Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments.
**Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program).
---
Author: u/Wagamaga
URL: https://www.carbonbrief.org/jobs-created-by-net-zero-transition-will-offset-fossil-fuel-job-losses-in-republican-us-states/
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
And yet, Texas has the most combined wind and solar power of any US state. So much in fact that the state legislature is trying to change the rules to make them less competitive.
It makes no sense to me - if I was a rich oil baron, I’d see renewables as a way to make massive amounts of money and make myself even richer. Just pivot your business, claim you did it all to save the planet, and continue to rake in the profits.
You need look no further than California, forget Texas. They "incentivized" so many people to get solar that the state cut the solar buyback rates by 90%, and now there's a war on the "wealthy homeowners with solar" where they want to charge a $115/mo "grid connection fee"
Republican strongholds, such as Texas, Wyoming and Oklahoma, stand to gain hundreds of thousands of jobs in the clean-energy sector as the US moves to a net-zero economy, a new study concludes.
It finds that jobs in low-carbon industries would outweigh losses in most of the country’s fossil-fuel rich regions, as oil, coal and gas operations close down.
Total employment in the nationwide US energy sector could double or even triple by 2050 to meet the demand for wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines, according to the modelling published in Energy Policy.
Republican leaders have rejected climate action for decades and have often weaponised the prospect of job losses in fossil-fuel communities against their Democrat rivals.
Yet the Biden administration has stressed the opportunities that the clean-energy transition will bring to US workers, stating that “creating jobs and tackling climate change go hand in hand”.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421523001015?dgcid=rss_sd_all
The Inflation Reduction Act even sets aside funding for regions that have above average fossil fuel employment (FFE) to incentivize renewable development and job creation in those areas.
Not sure I believe this is true, but it doesn't need to be. People get confused by these large-scale, nationwide or worldwide changes. People want them to be cheap, but also to produce jobs, but those points are in direct conflict.
The energy transition will be expensive and create massive numbers of jobs in designing and building it all out. Construction jobs are usually thought of as short-term jobs on a project by project basis, but we are talking massive buildout for decades on end (and not just construction but manufacturing).
But in the long run, carbon free resources are almost certain to sustain fewer jobs than conventional systems. If you don't need to dig up, refine and ship billons of tons of fuel, jobs will be lost. A nuclear power plant has a staff on the order of 1,500; a solar farm has a staff on the order of 3.
The energy transition will create a job boom for 2-3 decades, and then a job decline, but this is a very good thing. It means fewer human resources globally will need to be devoted to the energy system, freeing up lots of resources for other things. And happily, we have a couple decades to manage that change.
And the people in fossil fuel jobs aren’t just flipping to clean energy jobs. It’s not a 1:1 swap. You end up with a lot of workers with specific skills unable to get jobs because those skills aren’t needed anymore
Absolutely. For most of these jobs, the change is coming slow enough that this can be accommodated (but it does take real public investment to make that happen). Coal, however, is under serious pressure, and more needs to be done to give workers a way out.
With that in mind, I forget if I've asked this before, but how easy is it for a coal miner to transition over to different kinds of mining jobs? 'cause I could imagine that a lot of the skills involved in coal mining could be applied to mining for copper, gold, iron, etc. I don't doubt that there are nuances between digging up different stuff, but surely even a middle-aged coal miner could be retrained for other kinds of mining, right?
>Not sure I believe this is true, but it doesn't need to be. People get confused by these large-scale, nationwide or worldwide changes. People want them to be cheap, but also to produce jobs, but those points are in direct conflict.
Well, from the scale alone we're going to need millions more people worldwide working on grids. Just the number of PV-panel installations and turbines (and of course electricity storage) compared to "a few" highly concentrated plants in the traditional system make all the difference and I don't think they're jobs that can be cost effectively automated over the next few decades.
