Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy: Making and Keeping New Industries in the United States

Conclusion

To reduce the level of greenhouse gases and other environmental burdens, it would be necessary to make substantial shifts in the generation and production of electricity, the ways in which buildings conserve and use energy, and the structure and energy sources of transportation. The transition would take place over many decades at different scales, and it would require the integration of technological innovation, different consumer practices, and new government regulations. In this book I have expanded on the theory of large-scale technological transitions by drawing attention to the importance of contested policy fields that result in uneven, incremental, and often failed reforms. Instead of viewing longterm , macrosocial change as an exogenous landscape, I have shown how the policy fields where the reforms of the green energy transition are contested are also sites for the construction of the political landscape. Specifically, I have argued that the green energy transition in the United States of the twenty-first century involves an uneven shift toward developmentalist ideology and policies. Slow changes in the political landscape such as underlying shifts in political ideology are both a response to the contestations over the greening of the economy and a shaping framework that structures those changes. Because I conceived this as a work of historical social science rather than of normative policy evaluation, I used a broad definition for “green energy.” Although I distinguished different shades of green energy technology and their relationships to political constituencies, the goal was not to impose, a priori, a normative definition of green energy on the politics but instead to explore how the definitions of green energy are themselves at stake in the policy fields. This descriptive and empirical approach results in several general conclusions about the green energy transition in the United States. The results may generalize to other Conclusion 214 Conclusion countries, but comparative work must be left to another project. The six central conclusions are as follows: 1. Because energy policy has become increasingly connected with business development and job creation, energy policy fields have become a primary site where articulations of developmentalist ideology can be found. However, like other policies, green energy policies are compromise formations. In some cases green energy policies show evidence of social liberalism by sanctioning government intervention in the economy for environmental purposes, drawing attention to distributive issues such as environmental justice issues, and tilting job creation toward low-income populations. Likewise, some green energy policies have a neoliberal strand, which configures policies to strengthen and benefit markets dominated by large corporations. There are also areas of green energy policy that involve public ownership and support for transfers of ownership to households and small businesses. 2. The focus on job creation and business development has linked trade and industrial policy as two central elements of developmentalism. Of special note is concern with the decline of manufacturing jobs that accompanied trade liberalization. Federal government policies show evidence of increasing trade disputes and protectionism, and state governments also pursue import substitution for energy and local procurement preferences. However, because green energy manufacturing can also benefit from global sales, there is a countervailing current that focuses more on competitiveness policies, such as investments into green energy research,subsidies,tax credits,and green jobs trainingprograms.Together, the protectionist and competitiveness approaches to green business development involve a new pragmatism with respect to trade. Although the new pragmatism represents a shift away from a strident belief in the benefits on ongoing trade liberalization, it doesn’t completely return to the protectionist, import-substituting policies of the United States during the nineteenth century. 3. The patchwork of policies in support of green jobs at the federal, state, and local level add up to an uneven green industrial policy. In some states, green industrial policy is explicitly formulated through industrial development roadmaps and targeted industries, whereas in other states the support is more general or even absent. Green industrial policy for the federal government has been much more problematic because of sectional differences between regions that are still tied to the fossil fuel economy and regions that are largely importers of fossil fuels. An excep- Conclusion 215 tion is biofuels policy, which tends to escape from the pattern of sectional and partisan rivalries that has often been the downfall of industrial policies in the United States. 4. In a global economy in which companies in both highly industrialized and newly industrialized countries compete for a market...