Though the plan to create 17,000 jobs in the green energy sector alone is promising, the plausibility of such a plan is puzzling. At least to some.
At odds is whether Barack Obama's green jobs plan will work, if at all, against the backdrop of the country's worst recession since the 1930s.
Skeptics challenged that the Obama administration is investing in green technologies unlikely to be profitable and therefore the investment would amount to unsustainable taxpayer-funded jobs at most.
Obama late last week announced his plan to boost employment by providing 2.3 billion U.S. dollars in tax credits for the creation of green
jobs. The president is also urging the Congress to approve investment of another 5 billion dollars in over 180 green energy projects.
The announcement caused a kerfuffle over figures, as arithmetics-minded critics divided the special fund into a 100,000-plus-dollar annual salary for each of these 17,000 would-be job holders, way above the median annual household income in the country.
Some conservatives went so far as to doom Obama's plan.
"The clean jobs approach is a dead end and even counter-productive," said Ben Lieberman, senior policy analyst for energy and environment at the Heritage Foundation.
Nathan Hultman, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, echoed by
saying that there is always a danger that the government could espouse technologies that later prove to be duds, wasting large sums of taxpayer
money.
"The antidote to this concern of picking winners is not to pick nothing, but to provide incentives for a broad portfolio of technologies
that will push the economy in the right direction," the professor added.
Quite some scholars joined Nathan Hultman's wagon and they contended that the government should choose goals and not the vehicles to reach goals.
Supporters of Obama's plan, however, argued that such green energy investment is crucial to maintaining long-term U.S. economic competitiveness as more countries move toward clean energy.
If done right, clean energy initiatives can be self-sustaining, but require a great deal of government commitment, as well as public-private
partnerships, Nathan Hultman pointed out.
Bracken Hendricks, fellow at the Center for American Progress, said that because prior administrations did not promote investment in green energy, there has been an under-investment in the low-carbon economy relative to other countries.
President Obama has repeatedly said the United States could fall behind other countries in producing a clean energy economy.
Indeed, Japan, China and European Union countries are investing heavily in clean energy and the United States may find itself lagging if the government fails to take actions now, some experts warned.
Technological competitiveness aside, employment in the green energy sector is expected to generate more jobs than from fossil fuel energy sectors.
"You get more than three times amount of jobs as investing in oil and gas and four times more than in investing in coal," Hendricks said of low carbon jobs.
The scholar explained that many jobs encompassing a broad array of wage levels will come from Obama's overall green jobs strategy.
That includes not only jobs in engineering, design and project management but also skilled blue-collar jobs such as in sheet metal
fabrication, Bracken Hendricks added.
Still, critics maintain that Obama's efforts to promote a low carbon economy will do nothing to boost sustainable job growth and in the
worst-case scenario could even harm the economy by spending government funds on unproven technologies.
Technologies should be allowed to compete in the open market, where they will live or die without government intervention, they argued.
Ben Lieberman even drew a correlation between struggling economies and investment in green energy.
Countries such as Spain, Denmark and Germany and such U.S. states as California are struggling with higher unemployment partly because of green
job policies that were not grounded in the economic fundamentals, he said.
That, Ben Lieberman explained, is because many clean energy policies make energy more expensive, which kills jobs.
"It's putting environmental goals ahead of economic goals. It's an attempt to pretend there's a win-win situation but the administration is hurting the economy," he said.