Behind the Numbers of Green Careers

Job creation estimates are based on the Sunrise Movement objective of investing $10 trillion in new spending over 10 years in specific areas of the United States economy, such as renewable energy, public transportation, the care economy and public health. These objectives were mapped to equivalent investment and job multipliers contained in work by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), since many of the investments modeled in that study align very closely to the Sunrise objectives. The $10 trillion in spending was distributed according to the same relative investment levels contained in the PERI study. This provides an overall estimate of job creation in each investment category, including direct, indirect and induced job creation. The job creation reported is for one job-year, or one job created for one year. Total job-year creation over the 10 years of spending would be 10 times the one job-year number.

To estimate which specific occupations would gain jobs, each category of investment was mapped to one or more relevant industries in the May 2020 National Industry-Specific Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Jobs were distributed through each occupation in these industries in proportion to the relative May 2020 employment in those industries. This assumption is more likely to be true in the initial years of these investments. Over the 10 years of investments, the occupational distribution of the jobs may shift, both as the overall economy shifts occupational distributions, and as the effect of the initial years of new investments change the nature of these industries and industries connected to them through indirect and induced job creation. Occupations with less than 50 additional jobs created are not shown. 

For the Archetype profiles, we focused on occupations at the “detail” group level of the above BLS estimates, since these most align with occupations that most people are familiar with, and avoid as much as possible grouping multiple occupations together. Detail-group occupations were each assigned to exactly one Archetype. These subjective assignments were made by Sunrise staff, with my advice, based on the typical activities performed in each occupation and how these occupational profiles aligned to the characteristics of each Archetypes. Note that BLS does not provide a detail-group profile for every occupation in the economy, so additional, unlisted occupations might fit into each Archetype. Further, since the specific job functions of an occupation can vary somewhat from job to job, and since some occupations require a wider range of job functions, it’s likely that some occupations could reasonably be classified under more than one Archetype. The Archetype selected can be thought of as the most common Archetype for that occupation.

To estimate the state and local distribution of the employment, the job creation in each occupation above was distributed in proportion to the relative May 2020 employment for each state, metropolitan area, and non-metropolitan area as provided by the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. This estimate is more likely to be true in the first year of the investments, as jobs are mostly created in locations that already have these industries. Over time, the geographic distribution of these jobs will likely shift, as industries expand into new geographic areas or respond to other equilibrium changes in the broader economy.

Demographic and wage data for each occupation comes from the BLS Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. Education and training data come from the BLS Employment Projections. Program-wide demographic, wage and education/training estimates are based on the values for the “major” group occupations and their relative job creation estimates.

Sources of error for the estimates in this project may include: error in BLS’s estimates, error in the PERI analysis, the degree to which the Sunrise/PERI categories of spending align with existing BLS industries, and, as discussed above, the degree to which additional investments in these categories would create jobs in the same geographic areas as they currently exist, and in the same proportion. Due to the scope of this project, these errors were not quantified, beyond the quantification of errors that BLS provides for its estimates.

The job creation model for this project was developed by Kyle Gracey (@gracey_kyle). Kyle has been researching the equity of green jobs for more than a decade. His original research has been published in Building a Green Economy: Perspectives from Ecological Economics (Michigan State University Press) among other locations, and presented to the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel On Global Sustainability, U.S. Green Building Council, BlueGreen Alliance, and more. Contact him at kylebriangracey.com/contact.