Skeptics fear that the president-elect's Green New Deal will do little but waste taxpayers' money. The government squandered billions on the Jimmy Carter-era synthetic-fuels program, a failed effort to create vehicle fuel from coal.
Corn-based ethanol -- the latest recipient of fat subsidies -- is loathed by many environmentalists, who say it is an inefficient fuel that gobbles precious cropland and helps to drive up food prices.
Better to let the market decide, not the state, said Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University in Virginia.
"The history of government picking winners in the U.S. is not that grand," he said. "People instinctively love the idea of green jobs. . . . But there is a lot of mass stupidity out there."
Renewable-energy proponents such as former California Treasurer Phil Angelides say stupidity would be to stick with current U.S. energy policy, which has turbocharged global warming, super-sized the trade deficit and propped up oil-rich regimes hostile to American interests.
Angelides heads the Apollo Alliance, a coalition promoting clean industries as a means of rebuilding U.S. manufacturing and lessening the nation's dependence on foreign oil.
"It's the best path to recovery and the best chance of creating jobs that can't be outsourced," he said.
Although Angelides' organization takes its name from the space program that put Americans on the moon, creating green jobs isn't rocket science, said Oakland activist Van Jones, author of "The Green Collar Economy."
Jones said Obama's proposal to weatherize homes would pay for itself through energy savings while putting legions of unemployed construction workers back on the job. A $100-billion investment in a green recovery could create 2 million jobs within two years, a good chunk of them in retrofitting, according to a recent University of Massachusetts study.
"You can employ a lot of people very quickly with off-the-shelf technology like caulk guns," said Jones, founder of Green for All, an economic development group. "This isn't George Jetson stuff."
No one knows precisely how many green jobs exist in the U.S. economy. Estimates range from less than 1 million workers to nearly four times that. What's clear is that clean industries have been growing rapidly without a lot of help from Uncle Sam.
