Help Wanted: Biden’s Clean Job Creation Plans
Are you in need of a job? The Biden clean energy plan will create a lot of opportunities.
With millions of people out of work, now seems like a good time to create millions of jobs. But clean energy jobs won’t only benefit people who lost jobs because of the pandemic. Young people looking for a first job or a well-paying career, workers hoping to change professions or find safer and healthier jobs, and fossil fuel workers who are already seeing their industry on an inevitable decline and need jobs with equal or better income and security — everyone can find a role to play in the clean energy manufacturing boom.
Welders, electricians, and other trade workers will be essential to installing the solar, batteries, new power lines, and other electric infrastructure necessary to power the US on 100% clean electricity.
Construction workers will find more job opportunities through Biden’s building retrofit program, installing clean power plants and factories, and repairing transit infrastructure across the country.
Entrepreneurs, innovators, and engineers will be empowered by Biden’s proposed agency ARPA-C to bring new and cheaper clean energy technologies to market.
Fossil fuel workers and other skilled technicians will be immediately employed to plug and clean abandoned wells and mines.
And manufacturing workers will see an enormous boom in their industry as the country ramps up production of electric cars, hydrogen electrolyzers, advanced nuclear power plants, solar and wind farms, batteries, new factory equipment, and much more clean equipment.
All of this can fill the immediate gap in jobs and get the economy restarted after the pandemic. Of course, some of these new jobs will last only a few decades as we roll out new infrastructure. It is the prosperity that the new infrastructure will bring — through efficiency, cheaper energy, and better technology — that will drive long-term economic growth into the more distant future.
[This mini-blog is part of Picturing Policy, a new project to help voters visualize what climate policy proposals would look like for their lives. See PicturingPolicy.org and @PicturingPolicy on Instagram and Twitter. Images by Violet Kitchen.]
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