Employment: Solar vrs Coal and Oil

The Keystone Pipeline Project will Not add tens of thousands of jobs, building it nor refining or shipping/transportation needs. The refining and shipping/transportation capacity is already in place and so are those jobs, building will create jobs only in the hundreds and those will be mostly short term as it goes through each state, only a few will continue to be employed during the whole project. Not even manufacturing needs for will boost job growth. Alternatives, this looks only at solar but add in wind, hydro including tide technologies, will create, and already would have, tens of thousands of jobs including in manufacturing. And add in the innovative engineering to advance those as well as developing a new grid system, especially smart grids, to eliminate huge outages in storms and more and thousands of more jobs are created. Oil and Coal workers would easily bring their experiences, hard work ethics, skills and knowledge in the trades, along with the many construction trades professionals, into the alternative clean energy industry, which in most cases would be safer jobs as well.

Need Jobs? US Solar Industry Provides Employment for More People than Coal and Oil Combined

7 February 2014 - Welcome to the future, its already here. Solar employs and nuclear destroys; we have ample evidence of that now, and with the annual U.S. solar jobs census we now have proof that solar power isn’t just providing energy, without destroying our oceans and contaminating the earth and air with strontium, caesium and barium, among other chemicals, it is providing more than 143,000 Americans a paycheck.

Since 2012, that’s nearly a 20 percent increase, says The Solar Foundation, which conducts the census. An additional 23,682 jobs have been added—10 times the rate of employment growth as the national average of just 1.9 percent. In the past four years, 50,000 well paying jobs were added—many of them building and installing solar panels and this employment rate is expected to continue growing at a steady pace. read more>>>

If we had jumped back into quicker development of alternatives, blocked for some forty years by the special interests, when the economy tanked, adding long ignored infrastructure rebuilding, we would have come out of the collapse long ago and had middle class saving economic growth across the board. Saving and once again growing the construction and manufacturing industries while adding a whole new growth industry with ability to export products of which would have expanded into all area's of the economy, and quickly!!