Monica Potts says that unless America changes its energy policies, it will continue to train workers for jobs that just aren’t there.
The unfulfilled promise of stable, well-paying green jobs is probably best represented by the wind turbine: The United States has the capacity to both build the turbines in unused factories and get as much as 30 percent of our power from wind — but we aren’t doing either. Yet a wind turbine graces the cover of nearly every think-tank report on green jobs, and it’s a favorite prop of politicians who want to convince Americans that they’re ready to redeploy a beaten-down workforce into a new, exciting field of the future. Lawmakers and eternally hopeful progressives herald the green sector as the new source for working-class stability: jobs that can’t be outsourced and are relatively recession-proof.