Help Wanted Green Energy | Green Energy News

February 17, 2002 – Vol.6 No.47

HELP WANTED - GREEN ENERGY.

That’s a new heading that may be in the Help Wanted section of the newspaper some day soon. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center for a Sustainable Economy (CSE) have released a new report - Clean Energy and Jobs, A Comprehensive Approach to Climate Change and Energy Policy - that lays out plans as to how the U.S could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent by 2020 while creating 660,000 new jobs by 2010 and an additional 800,000 by 2020.

In summary the report recommends that...

-- Fossil fuels should be taxed on their carbon content , while at the same time labor taxes (income taxes) should be reduced to a level which would keep revenue impact neutral.

-- Research, development and commercialization of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies should be increased.

-- Job-transition packages, such as retraining, should be created for workers affected by the change to cleaner energy technologies.

-- U.S. competitiveness could be maintained by adjusting the fuel-tax structure for disproportionally affected products.

An earlier study by the Union of Concerned Scientists mirrors the EPI/CSE study, saying that increasing average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2020 would create 100,000 new jobs in the auto industry. Visit the EPI at http://www.epinet.org/ , CSE at http://www.sustainableeconomy.org/ .