Back 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.GWPF
