“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 163

energy, would slightly slow economic growth and job creation. h is is
true despite increasing demand for environmental goods and services,
including clean energy technologies, because losses elsewhere in the
economy would of set that. But proponents of new energy technolo-
gies are now at empting to seize the economic mantle for themselves.
Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, made the argument
succinctly in his best-selling book Hot, Flat, and Crowded , in which he
claimed that even if climate change and energy security turn out to
be bogus problems, the U.S. economy will benei t enormously from
aggressive ef orts to address them. Clean energy, he writes, is a “win-
win-win-win” opportunity . 56
h e headline numbers are striking. According to a study published
by the Brookings Institution, a Washington research organization,
138,000 people were employed in renewable energy industries as of
2010, up 24 percent since 2003. 57 And those numbers are dwarfed by
projections for the future. A 2009 study from analysts at the University
of Massachuset s at Amherst and the Center for American Progress, a
liberal Washington research group, argued that $150 billion in annual
government spending could support the creation of 2.5 million clean
energy jobs. 58 Another study from the Economic Policy Institute, also
based in Washington, concluded that $100 billion a year in spend-
ing spread over a decade could create 1.1 million new jobs, even at er
accounting for jobs lost in coal, oil, and natural gas. Industry advocates
have been even more aggressive with their predictions: the American
Solar Energy Society, for example, promises a net increase of 4.5 mil-
lion so-called green jobs if only the United States adopts an aggressive
climate change strategy.
Such numbers are met by many with immense skepticism. Perhaps
the most celebrated piece of counterevidence, at least among political
opponents of green jobs claims, is what has come to be known as the
“Spanish study.” Published in March 2009 to great fanfare, the i t y-two-
page study by Gabriel Calzada, a professor at Juan Carlos University
in Madrid, had a stark bot om line: Spanish renewable energy policy
had destroyed 113,000 jobs—a full 2.2 jobs for every one created. h e
Wall Street Journal editorial page welcomed the study with the head-
line “Green Joblessness: Spain Shows the Folly of Eco-employment