Critics of the climate treaty claim America' s withdrawal will boost hiring and help consumers — here' s what jobs data show
President Donald Trump’s move to withdraw the U. S. from the Paris climate accord will, critics of the global treaty say, spur job growth and lower Americans’ energy costs. Are they right?
Most experts think not. Indeed, shifting to a clean-energy economy has greater potential to boost employment, economists say. In a sign of how far along the U. S. is in that transformation, more than twice as many people were employed in the solar sector last year than in coal mining, according to the U. S. Department of Energy. The only energy sector with more workers is oil.
In other words, if the U. S. were to abide by the voluntary limits on carbon emissions reached in Paris in 2015, it would be not be a policy reversal so much as a doubling down on the energy direction much of the country has already taken. Energy consumption has dropped in recent years, not because people are using less of it, but rather because of technological advancements that have boosted energy efficiency.
President Trump, in his announcement Thursday, claimed the accord would cost the U. S. 2.7 million jobs by 2025. But the evidence he referenced, from the pro-business American Council for Capital Formation and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, is misleading. As its authors wrote in a footnote, the research cited by Mr. Trump “does not take into account potential benefits from avoided emissions, ” and “the study results are not a benefit-cost analysis of climate change.”
In other words, the estimate of jobs lost from America’s participation in the Paris deal doesn’t account for work created through clean-energy initiatives. Another figure Mr. Trump cited — that 6.5 million industrial jobs would be lost — similarly doesn’t account for jobs created in installing and maintaining clean-energy infrastructure.
The renewable energy sector today is not only creating more jobs but also has a larger “multiplier effect, ” a measure of ancillary economic benefits, according to a recent economic analysis. Whereas each fossil-fuel job supports two other jobs, a single job in wind or solar energy supports more than seven jobs elsewhere.
In fact, it’s competition from cheaper energy sources, including natural gas, that’s the primary culprit for the decline that coal has seen since 2009. The administration’s encouragement of the industry, along with oil, may not do much to bring them back. for another reason. Solar and wind energy, in their current phase, are more jobs-intensive than oil. The entire Keystone XL pipeline only takes about 50 workers to maintain, according to the company that created it.
One reason solar power is booming is that it is finally competitive with, and sometimes more affordable than, other energy providers. The price of installation has dropped by nearly three-quarters, according to one analysis. Even if the modest government incentive that solar currently enjoys were removed, it’s likely cheap enough that it could reasonably compete with fossil-fuel sources. Between 2010 and 2016, the sector grew by over 20 percent every year, according to the Energy Department finding. In many states, growth was even stronger.
