The United States has more than 3 million green jobs
Last summer, the Brookings Institute took a whack at counting the green jobs that existed in 2010. The researchers found a clean economy “modest in size,” providing 2.7 million jobs.
Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an independent government agency, announced its own green jobs number for the same year, 3.1 million. Mark Muro, the lead author of the Brooking report, says he was “pleasantly surprised” that the two studies came up with similar numbers. “That shows that in fact we can measure the clean economy and that a consensus is emerging on how to do that,” he says.
More than one in 10 employees in the utilities industry work making clean power. Most of those jobs (35,800) deal with generating nuclear power; only a tiny fraction (400) are connected to solar power. On the other end of the spectrum, almost no one employed in “financial activities” works on green issues. The 190 green jobs the BLS counted make up such a small slice of the sector as to be nonexistent. Other industries with a sizable number of green jobs included manufacturing (4 percent) and construction (6.8 percent).
Sara Laskow, "The United States Has More Than 3 Million Green Jobs," GOOD, Mar. 26, 2012. http://www.good.is/post/the-united-states-has-more-than-3-million-green-...
[verified 4/25/14]