In the coronavirus pandemic’s early months, the renewables industry braced for significant pain and dealt with some. As the virus spread in Asia, plants paused production, stalling supply chains. In the U.S., shutdown orders hampered construction and sales for a time. Overall, the renewables industry lost more than 67,000 jobs from February through December, according to […]
PORTLAND, OR – Projected to reach nearly 60,000 jobs in 2020, Oregon’s clean energy economy lost more than 6,000 after a tumultuous year driven by the global COVID-19 economic crisis. Despite losing 10% of its workforce, clean energy remains the state’s leader for energy sector jobs and the best bet to power a fast and […]
“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 […]
“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.”
Reducing current and future global warming emissions is not enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. We must also aggressively remove carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere. While advanced carbon removal technologies are still on the drawing board, E2’s new report, Healthy Soils and the Climate Connection, shows that agriculture presents an immediate, […]
Making stored carbon farming’s next cash crop is vital to U.S. climate battle WASHINGTON – America’s farms were struggling just to make a profit even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but long-ignored soil practices could provide new revenue opportunities and long-term profitability for thousands of hard-hit farms across the U.S., according to a new report from […]
Most initiatives to fight climate change today focus on reducing fossil fuel emissions from electricity generation, transportation, and buildings. But to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we must also significantly reduce the atmospheric carbon that has already been emitted. While efforts are underway to develop new and high tech mechanisms to accomplish this, there is an immediately available and economically viable pathway for atmospheric carbon removal—one that provides a compelling new value proposition for farmers to revitalize their soils and get paid for doing it.
Regenerative agriculture methods such as cover cropping, crop rotation, low-till or no-till practices, and reduced reliance on fossil-fuel based inputs can mitigate climate change by drawing down atmospheric CO2 and sequestering that carbon in the soil, while improving microbial soil health, and increasing soil fertility, crop yield and resilience. These practices also produce multiple additional economic and environmental benefits.
For most of the past decade, agriculture has been one of the most challenging sectors of the U.S. economy. American farmers have had to endure plummeting crop prices, trade-war tariffs, rising costs for inputs like fertilizer, and increasing crop and livestock losses from extreme weather events and less predictable growing seasons—an estimated 85% of U.S. crop losses are due to extreme weather events. Then came COVID-19, disrupting supply chains, upending markets such as restaurants, schools, and institutional food, and further dimming farmers’ prospects with a likely extended recession. According to the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, net farm income could plunge by 19% ($20 billion) in 2020.
But climate-smart agriculture and soil carbon drawdown are in the nascent stages of ushering in a potentially gamechanging chapter in 21st century agriculture. Through strategic direction of Farm Bill funds and other state and federal policies, partnerships with private sector companies seeking to go carbon-negative, and increased consumer demand for low-carbon food, fiber and fuel, regenerative cultivation practices can deliver four significant economic, environmental, and political opportunities for the U.S. farm economy.
Climate-smart agricultural practices offer a path to economic recovery and long-term profitability for hard-hit farmers by delivering increased and more consistent crop yields, reduced costs for inputs (fertilizer, fuel, pesticides) and crop insurance, and the opportunity to participate in markets for soil-based carbon removal. ‘Reduced carbon’ or ‘negative carbon’ crop outputs and the products derived from them may also have increased market value as consumer awareness and demand increases for products with these attributes.3 Healthier soils also make farms and ranches more resilient in the face of increasingly common extreme weather events.
“Ag tech” is one of the fastest-growing technology sectors, with investors from across the financial sector funding startup companies creating highly skilled jobs in technologies such as microbial soil additives, advanced sensors, drones, monitoring software, GPS mapping, genomics, AI, and data analytics. The demand for accurate soil data measurement and analysis is strong, and college programs to train new ag tech professionals are growing throughout the Farm Belt. Additional innovation is taking place in the creation of agricultural carbon trading platforms, establishing carbon as a new farm commodity.
While storing carbon from the atmosphere in agricultural soils can be a key factor in the battle against climate change, the practices that sequester carbon also deliver a wide range of other environmental benefits—including improved water quality and conservation, improved air quality, greater biodiversity, and reduced toxic inputs. Markets and other opportunities that monetize these practices are emerging, creating new revenue streams for farmers and ranchers across the U.S.
Support for policies to incentivize agricultural carbon sequestration has bridged the historically contentious divide between the environmental and agricultural communities because the practices that restore and enhance soil carbon produce both economic benefits for farmers and natural resource benefits to society. In 2017, for instance, an unprecedented coalition of environmental, business, and farm industry groups helped forge and recruit bipartisan Congressional support for the Soil Health Demonstration Trial in the 2018 Farm Bill, a key soil health enhancement and soil carbon measurement program. Since then, numerous policies building on that provision have been proposed at the state and federal levels by lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle, as diverse stakeholders recognize the benefits of valuing agricultural carbon removal.
