Clean coal jobs ARE green jobs

It’s about time people think about the words they’re using to talk about green jobs. Because according to a recent post in the New York Times Green Inc. blog, clean coal jobs are apparently (according to the blog’s author) NOT considered green jobs.

What could be greener of a job than working to make America’s most abundant energy resource even cleaner by developing and deploying technology to remove pollutants?

The blog post discussed a Pew Charitable Trusts study on green job growth and included Pew’s exact definition of what a green jobs is: one that “generates jobs, businesses and investments while expanding clean energy production, increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, waste and pollution, and conserving water and other natural resources.”

To any reasonable person, Pew’s definition of green jobs sounds an awful lot like the jobs that come along with clean coal technology. Studies show that coal-generated electricity plants using carbon capture and sequestration and other clean coal technologies promote job growth, boost the local economy and reduce emissions.

In a report conducted by BBC Research and Consulting, a coalition of key labor groups found that the deployment of power plants equipped with CCS could generate $1 trillion of economic output and create between 5 million and 7 million man-years of employment during construction and a quarter of a million permanent jobs. 

Maybe that’s why President Obama consistently talked about how investing in the next generation of clean coal technologies was a key part of his Administration’s green energy plan – just something else for the folks at the Green Inc. blog to keep in mind.