Green Economy Holds Golden Opportunity for R.I.

By SARAH SCHUMANN/ecoRI News contributor

PROVIDENCE — Climate change, rising energy prices and an unemployment rate topping 11 percent might sound like a dismal combination, but in this mix of misfortune, some Rhode Islanders spot opportunity. Spurring development of renewable energy and green building techniques, some say, can make the state more sustainable, while at the same time providing a sorely needed lifeline to the state’s struggling workers.

“Rhode Island has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs over the last thirty years,” said Keith Stokes, executive director of the Economic Development Corporation (EDC). “We see the green economy as a way of building a whole new manufacturing base.”

Last year, the EDC convened a roundtable to generate a roadmap for advancing the green economy. That process concluded that Rhode Island’s greatest green opportunities lie in wind power, green manufacturing, green building and green innovation.

Of those four sectors, offshore wind has become the poster child of the state's green economy. But according to Jeff Polucha, who chairs the Green Technology Consortium, a business partnership sponsored by the Governor’s Workforce Board, wind power alone will not heal Rhode Island's job woes.

“The wind industry is the pom-poms,” Polucha said, mixing a metaphor, “but the building trades are the meat and potatoes.”

Both sectors — renewable energy and energy efficiency — are the focus of job training programs around the state. From colleges to community organizations, such as the Apeiron Institure's Sustainable Business Group, these programs are preparing a workforce for jobs that will green the state.

As they chart a path to a thriving green economy, these groups are running into some questions. The most important one may be: What is a green economy?

“Everybody has a different definition of green,” Polucha said. He offers the following examples. “A bus driver is driving a bus with diesel fuel. The next day he comes to work, and they put biodiesel in his vehicle. Do you see a green worker today, or is he still just a bus driver? Or how about the accountant who works in a green company. Is he a green worker?”

Echoing this difficulty, a green jobs skills gap study commissioned by Polucha’s Green Technology Consortium estimated current green jobs in Rhode Island at anywhere from 1,500 to 50,000, depending on how "green" is defined.

What the Green Technology Consortium and EDC approaches have in common is that they take a sector approach to the green economy, treating it as a subcomponent of a larger economy.

Others, such as Andrew Cortes, who runs Building Futures R.I.’s Energy Training Partnership for low-income residents, view a green economy "as more like an overlay. I view issues of sustainability as something that needs to be integrated into all sectors, rather than a specific sector that you can pull out of the economy.”

Mark Kravatz, of the aforementioned Apeiron Institute of Sustainable Living, which imparts energy efficiency trainings, suggests reframing the notion of green economy as a process. “It’s really about creating triple-bottom-line practices all the way up,” he said.

By way of analogy, Kravatz suggested that, “A green economy is our economy with a full facelift, instead of just a new chin.”

But catalyzing this process has proven challenging, giving rise to a "chicken-or-the-egg" scenario. Do we invest in training workers for a green economy, or jump-start the green job market and hope people will seek training in these areas?

The Green Technology Consortium’s skills gap study, completed last June, cautioned against training workers unless trainees have a fair chance at a job after graduating. But others argue that without a trained workforce, companies are less likely to initiate green projects.

“The debate is,” Kravatz said, “do we create a really educated workforce that’s going to push the envelope, or do we educate business owners (about the benefits of a green economy) and hope that they’re going to hire people once they’ve realized?” 

Individuals and organizations across Rhode Island are working toward both ends. If both tracks are successful, it's hoped that both the economy and the environment will benefit.

Comments

[greg gerritt]

I do not like to publicly disagree with my friends, but all this "green economy " stuff is really an effort to slow down the destruction of the planet, not reverse it. It is only truyly green if it actually heals ecosystems, and none of the talk abotu green sectors or overlays actually addresses the problem of ecosystem collapse. The economy of RI is not going to come back following this blueprint.

[Liz Marsis]

The growth of a green economy is a bright spot in a dark economy. The entire process of producing and delivering goods and services needs to be sustainable, as Mark Kravatz and Andrew Cortes correctly point out. And Greg is also correct in noting that green market capitalism in this minimal business-economic sense won't cure our planetary ills. The destructive-toxic mechanism of our current economy, which is married to an ideology of "endless growth" and "individual selfishness," is in desparate need of fixing. Any and all strategies that push things along in the right direction are good. So coming at workforce development from the top and the bottom, as Kravatz is doing, is good. Much better than no action or status quo growth. BUT, economic experimentation is called for to get us off a growth-inequality model and moves us to a stable, fairly distributed system of material consumption. If and when we master the art of 100% clean renewables, a food=waste type of non-toxic, renewable goods production and bring about an end to poverty and unemployment, then we can think about growth. China's laudable goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 40% for each unit of additional GDP growth, still leaves us a 60% (instead of 100%) trajectory of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere given its fast, economic growth curve. The US, as a mature (saturated) economy can "grow" by either a redistribution of income (i.e. tax individual wealth to refund government services and increase low and middle income consumption) or grow at the expense of others. The sad truth is that this recent uptick in consumer spending is driven by luxury and very-high end sales. We have a lot of work to do. Let's us keep our spirits so we stay motivated. Liz

[Paul Klinkman]

Reversing many aspects of climate change through carbon sequestration must involve many or most of the world's governments. Someone has to pay for good work to get done.

I happen to believe that the world is technologically wealthier than ever, and that we, as a world, can afford to give great numbers of people reasonable jobs performing carbon sequestration. I'd recommend growing vast amounts of algae for the oil market, selling the biodiesel oil extracted from the algae and sequestering the less valuable algae cell husks in huge coal seams, buried under layers of clay and soil. Algae, being a tiny crop that can be grown in a sealed environment, can be grown in desert and in tundra conditions, as opposed to current crops that displace food crops on cropland.

The problem is the government.

[Kevin Proft]

While I understand that Greg wants solutions that do not originate from the belief that the economy must always be growing in order to be healthy, I disagree with his sentiment that the green economy solutions presented in Sarah's article fail to heal the environment. Implementing non-carbon based energy sources and changing building practices to incorporate more energy efficiency are both steps towards ecological healing. If they create jobs along the way, so much the better.