Green Growth: How the Eco-Stimulus Can Generate Jobs

The second potential eco-stimulus winner will be the green building industry, which represents a mammoth opportunity and offers a powerful 

long tail in terms of new employment possibilities. 

Building for the Future

The numbers tell the story in a stark way here: There are currently 120 million homes, 5.1 million commercial buildings and legions of government office structures in the U.S. today. These structures account for approximately 40 percent of the nation’s carbon emissions and consume 60 percent of its raw materials, so if even a reasonable percentage of them were retrofitted and became more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, we’d be setting a major economic multiplier in motion.

The material science sector could especially benefit from a green building stimulus surge if it develops and markets products like clean cement and other building products; and the software industry could also prosper by creating automation services and systems to manage the homes, offices and buildings that are working toward greater energy efficiency.

A Jolt of Prosperity

The third stimulus beneficiary will be the nation’s outdated and outmoded electricity infrastructure, which needs to be upgraded with intelligent and breakthrough digital technology that will boost efficiency and reliability while lowering cost.

A number of skeptics talk about how daunting this overhaul would be. And they are right. The current electricity grid feels like a 19th century creation rather than a 21st century innovation. And it’s a jumble of fraying old wires, decaying transmission stations and antiquated analog equipment that is holding the nation’s global competitiveness back.

But this effort would be well worth it. A recent analysis by the Grid Wise Alliance reveals that $16 billion in smart-grid disbursements over the next four years would serve as the catalyst for projects worth $64 billion. These projects would create nearly 300,000 direct and high-value jobs between 2009 and 2012; and 150,000 of these positions would be established before the end of 2009. In addition, the Grid Wise report indicates that 140,000 indirect jobs would be generated between 2013 and 2018 as a result of smart-grid investment.

A Rising in the Valley

Smart grid innovation and infrastructure improvements would – in the same way as green building retrofits – help the software industry play a much-needed role in clean technology. And, with information technology hitting a plateau, Silicon Valley could reinvigorate itself by embracing a modernized electricity grid through two-way communications devices, smart meters and advanced control systems that take all the gathered energy information and manage it in real-time.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal spending programs struggled to reverse The Great Depression for almost a decade, and it wasn’t until the United States geared up for the Second World War that the economy finally righted itself.

A New New Deal

I believe Barack Obama is more fortunate than Roosevelt because the nation is on the brink of a New Energy Economy today. If Congress and the new President choose eco-stimulus programs and policies wisely, we may see prosperous and peaceful new horizons sooner rather than later.

Michael Butler is Chairman and CEO of Seattle-based Cascadia Capital, LLC, a national investment-banking firm that is helping sustainable industries finance the future; Jamie Boyd is a senior vice president at Cascadia.

The above opinion piece is from independent writers and is not connected with Greentech Media News. The views expressed here are those of the authors and are not endorsed by Greentech Media.