Green Prosperity: How Clean-Energy Policies Can Fight Poverty and Raise Living Standards in the United States

This June 2009 report from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, finds that investments in clean energy technology will create more job opportunities -- especially for low-income workers -- than equivalent spending on fossil fuels, across all levels of education, creating new "pathways out of poverty" and raising the standard of living for low-income workers employed in clean energy manufacturing jobs. An investment of $150 billion a year in clean energy -- roughly one percent of national GDP -- would result in 1.7 million new jobs, with roughly 870,000 of them accessible to workers with high school degrees or less.