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in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released a study showing
our economy had 3.1 million green jobs. Recently, it issued another
green jobs study with a headlining number of 854,700 green jobs. Don’t
worry—the economy did not lose 2 million green jobs in three months.
There were not 3.1 million green jobs to begin with. And there are not
854,700 green jobs now.
We have already analyzed the uselessness of the first study (here and here). Signs that the first study’s definition of “green” was questionable include:
- There were 33 times as many green jobs in the septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry as in the solar utility industry;
- More than 50 percent of all jobs in steel mills were green;
- There were more green jobs in school bus and employee transportation (160,896), trash collection (116,293), and used merchandise stores (106,865) than in either engineering services (100,847) or architectural services (71,891); and
- The acting commissioner of the BLS admitted that oil-industry lobbying could be considered a green job.
In the new study, as in the first, examination of the categories with the most green jobs leads to much head-shaking.
The
single largest green job category is “janitors and cleaners, except
maids and housekeeping cleaners,” which had 56,700 green jobs. This is
nearly 10 times as many green jobs as in “civil engineers,” which has
the highest number of green jobs in the “architecture and engineering
occupations” super category.
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