Environmental Problems and Employment Opportunities

Economists offer a wide range of predictions regarding the employment effects of attempts to solve environmental problems. Assessments range from mild pessimism (restrictions to abate pollution contribute to unemployment) to dire warnings (the economic megamachine should not grow but shrink in order to avoid major calamities in the long run), and from pragmatic optimism (pollution abatement is a new industry) to promises of new life styles. There is something to be said for each of these opinions. They are to some extent conditional on theoretical considerations, but they depend much more on one’s conception of environmental policy. And this, in turn, is motivated by one’s perception of what might be feasible from the political, and desirable from the environmental, point of view. We therefore start with the latter question. We shall discuss the prospects for employment offered by actual environmental policies in section 2, and some more speculative ideas on future developments of environmental protection and employment will be presented in section 3.