“Anybody who thinks transitioning the economy to clean energy will kill — not create — jobs is simply out of touch with reality,” says Bob Keefe, executive director of the nonpartisan advocacy group Environmental Entrepreneurs. “We’re creating way more jobs through clean energy than fossil fuels. This is the energy industry today.”
The truth is that the clean energy economic transformation won’t kill jobs so much as change jobs. How the quantity and quality of the new jobs stack up against the old depends, of course. It depends on the particulars of the policies and practices that emerge from federal, state and local governments and the on-the-ground behavior of innumerable companies, civic institutions and citizens.