Economist's Green Job's Debate

The Economist believes that creating green jobs is a sensible aspiration for governments. Van Jones defends the motion. Andrew P. Morriss is against the motion. (View the debate).

Is it? Sustainability 2030's response follows:

If one understands that the only possible future is a sustainable one and that current environmental, social, and economic trends and business as usual are leading in the opposite direction, to socio-economic and biospheric destabilization and possible collapse, then the only logical response to the Economist's challenge is affirmative. Of course creating green jobs would be a sensible government aspiration if they led in the direction of durable prosperity and security (sustainability) and away from collapse. However, the devil is in the details. A sensible aspiration does not a method make. So how can the government best execute this aspiration?

Most of the debate has occurred within the realm of either inaccurate ideological statements (over generalizations are always false) or policy incrementalism. Neither realm addresses the real issue--how to realize the aspiration--sufficiently.

Both debaters agree that the existing energy market is a dysfunctional case of political (special interest lobbying) and economic market failure (prices signaling the wrong relative valuations and risk), but disagree on the cure. Jones goes with traditional, albeit more intelligent policy prescriptions to correct market failure. Morris ascribes the dysfunction to an intrinsic government incapacity for good decisions--hence the answer is for no government action. However, Morris does not trace the causality back to the long, rich history of big-oil special interest intervention in the political system that was the precursor to many, possibly all, of those past bad government decisions in the energy market. Of course, it is more complicated than that, but those details will not change the situation.

Morris’s' argument leaves us with the do-nothing option (self-induced Armageddon) while Jones’s argument leaves us with traditional policy tools of economic development, which may create some green jobs but would not address the real issue. Creating a bunch of new green jobs in a new green energy sector will not bring about the needed systems transformation quickly enough for sustainability success—and the real goal of green jobs. After all, in a sustainable world, all jobs will be green. The goal is not green jobs per se, but a green or ecologically sustainable economy. Therefore, the "green jobs" goal is a proxy for the larger goal of a green or sustainable society that is the antidote to global warming as the front line of, but not the entire and more complex, sustainability challenge that society faces. If we lose sight of this ultimate goal in trying to achieve this instrumental secondary goal, we will not design the right response.

In addition, even if we were successful within the limited realm of traditional economic development policy applied to greening energy sector jobs, the policy “success” would be insufficient. Without expanding the frame of "green" energy sector jobs to encompass or harness the changes in the rest of the economy that are either required for or substantially support the creation of the wider ecologically sustainable, low-no carbon economy, the powerful policy and economic synergies available and required for success inthe clean energy sector will not be evident nor used. The result will be a few green jobs, but no green economy. The problem is that time is of the essence. We no longer have the option of “muddling through” with marginalist incremental problem solving, greening one subsector here, another there, with the systems transformation possibly occurring sometime in the future if and when the market price curve for “green” dips below those for current “red” practices.

When it comes to the sustainability challenge, part of the problem is that the market is likely not capable of signaling the required changes sufficiently at all or at least not signaling them soon enough. This is the case because many of the natural system changes that our human economy has set in motion are invisible to market signals and to human institutional intelligence up to the point where it is too late to respond sufficiently. Global warming is a classic example. Aside from being named to induce human complacency (it should be called global burning), the changes in average global temperature are so small as to be imperceptible. By the time the ensuing bio-geo-chemical and associated ecological changes are visible and comprehensible to our empiricist-based institutional market and political intelligence and instrumentation, the forces for catastrophic environmental changes have been set in motion and cannot be reversed. They will crush the human economy with the speed and impunity of a human swatting a fly. Thus, the tools of marginalist policy analysis, the arguments over the intrinsic idiocy of government etc., are really pointless and insufficient.

The real question is, can humanity defy the trends of its past performance, rise to the occaision, and get it right? I say yes, it can. After 50 years of environmental research, society has the understanding required for governments to be wiser with policy interventions that reset incorrect market parameters so that the resulting internal private market dynamics produce the real social welfare that is its only claim to legitimacy. Being an ideologic slave to failing dysfunctional "free" markets, is the idiocy of free market ideologic purity and fundamentalism. After 200 years of the human experiment with democracy, we have the expertise to counter the influence of special interests, economic or otherwise. After 300 years of a phenomenally creative capitalist socio-production revolution, we have the technology and organizational capacity we need to begin to create the green economy and the innovative capacity to invent the rest. We simply need the clarity of will and the strength of leadership to begin. This debate needs to be understood as a debate over the aspirations of creating a green economy and society as an antidote to the ever-accelerating trend towards global climate destabilization and human economic systems collapse (insurance industries will be the first casualties), as well as an antidote to the savaging of sustainability parameters that our economy counts as production instead of as the real costs they are(often unrecoverable). Only then will the near-term secondary goal of green jobs in a newly transformed clean energy economy be seen for, and defined as, what it really is, a needed component of a lightning-fast whole systems transformation for sustainability success. Only then will the real innovation challenge of sustainability be fully perceived—innovation to create policy instruments powerful enough for whole systems transformation and management, innovation to create smart institutions that will not be hoodwinked by system gamers and manipulators.

Of course creating green jobs is a sensible aspiration for governments, particularly when it is required for survival and economic betterment, and when it is done in ways that harness the power of functional free markets to the task.