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RICHARDSON, Texas, US, June 7, 2006 (Refocus
Weekly)
Using green power to meet 20% of U.S. electricity
demand would create one-quarter of a million jobs by 2020, according
to a report from a university in Dallas.
Global warming may represent a major opportunity for investment
and job growth in the United States but any such potential is
endangered if the general public and politicians remain mired in
panic or a sense of resignation about climate change, says Lloyd
Jeff Dumas in ‘Seeds of Opportunity - Climate Change: Between
Complacency and Panic.’ Dumas is a professor of economics and public
policy at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the report examines
the potential economic opportunities associated with mitigating
global warming, with a focus on five policy approaches.
“It has been said that within every problem lie the seeds of
opportunity,” it explains. “Global warming is no exception to that
rule.”
Global warming threatens to result in huge economic dislocations,
powerful storms, diseases, catastrophic droughts, dwindling food
supplies, unprecedented floods and vanishing coastal areas, but the
threat also presents an opportunity for private sector companies and
government to find cost-effective ways to mitigate the damage likely
to be caused by climate change. “There is the potential for earning
substantial profits and creating large numbers of productive jobs by
focusing on climate change solutions,” it adds.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that
reducing equivalent GHG emissions by about 15% of current levels
could be achieved by 2010 and by 30% by 2020 by taking measures that
would save enough energy to actually produce net economic benefits,
rather than costs,” the report states. The United Nations projects
that global sales of all forms of renewable energy will reach US$234
to $625 billion by 2010, and $1.9 trillion by 2020.
“The market in the U.S. alone is expected to grow 34% by 2020,”
explains Dumas. “Using renewable energy to meet just 20% of U.S.
electricity demand would by itself create nearly a quarter of a
million jobs in this country by 2020.”
He proposes five possible solutions to address global warming that
would hold costs or increase the return on our investment, including
“increased use and further development of renewable, ecologically
benign energy sources,” cap and trade emission reductions, energy
conservation programs, enhanced GHG sequestration, and programs that
use “positive and negative incentives to induce the progress of
technologies useful to climate change mitigation.”
“When it comes to global warming, there is reason to be optimistic,”
according to the report. “We certainly cannot afford to be
complacent, but there is no need to panic. We still have the time to
take a measured approach, to roll up our sleeves and build the
political will to take sensible, pragmatic actions that will make
global warming a problem of the past, rather than a threat to our
future.”
“There is widespread consensus among the scientific community, and
growing recognition by political and business leaders as well, that
global warming poses real and increasingly documented risks,” it
explains. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has calculated
that an increase of 1 m in sea level due to global warming could
drown 80% of coastal wetlands and inundate 10,000 square miles of
dry land if shores are not protected.
By 2050, total global economic costs of global climate change are
expected to reach $300 billion per year and the UN Environmental
Program says economic losses due to natural disasters are doubling
every decade and have reached $1 trillion over the past 15 years.
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