| By Dave Harding, ProgressOhio - Dec 20th, 2009 at 10:51 am EST |
Matt Zone represents Ward 17 on Cleveland City Council and is president of the Northeast Ohio City Council Association.
Ohio should take the lead in clean-energy revolution
We have done much in our state and nation to move America away from a single-minded dependence on foreign oil. Even so, as I discovered in Copenhagen, we are in an international race to develop clean energy. I'm convinced that Ohio has made a great start, but we have much more to do. Together with the rest of America, we can be the leader.
Ohio has a lot to gain. According to a joint 2009 report from the Political Economy Research Institute and Center for American Progress, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, in conjunction with a system like that laid out in the U.S. House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act, would drive a major increase in demand for clean energy. This shift will yield a net boost of more than 67,000 statewide jobs, while also driving a net increase of state investment revenue by $5.6 billion. Another report, from PERI, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Green for All, projected that clean-energy investment would bring 10,421 new jobs to the Cleveland metropolitan area alone, almost half of those jobs for workers with a high school degree or less.
And this is no vague shot at a distant future. The clean-energy revolution is already happening. According to a Pew Charitable Trusts report, clean-energy jobs in Ohio grew by 7.3 percent between 1998 and 2007, compared to a 2.2 percent decline for all other jobs. In 2007, there were more than 2,500 clean-energy businesses operating in the state. An NRDC Green Jobs report found that there are already more than 550,000 jobs in Ohio in a wide range of job areas that could see "job growth or wage increases" as part of the push for clean-energy renewal and climate-change mitigation.
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