Missing From the ‘Green Jobs’ List

[groovedaddy]

Are Chemists, Engineers on Green Jobs List?

For weeks, there’s been a growing chorus — from the incoming Obama team to community-welfare campaigners and environmental bloggers — pushing for building the economic revival around “green jobs.” So far the focus seems to be mainly on rebuilding physical infrastructure: insulating leaky low-income housing, building wind turbines, improving the clunky electrical grid and the like. These are, by almost any measure, logical starting points for an effort to cut America’s energy bill and carbon dioxide emissions while restoring prosperity.

But for such an initiative to be green at a scale sufficient for the atmosphere to notice, my sense is it will need to focus just as much on rebuilding the country’s intellectual infrastructure. I’m not quite sure I’ve heard any leader yet describe the sustained, aggressive “energy quest” that would be required to lead the world toward a future with non-polluting energy choices sufficient to empower more or less 9 billion people — and how that quest would have to extend from the living room to the boardroom, from the laboratory to the classroom, to be transformational.

As our ongoing Energy Challenge series and plenty of independent studies have made clear, the country and world are still not engaged seriously in advancing non-polluting energy technologies, from solar cells to the elusive notion of capturing carbon dioxide from power plants at a large scale and stashing it somewhere. (One phrase that reverberates almost as much as green jobs these days in climate-energy discussions, with far less credibility, is “clean coal.”)

The latest overview of science and engineering trends from the National Science Foundation includes lots of warning signs. In the meantime, above you can see the latest graphical portrait of taxpayer investments in basic research in arenas that have mattered over the last half century. (The graph was updated for me by Kei Koizumi of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from the version I used in the recent post examining what an “energy moon shot” might look like.)

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/are-chemists-engineers-on-green-jobs-list/?ref=science

[truedelphi]

1. May I point out that one reason that the "scientific infrastructure" is now so weak is

That over the past two decades, many science jobs have gone overseas.

I had no awareness of this problem until subscribing for publications from the American Chemical Association. They did a several part series describing how people lose their jobs to laboratories overseas. Then after mom and dad are unemployed, fifteen year old Johnnie and sixteen year old Susan no longer want to go into the sciences.

Why should they?? If you spend six to eight years chasing a Master's degree and maybe a PhD as well (In addition to high school and 4 yrs of college) and arrive in your mid-forties, unemployed, strung out on anti-stress medications, etc - why WOULD your kids want to follow your example.

HB-1 visas are another reason why the scientific infra structure puts our society at risk for people having disdain for education.

BTW, solar advances were doing well as the Carter administration was finishing up. But Reagan's people cut off the tax incentives for such innovation and utilization of that technology, so we entered a period in which we have fallen far behind Germany, Japan and others.