Green Jobs? You Can All Go To Shale

The Marcellus Shale Coalition (that’s the pro-drilling group made up of natural gas exploration and recovery companies) has come up with a great idea — their own site advertising jobs available in the industry:

Today, the Marcellus Shale Coalition (MSC) launched a cutting-edge, interactive website dedicated to connecting job seekers with its member companies operating throughout the Marcellus region. The site MarcellusCoalition.org/site/jobportal.html, offers in-depth descriptions of the broad range of jobs available in the industry, as well as current openings and employment opportunities….

As this production expands, and the demand for labor and services continues to grow, so too are the tremendous amounts of job opportunities for the region’s workforce. In fact, a recent study conducted by professors from Penn State projects that over the next decade, Marcellus production will create nearly 212,000 new jobs in Pennsylvania alone.

This ought to be an inspiration to the anti-drilling political opponents of MSC (the PennFutures, PennEnvironments and other PennEco-stremists) to adapt this great idea for their own “Green” jobs portal. Certainly there are plenty of weatherization and solar and turbine manufacturing opportunities in the Keystone State to reverse the state’s upward unemployment rate trend. After all, all those incentives and tax breaks for such programs have done such a bang-up job so far.

I’m sorry — what did you say — there’s news out today?

Noticeably absent from President Obama‘s latest economic-stimulus package are any further attempts to create jobs through “green” energy projects, reflecting a year in which the administration’s original, loudly trumpeted efforts proved largely unfruitful.

The long delays typical with environmentally friendly projects – combined with reports of green stimulus funds being used to create jobs in China and other countries, rather than in the U.S. – appear to have killed the administration’s appetite for pushing green projects as an economic cure.

After months of hype about the potential for green energy to stimulate job growth and lead the economy out of a recession, the results turned out to be disappointing, if not dismal. About $92 billion – more than 11 percent – of Mr. Obama‘s original $814 billion of stimulus funds were targeted for renewable energy projects when the measure was pushed through Congress in early 2009.

Even some of the administration’s liberal allies have expressed skepticism over the original stimulus package’s use of green investments as a way to spur quick employment growth at home.

“Spending on renewables is slow to get out of the door. Leaks to foreign companies is an inadequate driver of jobs and growth and may not create a strong exporting industry,” said Samuel Sherraden, an economic analyst at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based progressive think tank.

Oh.