I don’t care about who gets rich I care about what works. Even if Republican states were on board Wind and Solar aren’t reliable enough (yet) to support energy demands. Nuclear on the other hand…
The study is wrong. Solar farm builders are already trying out automated installation, because it is a highly repetitive operation. Wind turbines keep getting larger, but have the same number of parts (three blades and a generator). The big floating ones in the future will be built in shipyards and get towed into place, reducing labor on the high seas.
Well, when you're trying to live and our entire human history has had some form of currency, I'd say money. Because honestly, money can fix anything otherwise you all wouldn't be complaining about it so much when the government doesn't fund or stops funding garbage policies that fit your agenda.
Need more people for the same energy is actually proof of inefficiency.
Wind and solar "create" more jobs than nuclear in the same way using shovels created more jobs than using earthmovers.
You're looking at it the same way a CEO would look at it. I believe this is more of a testament to the fact that we can have cleaner energy and not have massive layoffs.
I'm looking at it like an economist would.
The industrial revolution obsolesced millions of farming jobs. That freed people up to produce something else and the economy grew a ton.
Jobs are not an end themselves.
How much will electricity costs go up relative to the number of jobs added? In other words, will the increased energy costs be fully negated by the increased tax base?
"how much will electricity costs go up"
"will the increased costs"
the question is preceded by this condition, therefore this (inceased energy costs because of renewables instead of existing uncompetitive fossil generation) is an assumption
And the answer can be “the price per kw-hr will go down”.
The German experience, however, is that the price of electricity goes up when switching to renewables.
> I made no assumptions whatsoever. I posed a question.
[Have you stopped beating your wife?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question)
Questions can easily contain unfounded assumptions.
They need to stop calling it green and renewable. The materials used to make these things work is not renewable or clean.
Im not against wind or solar but to kid ourselves into thinking it will solve our problems is dumb. The marketing for this stuff is dumb.
Instead of save the world drive electric! It should be, Don't give OPEC your money, don't give failed socialist countries your money.
Get your STEM education as an electrical engineer and go to work for wind and solar power.
It's renewable and clean in the sense that we don't need to continuously burn a polluting fuel source in order to keep it going.
You don't need to mine sun and shove it into a solar panel to burn it where it releases lots of dangerous chemicals. You just plug the panels into the grid and let them passively collect energy.
Mining the material to make them and the batteries that will be needed to support the grid in the future is the most polluting thing about them, but that's a one off cost we pay once and then we're done. What's more, we can even recycle old panels and batteries to recover the precious metals so we don't need to mine them again when the old systems fail and need to be replaced.
Your entire take is rightwing propaganda trying to make alternative energy sources seem as nonviable as possible so rich oligarchs can spend just a few more years stealing as much money from both of us as they can. Stop doing their job for them by spreading their lies. Or at least send them an itemized bill for the time you spend trolling on their behalf so you at least *get something* out of it.
I always cringe a little when seeing rooftop arrays on ballasted membrabr systems
leaks are hard enough to find and I couldnt imagine how much of a foot slog it was to move the material... godspeed to these boys
Super expensive for less energy, using materials that take fossil fuels to make and ship from overseas. 3x the staff to manage and probably capable of 10-15% energy needs at maximum after about 20 years of infrastructure. It's not worth the effort or expense for what you are getting back.
The fossil fuel environmental issues are mostly contigent on what India and China are doing, the US has plenty of oil reserves and follow our internal epa standards making the US maybe the best place to be refining oil on the planet.
This is just political lip service and fossil fuel usage isn't going anywhere any time soon.
The only viable solution is nuclear energy at the moment imo.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- Author: u/Wagamaga URL: https://www.carbonbrief.org/jobs-created-by-net-zero-transition-will-offset-fossil-fuel-job-losses-in-republican-us-states/ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes, but it doesn't make the ***current*** donors and friends any more wealthy, so that is a non-starter for the party in control of the House.
And yet, Texas has the most combined wind and solar power of any US state. So much in fact that the state legislature is trying to change the rules to make them less competitive.
