Home > About BNE > Press Room > 2010 Archive > January > Obama Pushes for Green Jobs Program

Obama Pushes for Green Jobs Program

By Philip Elliott
January 09, 2010,

 WASHINGTON — After a disappointing new unemployment report, President Obama on Friday pushed for an expanded government program that he said would help create tens of thousands of new clean-technology jobs.

“It’s clear why such an effort is so important. Building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future, jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced,” Obama said at the White House.

Obama spoke after the Labor Department said the U. S. jobless rate was unchanged at 10 percent in December, following a decline the previous month. But the government’s broader measure of unemployment — which includes people who have stopped looking for work or can’t find full-time jobs — ticked up 0.1 percentage point to 17.3 percent.

That, plus the larger-than-expected loss of 85,000 jobs in December, put new pressure on the administration to step up job creation.

“The road to recovery is never straight,” Obama said, although he added that the trend is pointing toward an improving jobs picture.

Obama announced the awarding of $2.3 billion in tax credits — to be paid for from last year’s $787 stimulus package — that he said would create some 17,000 “green” jobs. The money will go to projects including solar, wind and energy management.

The president also called for an additional $5 billion in spending for clean energy manufacturing, an idea being promoted by Vice President Biden.

Such initiatives are “an important step toward meeting the goal I’ve set of doubling the amount of renewable power we use in the next three years with wind turbines and solar panels built right here in the U. S. of A.,” Obama said.

He said more than 180 projects in more than 40 states would receive the tax credits.

“Building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future,” Obama said.

“The Recovery Act awards I am announcing today will help close the clean energy gap that has grown between America and other nations while creating good jobs, reducing our carbon emissions and increasing our energy security.”

“There is no greater priority for this administration than getting Americans back to work,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said in a separate statement.

Meanwhile, top White House economist Christina Romer cautioned against reading too much into any one monthly jobs report, saying the numbers are volatile and subject to substantial revision.

“Real recoveries come in fits and starts, and November was in some sense a start, and December was a little bit of a fit,” Romer said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Government revisions showed that the economy actually gained jobs in November, the first gain in two years, although the amount was tiny.

“We’re starting to see stabilization in employment,” Romer said. “Obviously, the next step is job growth. We’re thinking we’re going to see that by the spring.”

However, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, called the December jobs report “an ominous sign of the deep and continued suffering by working families who want to work but can’t find jobs, despite tentative signs of renewed economic growth.”

Trumka called for enactment of a new multibillion dollar stimulus package “to create good jobs now.”