Are Green Jobs For Real?: Special Report

Define Green Jobs,

Does this includes Wind Generators, does this also include the carbon release to manufactor the rotors, insulation, composites, ect...... Or is green just a current catch word to make you feel better about yourself.

p911

Catch word.

Some of each. There are valid green ideas, mixed in with misconceptions and scams. Do your best to identify which is which.

They are as real as all the auditors, admin, quangos, beurocrats, PR, HR, anyone who's title includes 'logistics', customer services etc.
And those who are actually engaged in the engineering are doubltess doing real work.

Saw a nice article the other day about a town in UK gripped by the grow your own self sufficiency bug, they are just planting stuff everywhere, giving away seeds and doing stuff. They proudly say they have no 'charter', no 'targets', no admin, they just do stuff and it works, the local council and businesses have all got on board and joined in the let's do it attitude.
Del

Green jobs are those that return a value greater than the input.

This absolutely depends on the specifics of the technologies that are applied and where the kit is made.

If you replace America's truly appalling auto fleet with an American made electric, running American drive-lines and powered on American coal, Wind and solar, I can see this being an enormous employment project, for all kinds of jobs. If instead, we import a lot of Asian hybrids, and continue to burn middle eastern oil, you are not going to see a lot of jobs, except for the aforementioned paper pushing desk monkeys, nor plug the hole in the bucket that is bleeding the country dry.

You can't continue to sent trillions of dollars to Asia for manufacturing, and trillions more to the Gulf States for oil, and spend trillions more on stupid wars and corporate bail outs and not run out of Geld. Its a question of when, not If.

If they will treat this like a war, and systematically eliminate foreign oil dependence, which bleeds hundreds of billions from the American economy each year, and become again a source of innovation and technical brilliance, the future is bright. If America's heavy industries continue to be run by committees of morons with degrees in accounting, then there is absolutely no hope at all. Green Jobs are only as real as the green industry, and the green technology that industry makes. So far, its mostly paper, and a bit of good wind engineering.

It was science and engineering that turned America into a global power, and if America is to reawaken, it will be science and engineering that do the job. If America thinks that it can live in the 60's and keep thumping out Small Block Chevs for all eternity, then the game is over. We need to own the next game.

If you replace America's truly appalling auto fleet with an American made electric, running American drive-lines and powered on American coal, Wind and solar,

But is running electric by the burning of coal at the electric power plant to recharge your hybrid's batteries instead of typical gas powered cars "actually greener"?....

OH I SEE. ..you mean greener as in making money.

In that case, Yes I agree.

p911

Why off topic?

Welcome to CR4

The Brutus

Certainly not off topic

The term you're looking for is "Well to Wheels". This measurements is now widely quoted, for the reasons you stated.

Welcome to the madhouse Engineers' Corner.

Yes, sort of....

I have never been keen on that expression, because, on the electric side, you have choices other than an oil well. I have a large PV array on order, and after a couple of short years paying of its energetic debt to society, the remaining years of its life will be very much oil-free, and carbon free energy. There is no well.

I prefer to stick with thermal conversion efficiencies for heat engines, and simple dimensionless efficiency figures for electrical energy transformations. Sankey diagrams are great, and stuff a lot of data into a nice package, and I think they are the best way of examining this issue. I find it much harder to do with words.