GoGreen Conference - hope for a desperate future?

I am going to attend the GoGreen conference today. I am not a business specialist, and my knowledge of green is weak. These will be good things to learn more about. I intend to take very good notes and share what I learn. I hope to be more informed in discussing these issues in the future.

A lot of people are touting green jobs as a way to revitalize our economy and take the nation, and the state, into the future. The concept is a good one. Many old jobs are gone forever. Here in Oregon, the timber industry is gone. We’ve likely seen the last of the fishing industry as it once was. We will never be a state doing lots of work for the military-industrial complex (yay for that). We don’t even need that many jobs; we’re a small state and a small number of jobs will fix much that ails us.

They must be, however, the right jobs. That’s the beauty of green: the companies that move into that field in the coming years are not likely to be either large or to employ large numbers of people. I was speaking to someone yesterday who had toured a new factory in HIllsboro that produces solar panels. It’s highly automated to keep costs down and allow them to compete with the Chinese. Not a big source of jobs — yet.

But in time, once the basic components are available and affordable, and once we start developing more uses for these and other components, other jobs should arise. The Chinese may be able to build cheap solar panels; can they install them on your roof? Can they fix them when the break? Replace them in 15 years? Can they modify them for your specific building? Do they know which add-ons you need? Suggest how to program the software for your location?

Since so much of the green business and industrial future is location-specific — products, installation and configuration that is specific to a home, building, school, roadway — actual people doing that specific work will always be necessary. Yes, there will be attempts to develop as much of this in a factory as possible to keep costs down. But until we all start living and working in ticky-tacky, cookie-cutter prefabs, we’ll need specialists who will have to have the skills to visit specific sites and get the work done there. Especially since so much of this work will involve existing buildings. We won’t be tearing down three-quarters of the homes and buildings in the state just to provide green jobs.

There are a lot of jobs possible; even someone with my superficial knowledge can see that. But we have not gotten to that point yet. We need to develop both the capacity to produce, or procure, the basic components but also, and more importantly, the understanding of what these jobs can be and how to make them a reality. That’s my goal for today: to learn more about the future of green jobs in Oregon. In a state that has a precarious budget and has little visible economic hope in the short-term, funding the future is going to be difficult. At best. Maybe we’ll discover the old saying can be true in this case: necessity is mother of invention. We need jobs; we need to green our state; we need economic investment. Perhaps sheer desperation will light the way forward.