* Experts say White House oversold job-creation aspect
* Job-training efforts far short of goal
* White House says clean-energy efforts are paying off
By Andy Sullivan
April 13 (Reuters) – Three weeks ago, President Barack Obama
stood in front of a sea of gleaming solar panels in Boulder
City, Nevada, to celebrate his administration’s efforts to
promote “green energy.”
Stretching row upon row into the desert, the Copper Mountain
Solar Project not far from Las Vegas provided an impressive
backdrop for the president.
Built on public land, the facility is the largest of its
kind in the United States. Its 1 million solar panels provide
enough energy to power 17,000 homes.
And it employs just 10 people.
Three years after Obama launched a push to build a
job-creating “green” economy, the White House can say that more
than 1 million drafty homes have been retrofitted to lower
heating and cooling costs, while energy generation from
renewable sources such as wind and solar has nearly doubled
since 2008.
But the millions of “green jobs” Obama promised have been
slow to sprout, disappointing many who had hoped that the $90
billion earmarked for clean-energy efforts in the
recession-fighting federal stimulus package would ease
unemployment – still above 8 percent in March.
Supporters say the administration over-promised on the jobs
front and worry that a backlash could undermine support for
clean-energy policies in general.
“All of this stuff is extraordinarily worthy for driving
long-term economic transformation but extremely inappropriate to
sell as a short-term job program,” said Mark Muro, a
clean-energy specialist at the Brookings Institution.
Others say the green-jobs push has crowded out less
fashionable efforts that would have put people back to work
quickly.
“From my perspective it makes more sense for us to arm our
clients with the basic skills, rather than saying, ‘By golly,
you will do something in the green economy or you won’t work,'”
said Janet Blumen, the head of the Foundation for an Independent
Tomorrow, a Las Vegas job-training organization that has seen
positions in trucking and accounting go unfilled because
training money had been earmarked for green efforts.
A $500 million job-training program has so far helped fewer
than 20,000 people find work, far short of its goal.
Republicans, meanwhile, have seized on the failure of solar
panel maker Solyndra, which received a $535 million loan
guarantee, to argue that White House allies have been the only
ones who have benefited from the green jobs push.
“He handed out tens of billions of dollars to green energy
companies, including his friends and campaign contributors at
companies like Solyndra that are now bankrupt,” Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney said on April 4.
VARYING ESTIMATES
Backers of the notion of a “green collar” work force argue
that earth-friendly energy is a promising growth sector that
could create a bounty of stable, middle-class jobs and fill the
gap left by manufacturing work that has moved overseas.
On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama promised that a $150
billion investment would generate 5 million jobs over 10 years.
Obama included $90 billion in the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act to weatherize drafty buildings, fund
electric-car makers and encourage other clean-energy efforts.
“We’ll put nearly half a million people to work building
wind turbines and solar panels, constructing fuel-efficient cars
and buildings, and developing the new energy technologies that
will lead to new jobs,” he said at a wind-turbine plant in Ohio
the day before he took office.
In December 2009, Vice President Joe Biden said the effort
would create 722,000 green jobs.
The White House said in November 2010 that its clean-energy
efforts had generated work for 225,000 people and would
ultimately create a total of 827,000 “job years” – implying
average annual employment of around 200,000 over the four years
of Obama’s presidential term.
White House officials stand by that estimate and say job
creation is only one aspect of the clean-energy push.
“We have a record of success that has created tens of
thousands of jobs and is ensuring that America is not ceding
these industries to countries like China,” White House spokesman
Clark Stevens said. “Thanks to the investments we’ve made, these
industries will continue to grow, along with the jobs they
create.”
One problem is that, unlike other elements of the Recovery
Act that injected money into the economy quickly, efforts to
develop high-speed rail or electric-car batteries Obama also
promoted could take a decade or longer to yield dividends.
Gains in the sector don’t necessarily lead to wider
employment.
The wind industry, for example, has shed 10,000 jobs since
2009 even as the energy capacity of wind farms has nearly
doubled, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry has added 75,000 jobs since
Obama took office, according to Labor Department statistics.
Federal agencies also have struggled to get stimulus money
out the door in a timely manner, even for prosaic efforts that
help local governments reduce energy costs.
The rush of funding encouraged private-sector participants
to inflate their job-creation projections as they angled for a
piece of the action, insiders say.
“They were obviously just guessing,” said Robert Pollin, a
University of Massachusetts professor and green-energy supporter
who helped the Energy Department sort through loan applications.
“If an undergraduate gave me a paper of that quality I would
have probably given them a C or a C-plus.”
SLOW PROGRESS
The high-profile failures of companies that have benefited
from federal backing, such as Solyndra and Beacon Power Corp.,
have given ammunition to Republicans who paint the effort as a
costly boondoggle.
They also have targeted the $500 job-training program that
aims to train workers for skills they would need in a new “green
economy.”
The program’s initial results were so poor that the Labor
Department’s inspector general recommended last fall that the
agency should return the $327 million that remained unspent.
The numbers have improved somewhat since then, but the
department remains far short of its goal of placing 80,000
workers into green jobs by 2013.
By the end of 2011, some 16,092 participants had found new
work in a “green” field, according to the Labor Department –
roughly one-fifth of its target. The program also helped
employed workers upgrade their skills.
Republican Senator Charles Grassley said the program had
reached too few workers to be deemed a success.
“The green jobs-training program just didn’t work. It was a
poor investment of tax dollars,” Grassley said in a prepared
statement.
SHADES OF GREEN
The effort has been complicated by confusion over what
exactly constitutes a green job.
In March, the Labor Department estimated there were 3.1
million green jobs in the United States as of 2010, using a
broad definition that included everything from nuclear
power-plant workers to regulators, lobbyists and park rangers.
The Recovery Act used a narrower definition, focusing on
wind, solar and other renewable-energy industries and
energy-efficiency efforts aimed at reducing consumption.
Using a definition similar to the Labor Department’s, the
Brookings Institution estimated that the Las Vegas region that
includes the vast solar fields sprouting around Boulder City
supported 9,797 “clean jobs” in 2010, accounting for 1.2 percent
of the region’s employment.
Local officials don’t expect that figure to grow much.
“Will it add a significant number of jobs, enough to make a
real dent in our unemployment? No, I don’t see that happening,”
said Darren Divine, vice president for academics at the College
of Southern Nevada.
The fields of healthcare, education and technology are
likely to provide the best employment prospects in the years to
come, he said.
PLUGGING THE GAPS
The much-touted home weatherization program has upgraded
more than 1 million houses and provided work for about 20,000
people, as well as generating business for suppliers, according
to the White House.
But here as well, supply has outpaced demand. While
government spending has kept contractors busy upgrading
low-income houses and public buildings, homeowners have been
less eager to spend their own money in a tumbling real estate
market.
Contractors have fared better than the construction industry
as a whole but have not found as much work as hoped, said Greg
Thomas, the chairman of the trade group Efficiency First.
Les Lazareck, the head of Home Energy Connection in Las
Vegas, estimated that fewer than one in four people he has
trained through a Recovery Act program now earn most of their
income through weatherization work.
“There’s definitely not enough demand,” he said. “The
private market has been very slow.”
(Editing by David Lindsey and Philip Barbara)