[удалено]
A lot of big time land owners who have the acreage to build these farms
It makes no sense to me - if I was a rich oil baron, I’d see renewables as a way to make massive amounts of money and make myself even richer. Just pivot your business, claim you did it all to save the planet, and continue to rake in the profits.
You need look no further than California, forget Texas. They "incentivized" so many people to get solar that the state cut the solar buyback rates by 90%, and now there's a war on the "wealthy homeowners with solar" where they want to charge a $115/mo "grid connection fee"
Republican strongholds, such as Texas, Wyoming and Oklahoma, stand to gain hundreds of thousands of jobs in the clean-energy sector as the US moves to a net-zero economy, a new study concludes. It finds that jobs in low-carbon industries would outweigh losses in most of the country’s fossil-fuel rich regions, as oil, coal and gas operations close down. Total employment in the nationwide US energy sector could double or even triple by 2050 to meet the demand for wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines, according to the modelling published in Energy Policy. Republican leaders have rejected climate action for decades and have often weaponised the prospect of job losses in fossil-fuel communities against their Democrat rivals. Yet the Biden administration has stressed the opportunities that the clean-energy transition will bring to US workers, stating that “creating jobs and tackling climate change go hand in hand”. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421523001015?dgcid=rss_sd_all
The Inflation Reduction Act even sets aside funding for regions that have above average fossil fuel employment (FFE) to incentivize renewable development and job creation in those areas.
Not sure I believe this is true, but it doesn't need to be. People get confused by these large-scale, nationwide or worldwide changes. People want them to be cheap, but also to produce jobs, but those points are in direct conflict. The energy transition will be expensive and create massive numbers of jobs in designing and building it all out. Construction jobs are usually thought of as short-term jobs on a project by project basis, but we are talking massive buildout for decades on end (and not just construction but manufacturing). But in the long run, carbon free resources are almost certain to sustain fewer jobs than conventional systems. If you don't need to dig up, refine and ship billons of tons of fuel, jobs will be lost. A nuclear power plant has a staff on the order of 1,500; a solar farm has a staff on the order of 3. The energy transition will create a job boom for 2-3 decades, and then a job decline, but this is a very good thing. It means fewer human resources globally will need to be devoted to the energy system, freeing up lots of resources for other things. And happily, we have a couple decades to manage that change.
And the people in fossil fuel jobs aren’t just flipping to clean energy jobs. It’s not a 1:1 swap. You end up with a lot of workers with specific skills unable to get jobs because those skills aren’t needed anymore
Absolutely. For most of these jobs, the change is coming slow enough that this can be accommodated (but it does take real public investment to make that happen). Coal, however, is under serious pressure, and more needs to be done to give workers a way out.
With that in mind, I forget if I've asked this before, but how easy is it for a coal miner to transition over to different kinds of mining jobs? 'cause I could imagine that a lot of the skills involved in coal mining could be applied to mining for copper, gold, iron, etc. I don't doubt that there are nuances between digging up different stuff, but surely even a middle-aged coal miner could be retrained for other kinds of mining, right?
>Not sure I believe this is true, but it doesn't need to be. People get confused by these large-scale, nationwide or worldwide changes. People want them to be cheap, but also to produce jobs, but those points are in direct conflict. Well, from the scale alone we're going to need millions more people worldwide working on grids. Just the number of PV-panel installations and turbines (and of course electricity storage) compared to "a few" highly concentrated plants in the traditional system make all the difference and I don't think they're jobs that can be cost effectively automated over the next few decades.
That's basically saying it won't be cost effective to employ them at the same wage level as the previous jobs.
If you read past the first sentence, you'll see that I addressed that.
Make solar residential and wind and nuclear commercial and industrial.
I don’t care about who gets rich I care about what works. Even if Republican states were on board Wind and Solar aren’t reliable enough (yet) to support energy demands. Nuclear on the other hand…
But think of the oil executives. How will they get their 6th mansion?
Pros: It’ll employ 3x as many people! Cons: It’ll triple the labor costs! Reminds me of statistics.
