Five Million Green Jobs Become 600,000 Natural Gas Ones

In his nomination acceptance speech last night, President Obama promised 600,000 new jobs producing natural gas. That’s a far cry from his pledge at the 2008 convention to usher in 5 million new green jobs.

Whether or not Obama’s promise four years ago was ever realistic, the 5 million green jobs will now never materialize for the same reason that the 600,000 are likely to: fracking.

As Peter Schwarz explains in a recent Wired article, new technologies for unlocking natural gas and oil trapped in shale rock have totally changed the energy market. Prices of natural gas have fallen drastically over the past few years, reducing the urgent need for new sources of energy:

Cheap domestic gas will ultimately have three effects. First it will delay or kill most new competing sources of electricity production—be they coal, nuclear, solar, or anything else. Gas is now incredibly cheap and easy to acquire, while other energy sources remain expensive or hard to get (or both). Not surprisingly, gas is already winning: Coal is being pushed out, nuclear has stalled, and wind and solar projects are being canceled.

Fracking has also slowed the race for alternative fuel vehicles, Schwarz notes, by reducing uncertainty about oil prices.  

The bottom line is that the green jobs boom has been postponed indefinitely because of the rise of fracking. Those who were supposed to be building windmills and solar panels will now be injecting water into rocks deep beneath the ground to free up gas and oil. And while the promise of “brown” jobs in natural gas production gives Obama at least a partial response to the challenge of stubborn unemployment, it also presents him, and those concerned about carbon emissions, with a new quandary.

Extravagant promises about green jobs were particularly useful to Obama in the past because it allowed him to present a neat solution to two different tricky problems. Green jobs would address the immediate jobs crisis, while also laying a foundation for mitigating the longer-term threat of carbon emissions and climate change.  

Putting people to work fracking only ameliorates one of those difficulties. Although natural gas is relatively clean, the prospect of forestalling the hoped-for developments of solar, wind, and other cleaner energy sources and pulling previously inaccessible oil out of the ground is not an encouraging one, from an environmentalist perspective.

In his 2008 speech, Obama’s promises about green energy were all he felt needed be said about climate change. Last night, conversely, he leveled an explicit and dire warning about carbon emissions and offered a defense of environmentalism directly after touting the potential of natural gas development:

And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet, because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. (Cheers, applause.) They are a threat to our children's future.

Without the promise of green jobs, the anti-emissions message is much starker. It’s less attractive, and more frightening.

Advancements in fracking have been great for the American economy, but they’ve made it much more difficult for President Obama to reconcile the environmentalist message with economic growth.