Dr. S Johnson FYS 1104 31/01/2019 Topic Analysis: Clean-Energy Job Creation in an Overpopulated World I’ve always thought of myself as a pragmatist. Climate change, the energy crisis, and overpopulation all go hand in hand. To say that climate change would be solved by instantly having the world’s governments declare fossil fuels illegal is naive. What then do you do with the masses of unemployed blue collar workers? And where do you find people to work in the clean energy industry? According to a 2016 paper on India’s solar energy skill gap, “Unavailability of appropriately skilled manpower – especially for construction and commissioning – has been identified as one of the most prominent challenges in hiring required personnel.” (Arunabha 2016) This is where my search for a topic started. Jobs. I started to wonder whether jobs created in fossil fuels were comparable to clean energy jobs. According to the Indian report, not even the construction jobs are translatable.
Does that mean that we don’t have enough properly educated people to make the change, even if we all agreed to it? I started my research by looking into the number of jobs being created by fossil fuels. I figured starting there would help me understand how many jobs would have to be created in order to compensate for job loss. In my research I came across a very interesting article regarding job losses in fossil fuels as result of automation. According to an article on brookings.edu, it took 52 miners an hour to produce one ton of raw coal in the 80s. By 2015 that number had dropped to 16 workers (Devashree 2017). So employment figures for fossil fuels are already dropping. This lead me to consider whether it is even worth researching a way to replace jobs. It seems that the number of jobs that would need to be replaced is decreasing anyway.
I also came across a number of articles that mentions that clean energy job numbers are on track to outnumber fossil fuel jobs in the US. According to IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, green-energy jobs accounted for just under one million jobs in the US in 2017 (IRENA 2017). I also came across a research paper that details the creation of jobs in the clean energy sector., during our library session. According the paper, titled “Putting Renewables and Energy Efficiency to Work: How Many Jobs Can the Clean Energy Industry Generate in the US?”, clean energy can create more jobs than fossil fuels, at a higher salary rate (Max 919).
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However, the problem remains: where do we find the educated workers? So at this point my topic has swayed from jobs to education. In order for us to have enough educated people to support clean energy generation, education needs to be overhauled. But education lives very much at a governmental level. I’d like to research what needs to happen at a legislative level for clean energy to become more economically viable. If we have more people qualified to work in clean energy, we could generate it for less and thus “save the planet”. I’d like to focus my research on the everyday people who have to work the jobs created. If the level of education needed is at least tertiary, where will the money come from to fund the education of clean-energy workers?
It’s not as simple as saying “subsidies!” or “free education”. Though I believe that an institutional change needs to come about at a federal level, I am met by a challenge in my own ideology. I am passionately opposed to socialism. So when looking for a solution, I will have to find a way to avoid the answer of “let the government pay for it”. To be honest, I find this an exciting challenge. Time to put my money where my mouth is. To further focus my paper, I will be approaching it in the scope of one nation. I would like to pick a small first world country, where national changes are easier to implement. Initially I was considering a scandinavian country, like Norway or Sweden. But both of those countries are special cases where you find cultural and social homogeneity, which I will confess is one of the few situations in which socialism works and thus I want to avoid that.
Japan has one of my favorite political systems, and also seems like the most likely country in which a system that I propose could be implemented. The Japanese government takes recommendations from a specially elected economic council on which direction to focus its research and funding. Similar to what my research paper will look like in the end. And that leads me to the formulation of my research question:
How can Japan supply clean-energy workers through legislature changes? I will be drawing a lot of inspiration from previous attempts to convert a nation to clean energy, both successful and unsuccessful. Germany is a great example of national changes being made in order to further environmentally friendly energy production. I am curious to under more about how Germany, as a nation, made these huge changes in their infrastructure. A great report by the Copenhagen Climate Council documented the changes that Germany was implementing/had implemented in 2009. Although the report is a little old, it is a create account of the environment at the time, and how Germany made the decisions that led it to closing more and more coal plants every year. What makes Germany an even greater “role model” for my research into Japan is that Japan adopted Germany’s political model some time after WW2. So the idea that Japan would follow in Germany’s non-existent CO2 footprints is not so far fetched at all. It has happened before.
