With “only” 11,000 workers fired last month, the job-loss slide may be easing, or it may be a seasonal stall in shedding employees. The new year will tell.
Floyd Norris at NYT thinks not only that the recession has bottomed in employment losses, but that we’ll add jobs as we recover. Heather Boushey at CAP questions the strength of the recovery.
Much may depend on fiscal policy. Economists agree that most of the 2.8% growth in the third quarter is a result of the stimulus. As I’ve said before, more stimulus would work wonders right now.
Meanwhile, where is reasonable security of tenure, and strategic job-holding for willing workers? Only in sustainability – that third economy I mentioned the other day.
John Podesta at CAP opines that sustained job creation cannot be solved with short-term solutions, logically enough. Podesta cites CAP’s white paper proposing a wide-ranging set of policies for government to enact in order to create good jobs for the today and the future.
Included in Podesta’s prescription are a nationally chartered Green Bank to ensure investment into sustainable projects, and tax adjustments to support retrofitting.
Today, contractors offer unsecured home improvement loans for energy-efficient and renewable energy products, with a typical energy savings of 20 percent to 40 percent. But this market is small—approximately 5,000 loans per year—because interest rates are 10 percent to 15 percent—too high to be attractive for the typical homeowner. A program to “buy down” these loans would reduce the interest rate on a typical $7,000 loan from 12.99 percent to 6.99 percent at an approximate cost of $1,200 per loan. Loans would be a maximum of $20,000—typical loans are $10,000—with a 12-year term. In the meantime, the Obama administration should direct Fannie Mae—which oversees an existing energy loan program—to reduce its rates, which now range from 11.5 percent to 14.0 percent. This would also lower the cost of a buy-down program.
Retrofitting looms as an enormous growth industry. Our greatest source of local and readily available energy resides in the waste coefficient of our current usage. We waste so much energy (some estimates call it 97.5% waste) in all of our infrastructure and style of living in the U.S that efficiency alone results in immediate dollar gains.
Brad Johnson writing at Grist offers shirtcuff analysis estimating that 1.7 million new clean-energy jobs could be created as permanent careers PER YEAR, commensurate with public and private investment of 150 billion dollars each year. That’s not a lot of money, for the results.
The stronger the carbon cap is in a carbon market, the greater the investment. A $150 billion carbon market would be about double the size of what is being considered by Congress. That investment would be sufficient to construct a nationwide smart grid, retrofit every building in America for energy efficiency, and produce 20 percent of electricity from renewable sources—all by 2020.
- How to make 1.7 million new clean energy jobs permanent
These are some of the astonishing gains buried under our dying economy, lying in wait for the intrepid to set them free.
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