The Color of Jobs

by Tom Shields
October 16, 2009

If an award were given to the color of the decade, it would be green.

Green is clean. Green is good. Both the Jolly Green Giant and Kermit the frog should get a Nobel Prize for truly being green.

Where becoming more environmentally friendly was once a voluntary thing one could freely choose, it’s now required — weaved into laws, rules and regulations. On balance, that’s probably not a bad thing. We should all do our part to preserve Mother Earth for future generations.

Most public opinion surveys show clear support for protecting the environment and moving toward a greener society. Who wouldn’t support cleaner water and air, green-o-vated buildings, more fuel-efficient anything?

In MRG’s statewide survey in March, more than 60 percent of Michigan voters said they would install a windmill in their backyard to save energy costs.

The greenaholics take this up a notch, and say all things should be the right shade of green, to the exclusion of everything else.

That’s where the rub comes.

In MRG’s September statewide survey, on behalf of our clients and ourselves, when we asked about the practical applications of requiring more green policy, voters were pretty adamant in their views on some of the issues facing our state.

• Overall, slightly less than half of voters (48 percent) believe that global warming is real, and only 29 percent believe that it is real and the result of human activity. About half (49 percent) of people believe that global warming will have a negative effect on them or their family.
• Given that more than two-thirds of Michigan voters do not support the notion that human activity is resulting in global warming, it’s not surprising then that a majority of voters oppose (56 percent to 36 percent) the concept of a carbon tax or cap and trade penalty on manufacturing firms to blackmail them into adopting more energy efficient habits.

Voters get it. They know that any tax on business is a tax on them. And, that heavier regulation, without consideration for the impact on the bottom line, will cost our state more jobs.

We looked at some specific projects the green brigades have been fighting, like the proposed clean coal energy plants in Bay City and Rogers City, the approved nickel mine in the Upper Peninsula, and oil drilling in the Pigeon River forest.

• By 4-1 margins voters support the Bay City coal-fueled energy plant (74 percent to 18 percent) and the Rogers City plant (72 percent to 17 percent).
• By a 2-1 margin (62 percent to 32 percent) voters oppose any kind of moratorium on mining in the U.P.
• Voters favor drilling for natural gas and oil (62 percent to 33 percent) in the Pigeon River forest and other state-owned property.

Michigan voters — and nonvoters, for that matter — want jobs. They don’t care the shade of green these jobs come in.

They firmly believe that we can have development and critically needed jobs while protecting the environment through strictly enforced regulations and modern technologies and practices.

When asked about the proposed energy plants, voters believed by a better than 3-1 margin that the technology and regulations exist to build and operate an environmentally responsible power plant (67 percent to 22 percent).

The environmental movement may be a victim of its own success. For years they advocated development that took into account concern for the environment. The public agreed, and today believes we are achieving the right balance.

It appears that extremists in the environmental movement — like most extremists in any movement — are out of touch and out of sync with the Michigan electorate on the need to maintain balance and perspective on the environment and jobs.

Only 1 percent of the electorate in our September survey named protecting the environment as the most important problem facing Michigan. Ninety percent named jobs and the economy.

This week an op-ed by the director of Clean Water Action bragged there were 8,000 new green jobs created over the past three years in Michigan, while other sectors saw declines. Great! At that rate it will take only another 130 years or so to make up for the 300,000 manufacturing jobs Michigan’s lost.

I visited a website called greenjobsearch.org. It listed green jobs by city, so I clicked on Detroit Green Jobs. There were two openings this month, and one was to collect petition signatures for environmental issues — probably like the Grosse Pointe-based petition drive to kill hundreds of new mining jobs in the U.P.

Bring on the green jobs — Michigan will take all we can get. But the public appears to have little tolerance for turning good jobs away only to wait for the perfect shade of green jobs to come along. And that’s not a bad thing either.

Tom Shields is founder and president of Marketing Resource Group (MRG), a Lansing-based political marketing and public relations firm. Note: the firm represents jobs-producing mining projects in Michigan.