Green Jobs and the Ethics of Energy - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 154

workers will reap the benefi ts of a new low-carbon economy- skills, social protec-
tion, quality of jobs; the Energy Revolution report introduces interesting ideas
which will scale up investments in renewable energies, something crucial if we want
to fi ght future unemployment in the energy sector and avoid the poorest of the
planet, whose jobs depend on natural resources, paying the costs of
business-as-usual'.
Moreover, pushing ahead to positive targets, a report from the UK Campaign
against Climate Change Trade Union group called for 'One Million Climate Change
jobs now', outlining how cutting emissions by 80% by 2030 would create jobs in
energy and related sectors (CaCC 2012 ). Overall then there are some hopeful signs
around the world (Räthzel and Uzzell 2013 ).

8 Jobs and Growth

The trade union concern about the impacts on jobs of any major reduction in eco-
nomic growth opens up the fundamental issue of what type of society and economy
we might aim for. The radical environmental view that we should move to a stable
state economy is quite convincing but not widely shared. Tim Jackson has outlined
some possible ways ahead in terms of moving towards sustainable consumption, but
consumerism is deeply entrenched (Jackson 2009 ). Most people still see renewables
as a technical fi x, allowing this to continue, at least in some form, and in particular
to provide jobs. Otherwise 'hard line' deep greens may nevertheless welcome the
fact that, even in the recession, green energy was one of the few areas where there
was growth.
That opens up the issue of whether an expansion of renewables could, would and
should support continued growth. The resource potential is certainly there, and a
full transition away from fossil and nuclear would result in a major increase in green
energy employment, its scale depending on how quickly the transition was carried
out. So growth in this sector would happen regardless of whether wider growth was
deemed necessary. However, after the new energy system was established, with its
burst of job creation, the demand for new projects and jobs would fall off, unless the
global economy was to continue to expand. Some might be happy with a more or
less stable state maintenance level for the energy system, with employment also
stabilising or even reducing. But for most, continued wider growth would be the
aim, especially for those who have not as yet begun to enjoy the benefi ts of
affl uence.
Renewables as such do not remove the need for decisions about the nature of the
society we want. Their adoption may reduce most of the environmental impacts
caused by the use of fossil and nuclear energy, but there would still be a range of
constraints on further growth, some of them relating to confl icts between renew-
ables and the environment (e.g. land-use confl icts) but most relating to other
resources, such as fresh water. We can't expand indefi nitely, in terms of consump-
tion and population, on a fi nite planet. Indeed some worry that there will not be