Healthy Soils and the Climate Connection: A Path to Economic Recovery on America’s Farms provides a roadmap for how climate-smart agriculture policies could provide profit boosts for farmers and climate wins for advocates.
E2: Actions will help displaced oil and gas workers and get more jobs in low income and communities of color WASHINGTON (January 27, 2021) – Today, President Biden is announcing sweeping climate plans that include a moratorium on new federal oil and gas leases on public land, directs government to ramp up procurement of clean energy and […]
Clean business group E2 echoed many of those proposals, along with an administration measure that encourages federal procurements of clean energy technologies. “As we look to the first 100 days of the administration, it is essential that President Biden follow through on his commitment to make clean energy the cornerstone of COVID-19 recovery efforts,” wrote […]
E2: Congress needs to join the mission of building back a cleaner, better economy WASHINGTON (January 20, 2021) – Joe Biden will be sworn in today as the 46th President of the United States, bringing much needed change as the nation faces some of the toughest economic and environmental challenges in recent history. The following […]
**This memo has been revised and is available here. The numbers presented in the original Jan. 13, 2021 memo are based on data issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Jan. 8, 2020. An update to that data was made by the BLS in the Feb. 5, 2021 Employment Situation report** For first […]
**This memo has been revised and is available here. The numbers presented in the original Jan. 13, 2021 memo are based on data issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Jan. 8, 2021. An update to that data was made by the BLS in the Feb. 5, 2021 Employment Situation report**
The U.S. clean energy sector added 16,900 jobs in December, leaving 429,250 clean energy workers out of work since February of this year – a 12 percent decline over pre-COVID-19 employment levels, according according to the latest analysis of federal unemployment filings prepared for E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs), E4TheFuture and the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) by BW Research Partnership
While the nation’s overall jobs recovery has stalled over the last several months, the clean energy sector has been particularly slow. December’s job numbers represent the seventh straight month of job growth for the industry after three months of devastating job losses, yet just 30 percent of the industry’s total jobs lost have been recovered. At the current rate of recovery over the last six months, it would take clean energy — once the nation’s fastest-growing job sector — well into 2023 to reach pre pandemic employment levels. It take an additional year to make-up for the projected 175,000 new jobs projected to be added to the industry in 2020 before the pandemic struck.
Impacts of the pandemic-fueled job crisis also continued to disproportionately impact women and Black and Hispanic workers in December. Women—particularly women of color—and Hispanic workers lost jobs overall last month despite total clean energy employment growing slightly, at a rate of 0.6%.
At the start of 2020, nearly 3.4 million Americans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia worked in clean energy occupations, including renewable energy, energy efficiency, grid modernization, clean vehicles and fuels.
The revised memo based on the BLS updates to the data can be found here.
| State | Total Losses | Percent of Clean Energy Workforce |
| California | 71,615 | 13.00% |
| Georgia | 26,155 | 30.30% |
| Florida | 22,814 | 13.60% |
| Michigan | 21,946 | 16.50% |
| Texas | 18,622 | 7.60% |
| North Carolina | 17,044 | 14.90 |
| Pennsylvania | 16,735 | 17.20% |
| Washington | 16,580 | 18.60/td> |
| Ohio | 14,116 | 12.20% |
| Massachusetts | 12,088 | 10.60% |
| Sector | March | April | May | June | July | August | Sept. | Oct. | Nov. | Dec. |
| Energy Efficiency | -103,298 | -309,584 | -18,880 | +71,786 | +6,836 | +8,116 | +8,354 | +16,806 | +5,400 | +12,301 |
| Renewables | -23,739 | -71,705 | -4,272 | +17,287 | +1,918 | +2,571 | +2,273 | +3,965 | +1,348 | +2,779 |
| Clean Vehicles | -11,399 | -35,070 | -2,059 | +10,335 | +896 | +2,182 | +965 | +1,615 | +646 | +422 |
| Grid & Storage | -6,517 | -19,666 | -1,166 | +4,561 | +428 | +482 | +510 | +1,042 | +336 | +752 |
| Clean Fuels | -2,186 | -10,390 | -657 | +2,351 | +296 | +205 | +378 | +407 | +150 | +632 |
| Total | -147,139 | -446,416 | -27,035 | +106,320 | +10,373 | +13,556 | +12,479 | +23,838 | +7,880 | +7,880 |
The analysis expands on data from the 2020 U.S. Energy and Employment Report (USEER) produced by the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) in partnership with the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), using data collected and analyzed by the BW Research Partnership. The report was released in March 2020 and is available at www.usenergyjobs.org. E2 is a partner on the USEER, the fifth installment of the energy survey first released by the Department of Energy in 2016 and subsequently abandoned under the Trump administration.
If you are looking for additional insight into this report or E2’s more than a dozen other annual clean energy employment reports, visit e2.org/reports. You can also contact E2 Communications Director Michael Timberlake ([email protected]).