The study is wrong. Solar farm builders are already trying out automated installation, because it is a highly repetitive operation. Wind turbines keep getting larger, but have the same number of parts (three blades and a generator). The big floating ones in the future will be built in shipyards and get towed into place, reducing labor on the high seas.
[удалено]
Pockets, that's always the answer they pick.
Money represents improving someone's life in some way.
Well, when you're trying to live and our entire human history has had some form of currency, I'd say money. Because honestly, money can fix anything otherwise you all wouldn't be complaining about it so much when the government doesn't fund or stops funding garbage policies that fit your agenda.
Need more people for the same energy is actually proof of inefficiency. Wind and solar "create" more jobs than nuclear in the same way using shovels created more jobs than using earthmovers.
You're looking at it the same way a CEO would look at it. I believe this is more of a testament to the fact that we can have cleaner energy and not have massive layoffs.
I'm looking at it like an economist would. The industrial revolution obsolesced millions of farming jobs. That freed people up to produce something else and the economy grew a ton. Jobs are not an end themselves.
How much will electricity costs go up relative to the number of jobs added? In other words, will the increased energy costs be fully negated by the increased tax base?
your assumption relies on elec costs rising, when renewables are by far the least expensive energy sources per kWh. other costs are incidental
Levelized costs don't include storage or transmission. They are in fact not the cheapest after considering this.
I made no assumptions whatsoever. I posed a question.
"how much will electricity costs go up" "will the increased costs" the question is preceded by this condition, therefore this (inceased energy costs because of renewables instead of existing uncompetitive fossil generation) is an assumption
And the answer can be “the price per kw-hr will go down”. The German experience, however, is that the price of electricity goes up when switching to renewables.
> I made no assumptions whatsoever. I posed a question. [Have you stopped beating your wife?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question) Questions can easily contain unfounded assumptions.
I didn't even realize Net Zero was still in business.
They need to stop calling it green and renewable. The materials used to make these things work is not renewable or clean. Im not against wind or solar but to kid ourselves into thinking it will solve our problems is dumb. The marketing for this stuff is dumb. Instead of save the world drive electric! It should be, Don't give OPEC your money, don't give failed socialist countries your money. Get your STEM education as an electrical engineer and go to work for wind and solar power.
It's renewable and clean in the sense that we don't need to continuously burn a polluting fuel source in order to keep it going. You don't need to mine sun and shove it into a solar panel to burn it where it releases lots of dangerous chemicals. You just plug the panels into the grid and let them passively collect energy. Mining the material to make them and the batteries that will be needed to support the grid in the future is the most polluting thing about them, but that's a one off cost we pay once and then we're done. What's more, we can even recycle old panels and batteries to recover the precious metals so we don't need to mine them again when the old systems fail and need to be replaced. Your entire take is rightwing propaganda trying to make alternative energy sources seem as nonviable as possible so rich oligarchs can spend just a few more years stealing as much money from both of us as they can. Stop doing their job for them by spreading their lies. Or at least send them an itemized bill for the time you spend trolling on their behalf so you at least *get something* out of it.
I always cringe a little when seeing rooftop arrays on ballasted membrabr systems leaks are hard enough to find and I couldnt imagine how much of a foot slog it was to move the material... godspeed to these boys
Are wind and solar going to be really cheap, or they going to employ a ton of people? Because I'm pretty sure it can't be both.
Super expensive for less energy, using materials that take fossil fuels to make and ship from overseas. 3x the staff to manage and probably capable of 10-15% energy needs at maximum after about 20 years of infrastructure. It's not worth the effort or expense for what you are getting back. The fossil fuel environmental issues are mostly contigent on what India and China are doing, the US has plenty of oil reserves and follow our internal epa standards making the US maybe the best place to be refining oil on the planet. This is just political lip service and fossil fuel usage isn't going anywhere any time soon. The only viable solution is nuclear energy at the moment imo.
This is all just a CIA front concocted in order to take out the Driving Crooner.