10/10/08 Defining Green Jobs

Defining Green Jobs. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Renewable energy is rapidly becoming big business. And in fact the industry is struggling to keep up with itself. Alan Hardcastle, Senior Research Associate with Washington State University has been looking at the prospect for jobs within the renewable energy industry and in particular how to classify those jobs. HARDCASTLE: During the 2008 legislative session the legislature passed a bill that would provide a framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Washington State. Part of the bill also required the implementation of a study to determine the number of green jobs in the economy in our state. Many of the positions in the state may already be classified as green jobs. HARDCASTLE: We're in the process of trying to identify in our economy, get a handle on an estimate of how many of the jobs that are already in our economy would we consider to be green jobs. Part of the struggle we had was coming up with a reasonable definition of what we meant by a green economy and green jobs. Hardcastle says there really is no easy definition for either. HARDCASTLE: It really seems to depend upon the goals of the research, the geographic location, kind of what the characteristics of the economy related to that study imply. In our state we wanted to try to hold as true to the legislation as we could while at the same time being as inclusive as we can so that we really focus on sectors of our economy that naturally would be considered part of the green economy. What they came up with was a break out of renewable energy itself. HARDCASTLE: And it's primarily composed of industries and businesses that are engaged in four primary areas. The first is energy efficiency and that is what can we do to squeeze more energy out of our existing resources. Renewable energy is the second category and that as you can imagine spans many different technologies. Finally a third category which we've termed preventing and reducing pollution. Finally and related to that are companies and organizations that are in the business of mitigating or cleaning up pollution. So those are the primary categories that we are looking at as composing the green economy and as a focus of the survey. They are currently collecting data and we will report back their findings on what green jobs may be available in the near future. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.