Energy Efficiency and Employment

Via Gilberto Jannuzzi's blog (in Portuguese), we learn about another study Energy Efficiency and Job Creation (in English). This may be one of the more robust investigations on the subject. It concludes that a high efficiency scenario for the United States could create over a million jobs, create over 28 billion/year of income and save over 20 Quads of energy (1 Quad = 25 Mtoe).

The study from 1992, by Howard Geller, John DeCicco and Skip Laitner uses an input-output model to take into account direct & indirect, positive & negative employment effects. While construction, retail and services gain, utilities and energy industries (coal mining, oil refining) experience negative employment effects. Still, in the case of pursuing a high efficiency policy, employment creation is about 3 times as large as employment reduction, resulting in the net million jobs