Development of alternative energy should create more than 20 million jobs around the world in coming decades as governments adopt policies to address the depletion of resources, a UN report released on Wednesday said.
Some 2.3 million people around the world already work in alternative energy jobs with half of them in biofuels, said the report, Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World, commissioned and funded by the UN’s Environment Program.
Speedy creation of the jobs will depend on countries implementing and broadening policies including capping emissions of greenhouse gases, and the shifting of subsidies from the oil and natural gas sector, to new energy including wind, solar and geothermal power, it said.
“If we do not transform to a low-carbon economy we will miss a major opportunity for the fast tracking of millions of new jobs,” Achim Steiner, UNEP director, told reporters.
He said movement toward the jobs would occur even if the world does not come to a new agreement by the end of next year on stabilizing and then cutting greenhouse gases. That’s because global population is headed toward 8 billion or 9 billion by 2050, while new resources like metals, oil and gas are becoming more expensive to find, he said.
But if the world waits 10 years to take serious action on greenhouse gases the costs for moving to a green economy will be much higher, he said.
US President George W. Bush walked away from the UN’s carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol early in his first term, saying it would raise costs and unfairly exempt rapidly developing countries from emissions limits. Delegates from across the world will try to reach a successor agreement to the Kyoto pact in a UN meeting in Copenhagen late next year.
The report was written before the US credit crisis reshaped Wall Street and reverberated around the world, raising fears that many sectors could be slowed, including alternative energy.
Steiner said it would be a mistake to ditch green energy policies during the current financial crisis because in the long term the new jobs would make economies stronger and help make goods with less oil and gas.
The report said some 12 million new jobs could be created by 2030 in biofuels-related agriculture and industry.
Biofuel critics say current US ethanol, which is mostly made from corn, does little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But companies are racing to make cleaner, next-generation ethanol from sources including crop waste and rapidly growing non-food crops like switch grass and poplar trees.
The report said many jobs in the biofuels industry are unfair to workers.
“Much of the employment on sugarcane and palm oil plantations in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Malaysia and Indonesia is marked by poor pay and dangerous working conditions,” it said.
“There is also concern that large-scale biofuels production might drive large numbers of people off their land in future years,” it said.
“Close scrutiny” will be needed to determine what portion of biofuel jobs can be counted as decent jobs, it said.
Manufacturing, installing, and maintaining solar panels could add 6.3 million jobs by 2030 while wind power could add more than 2 million jobs. Even more jobs could be created in the building, recycling, and clean-vehicle manufacturing sectors, the report said.
Production of environmentally friendly goods is also set to double, with turnover of US$2.7 trillion a year by 2020, the UN report said.
“We are not talking about niche markets anymore. We are talking about millions of jobs that are emerging across the global economy,” Steiner said.
“It is the entrepreneurial world, because of what is happening in terms of the natural resources markets on the global market place, that is pushing for this,” he told journalists at the UN General Assembly in New York.
The program’s report on the green industry said that 2.3 million people are employed in the renewable energy sector alone — half of them in developing countries. About 2.1 million could be working in wind energy and 6.3 million in solar energy by 2030, the report said.
Already the renewable energy industry employs more people than the fossil fuels sector, the report said.
“The transition has already started,” said Juan Somavia, director general of the International Labour Organization.
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RSS