Necessity today is the mother of reinvention. Proponents of a green economic revolution are counting on it.
“Think about reinventing everything,” said Kevin Surace, president and CEO of Serious Materials Inc., a California-based company that among other successes, has patented an energy efficient drywall that is the first significant upgrade in the ubiquitous material since it was invented in the 1890s. Called EcoRock, it uses 90 percent less energy to create and is made of 80 percent recycled material. It was cited along with Serious Materials by President Obama in a national address as an example of success in the emerging greening of the economy.
And wallboard is just a start.
“Just about everything in our buildings was designed in the 1800s when energy was cheap and there was no concern about carbon dioxide and global warming,” Surace said, citing such common items as incandescent light bulbs and electric motors. “It means we really have our next industrial revolution ahead of us.”
Surace was a keynote speaker at Opportunity Knocks, Creating a Green Workforce in the Hudson Valley, April 29 in Fishkill, gathering about 200 attendees from industry, academia and public policy fields.
Sponsored by the Hudson Valley Green Partnership Pipeline, a consortium of regional workforce development boards and the New York state Department of Labor, the conference was held to examine ways jobs can be created through business initiatives in the so-called green economy.
“Most of the jobs going forward are going to be green related,” Surace said.
While there is no definition of a green job, they are generally described as work that creates products or structures with less impact on the environment than conventional products. Thus, for example, putting EcoRock into a building is a green job because EcoRock uses far less energy to create than conventional wallboard. Installing Serious Windows is also a green job, since they are rated as even more efficient than most Energy Star-rated windows.
What became apparent over the course of the daylong session is that America”™s economy can”™t just create green jobs without changing the economic paradigm to be energy efficient and largely non-polluting. Though that will take considerable effort, it offers opportunity across the economy in ways not normally associated with green business.
“Most professionals have a green edge,” said Melissa Everett, executive director of Sustainable Hudson Valley, a co-sponsor of the conference and a consultant for the Green Talent Pipeline initiative. In an address to the conference, she said the green change will be part of a process transforming the economy, including using the resources and expertise of professionals whose jobs are not normally viewed as green. One example, “There is a huge need for savvy investment advisers in the green economy,” she said.
But while the potential is enormous, the reality is still lagging. Everett noted, for example, that educational institutions in the region have trained at least 260 solar-panel installation technicians, which she said is “way more” than can currently be put to work in the field. But, she said, the professionals teaching those courses report the students are aware of the current jobs shortfall but are confident their new skills will soon pay off.
To help ensure that happens, the Pipeline has examined potential for green job growth in seven sectors: energy efficiency; renewable power generation; green building; sustainable transportation; pollution prevention and clean up; “natural resource-based industries;” and policy planning research and education.
“Lots of people are trying lots of things to train and manage a green work force,” Everett said. “But the gap right now is coordination and an understanding of how to make all this complexity coherent.”
To close the gap and create a roster of workers for green jobs in fields as they are needed,   “Steady communication with industry is key,” she said.
Like Surace, she noted that construction is where the green jobs are most likely to emerge, initially at least. “The state of New York has put thought into understanding what it takes to make a building efficient and what it takes to create a work force to do that.”
From architects drawing up plans for energy-efficient buildings to technicians putting insulation in the interiors to roofers installing solar energy roof tiles to landscapers using fauna to cool the grounds without using excessive water, a green revolution will require workers across the economy to become fully involved.
That has not yet happened. With 17,300 architects and engineers in the seven-county Hudson Valley region, only three dozen were accredited by the U.S. Green Building Council at the end of 2008.
Energy will be a key to creating green jobs, but in a more comprehensive sense than energy economics might normally be construed. “Look at the opportunities on the energy-efficiency side, there will be many more jobs on that side of the fence than on the supply side,” Surace said.
He also said that solar power is not the only nascent production energy field likely to create jobs, citing enormous potential in wind power and biomass energy, including algae.
“We are going to see algae farming in this country,” Surace predicted, saying it would provide fuel for biomass energy production.
In addition, he said, such simple technologies as solar thermal home and hot water heating can be used to improve a building”™s efficiency along with better refrigerators, small motors, water heaters and even light bulbs. All need workers to design, build and install them. And there are ideas that still seem marginal, but are becoming mainstream.
“Incandescent light bulbs will be outlawed around the world in a few years,” Surace said, because the circa 1890s technology wastes too much power producing heat instead of light and is too wasteful for a world threatened by climate change. He predicted that light emitting diodes or LED fixtures will sweep the marketplace in coming years, leapfrogging even sales of compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) because LEDs are already far more efficient and do not contain mercury as CFLs do.
Buildings in general are an underappreciated opportunity for not only energy savings, Surace said, but to help reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. He noted that overall around the world, the operation of buildings produces 40 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions, while creation of building materials accounts for another 12 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.
This is more than an economic problem, Surace said, because the consequences arising from climate change have already reached thresholds, for example, reductions in polar ice cover, which scientists had predicted would not be reached until the year 2100. The potential consequences are “catastrophic,” Surace said, so the greening of industry and creation of green-related jobs is not an economic option but an environmental necessity.
As such, he said there is an opportunity and a need to unleash the ingenuity of American business. With the gradual disbursement of the stimulus package he said, there are more resources available to do so. “The recovery act has given us the confidence to execute bold moves, we have played our hand and we think this is going to work out,” he said.
His professed optimism, he said, reflects the trend in one of his most reliable economic indicators, architects. He said the business pace of architectural firms usually precedes the economy by about 12 months; and for the first time in two years, architects are reporting their business activity is up substantially.
So if the economy is recovering and going green, what will that mean?
“A lot of invent, manufacture and install,” Surace said. “You will see that a lot.”
