[Blue Olives] Why Green Jobs Don't Count

[David Biddle]

In ten years, if we're still talking about green jobs, we will have failed to transform the world economy to a more sustainable and egalitarian set of markets. For many of us who have been invested in the so-called "green revolution" for the past three decades, the fact that we're talking about jobs with special hues even today is disconcerting. As has been documented here at Blue Olives, efforts to modernize technology and establish a more democratic and benign form of productive capitalism have been in the pipeline since at least the early 1960s. 

Indeed, "green jobs" should not be something special; they should simply be "good jobs" that are part of the status quo. Mining and logging jobs should long ago have given way to recycling and re-manufacturing jobs; autoworkers should be building nothing but high mpg/low emission cars and trucks; power plant operators should be managing non-fossil fuel electricity systems; and manufacturers should only be making photovoltaic panels, recycled bottles, super energy efficient appliances, and recycled content building materials. Dinosaur products and technologies that harm the environment, contribute to climate change, and support special interests (rather than global villages) should be relegated to the trash bin of history -- lobbyists and major advertising campaigns notwithstanding. 


The key to success for the sustainability/environmental/green movement is inevitably going to mean creativity and proactive change in every sphere of business activity, pushing the need for "revolution" out the door and initiating new perspectives and standards from the assembly line to the delivery truck to workbench to the cubicle to boardroom. One good example of this purposeful mindset would be in the world's of bookkeeping and accounting. It's very likely that climate change solutions won't work without CPA's and bean counters who know what they're doing. So far, documenting and tracking environmental costs and benefits has been the purview of activists, progressive business people, and environmental scientists. Nothing against the science side of things here, but folks in the business accounting world have  a deep history of ethical practice and methodologies specifically designed to create fair, apples-to-apples comparative evaluations of financial systems. Moving from numbers with dollar signs to tons (tonnes) of chemical emissions shouldn't be that hard. 

What may be hard is for business schools around the country -- and the world -- to grasp the importance of beginning the process now of developing proper environmental bookkeeping and accounting standards for future teachers and students. Once again, informed proactive thinking is dependent on seeing an established marketplace for emissions trading that is supported by a predictable regulatory environment (please read here that as long as the global community can't get it's act together on greenhouse gas emissions limits -- especially the United States and China -- then everything remains dicey and chaotic). 


Make no mistake about it though, without a well-schooled and enlightened accounting community it is hard to envision an adequate mapping of emissions and emissions standards. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. 


But should we call this new breed of business professional "green accountants?" To my way of think, no. Their world should always be about the black and the red. Businesses only succeed if they're in the black. Investors really only want to see the black. Green may be the color of "feel good" corporate marketing and environmental logos, but black is the color of profits and the color of truly sustainable endeavors.



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Posted By David Biddle to Blue Olives at 3/13/2010 03:33:00 PM