Towards a Green New Deal: Scenarios for the US Transition to Renewable Energy and Green Infrastructure

ABSTRACT With the election of Biden as the next US President and Harris as his Vice President, hopes regarding mitigating global climate change through renewable energy transitions have received a new impetus. Using data from the 2019 input-output table, a set of multipliers are computed for the US. Three different scenarios for transition to renewable energy are computed and analyzed using two different methodologies. It turns out that even modest changes in the direction of renewable energy transitions will help both mitigation of global warming and create new decent jobs in many sectors. Under the first methodology, the study found that with a 0.5% of GDP investment (107.15 billion), uniformly distributed across all sectors of the economy, a total of 388,089 jobs will be created in the renewable energy sector, the number doubles and quadruples to of 776,178 and 1,552,355 accordingly for 1% and 2% of GDP investments. Even under the second methodology, which only focuses on job-growth in the energy-intensive sectors, 1,406,466 would be created in the low assessment, 2,812,933 in the medium, and 5,625,866 jobs will be generated in the high assessment scenarios. Similar trends are seen output growth as well. Thus, there can be a double dividend from a set of renewable energy production and investment policies.