Green jobs conference asks ‘where are the jobs?’

By Debbie Kwiatoski  , Hudson Valley Business Journal  Posted on [2009-05-20 13:07:21]

Amid the flash and glam of creating a 'green' valley, there are the overwhelming questions:

 

Where will the green jobs be?

 

What training will be needed for them?

 

When will they truly become a sustainable industry in the Hudson Valley?

 

 Add to that, a question being asked quietly among the key economic development specialists and education and training folks: "How many jobs are we talking about, realistically?"

 

These were the issues on the minds of many attending a recent green jobs summit in Fishkill. "Creating a Green Workforce in the Hudson Valley" was a serious effort to bring leaders in business, education and government together to think seriously about what a sustainable, green economy would actually look like in the region.

"Think about reinventing everything," keynote speaker Ken Surace, president and CEO of California based Serious Materials, Inc. urged the group. "Just about everything in our buildings was invented in the 1800s, when energy was cheap and there was no such thing as global warming."

 

His implication? That we have, quite literally, the "next" great industrial revolution ahead of us. And, like the one that has long since petered out (at least in the United States), that will eventually mean a tremendous renaissance of jobs, as new cutting edge companies take new green technology and build the 21st century.

 

Well, maybe.

 

True, impressive efforts have been launched by groups, like The Solar Energy Consortium in Ulster County. But despite the millions of dollars being poured into TSEC and some serious company launches, like Prism Solar, Fala Technologies, Earth Kind  and a few others, the promise of good jobs...great jobs...more jobs than we could ever fill is, many summit attendees privately admitted, probably not on the local horizon.

 

Melissa Everett, Sustainable Hudson Valley’s CEO and one of the few folks in the region to actually have a PhD in sustainable development - as well as years of  'on the ground' experience in how these things work globally - crunched her numbers and came to much the same  conclusions as some of the region's Workforce Investment Boards, educators and political leaders,  not to mention unemployed white collar workers: thousands are currently chasing hundreds of actual jobs – and those jobs are pretty much in the manufacturing and installation segments of the green industry.

 

Still, the present may truly be just a prologue to the future. As  Surace stressed, we have a whole new world to imagine...new buildings to build...new energy systems to invent and install...new vehicles to imagine and build and sell...old pollution to clean up ...and each of these industries is going to need properly trained people to invent and design the new paradigms, people to market them and, of course, people to get them into place.

  

So, despite the fact that job fairs around the region still draw hundreds of people for the handful of actual jobs being offered, and despite the fact that 50ish unemployed engineers are currently finding 'green' job descriptions that include climbing ladders, pulling cable and being on your feet for eight to ten hours day, the word coming out of this first green jobs summit was a hopeful one: stay tuned.