With gasoline prices spiraling higher and weighing on economic confidence, President Obama called over the weekend for further investment in a "clean-energy future." But there is a flip side to that increasing pain at the pump: a huge jobs boom in fossil fuels industries.
Rising global demand "“ along with, more recently, concern over the situation in Iran "“ has driven gasoline prices higher. The climbing prices have been a boon for oil businesses even as they have cut into household budgets, and big oil companies have added rigs and workers in recent years.
The natural-gas industry has seen a coinciding boom as advances in extraction have made it possible to get more gas out of shale rock "“ the controversial practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The United States is now extracting record volumes of natural gas "“ enough that domestic prices have fallen to their lowest level in a decade. (Other countries, particularly Japan, are eager for the United States to build better infrastructure to export it, and prices are two to three times as high abroad.) It all adds up to a fossil fuel jobs boom: oil and gas extraction alone created 150,000 jobs last year "“ about 9 percent of all new jobs created in 2011, according to a new study from the World Economic Forum, though the industry accounts for only about 5.2 percent of total employment.
Looking more closely at Bureau of Labor Statistics data, virtually all parts of the oil and gas industry have seen job growth since the recession ended. Pipeline employment has risen 4 percent since June 2009. Oil and gas extraction has seen job growth of 18 percent. Employment in support activities for mining "“ like surveyors for drilling sites "“ has jumped 41 percent. During the same time period, total employment has increased just 2.1 percent.
Clean-energy industries have also grown, though not with the might of the fossil fuel industries. To be fair, good data is harder to come by. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track the wind or solar industries in the way it does oil and gas, with workers dispersed across the manufacturing, construction, operations and maintenance worker categories, among others. But the bureau has recently estimated that about 85,000 Americans work in wind energy and 93,000 in solar power.
A 2009 report by Pew Charitable Trusts found that the number of green jobs grew 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007. A more recent study from the Brookings Institution estimated that the "clean economy" added 500,000 jobs between 2003 and 2010 "“ a respectable jobs-growth rate of about 3.4 percent per year.
But even with a breakneck pace of growth, the clean-energy industry would not be creating as many jobs as the fossil fuel industry: It simply is not big enough at the moment to draw in hundreds of thousands of new workers per year. The Pew study, for instance, estimated that 770,000 people worked in green energy. That compares with more than nine million jobs for oil and gas, and many more for coal and other industries.
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