Green jobs success eludes Obama

Politico reports

President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy.

The catch? Nearly three years into Obama's presidency, the White House can't point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.

Monthly Labor Department employment reports say nothing about the new clean energy workforce, while an effort to document how many Americans actually make a living in the "green collar" field may not be done by November 2012.

Obama's Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 thanks to more than $80 billion in the economic stimulus package. But those are estimates at best.

White House officials say asking about the connection between the 9.1 percent unemployment rate and the administration's concerted green jobs campaign is the wrong question.

A better benchmark, they say, is the exponential growth in clean technology industries, from the new car battery manufacturers that have sprung up across the Midwest to renewable energy plants, including the world's largest solar facility that's slated to break ground Friday in the California desert.

The White House figures 825,000 Americans should be building electric car batteries, retrofitting homes or doing other green collar work by the end of 2012. But that too is an extrapolation.

"It's certainly a good thing if those numbers are believable," said Jerry Webman, chief economist at the Oppenheimer Funds. "But they're not a large enough number for the nation or Obama's job creation problem."