On Saturday, I took a horseback ride up one of the mountains that are dotted across the Yukon for a 360-degree view of the wilderness outside Whitehorse. This was my summer vacation, a road-trip from Whitehorse to Alaska. Sitting on my horse, Spook (who didn’t, actually), I could see clear across the Yukon skyline and I noticed a helter-skelter line of wind turbines sprouting out of the top of a ridge. Judging from the bitter wind that whipped around us, this was an excellent place to produce clean energy.
What I didn’t think about until later were the opportunities that green energy and other environmental projects create. After all, creating green jobs to replace the ones that people were losing when the economy started to implode in 2008 was one of President Obama’s goals in the recent bailouts down south
But while talk of green jobs in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere was making ripples, mainstream coverage was usurped by all this talk of bailouts. (Hey, let’s reward the companies who screw things up by giving them money!) Investing in the companies and the people who will not only develop wind turbines, clean energy batteries, and other technologies, but also in the so-called green-collar workers who will do the nuts-and-bolts installation and building will become an economic imperative, recession or not.
This shift from blue-collar work to green-collar work was something that Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, talked about with the Washington Post recently. “Most of the things we need right now to reduce pollution, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, doesn’t require fancy technology. What it requires is a caulking gun,” Jones said. (He was pretty on-message below, but you can hear a more substantive, less rhetorical talk by Van Jones on creating a green economy here.)
True, though I suspect that you’ll see more and more green-collar positions turn up on environmental job sites such as WorkCabin Canada and in the course catalogues for technical schools. This could be the biggest shift in change in training and career opportunities since the tech boom of the 1990s sent all the geeks to school to study programming.
Despite all the talk about alternative energy in the past few years, access to solar energy – the most prominent – has yet to really enter the mainstream. Mark Blackwell is hoping to change that. Last year, UL 
