When you talk green jobs, what are biggest misconceptions you run into?
Sometimes people assume we’re talking about some kind of George Jetson space-age jobs. In fact green jobs are for everybody from the GED to the Ph.D. People are not only designing new solar technology but also manufacturing it, installing it and repairing it, and all those are green jobs.
And it’s already under way. Right now there are wind energy companies in the US that are manufacturing huge wind turbines. People are working right now to produce high-performance windows that leak less energy, and marketing, selling and installing them.
How significant a role can the green sector play in giving the overall economy a boost?
It’s playing a big role and will play a bigger role. The recovery package that President Obama championed has approximately $20 billion in it for energy efficiency and renewable energy, and those dollars are already moving to governors and mayors who are going to be using them to put people to work this year.
You want to think about energy in two ways — producing it from new clean sources and using less of it overall, and there are jobs all over both sides of that. Solar panels don’t put themselves up. Hybrid cars don’t build themselves.
What do you see happening in New York City?
The main thing is in the domain of building efficiency. There are millions of square acres of buildings can be retrofitted so they use less energy. And what we’re talking about is taking a regular person, putting a green hard hat on them and letting them go and blow in clean, nontoxic insulation, or double-pane the glass so the buildings don’t leak so much energy. That’s not some exotic concept.