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| Green Jobs Wind Beats Coal! |
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Green Jobs Wind Beats Coal!
April 2009
In some promising "green jobs" news, the wind industry in the U.S. has now officially surpassed the coal mining industry in the number of people it employs. Wind industry jobs increased to 85,000 in 2008 while the coal industry remained the same at about 81,000 jobs.
The country made huge gains in wind energy in the past couple of years and that increase obviously created huge gains in employment as well. Last year, there was a 50 percent increase in installed wind capacity and a 70 percent increase in wind industry jobs over the year before. Of those jobs, 13,000 were in regions of the country that had seen a loss of manufacturing jobs in recent years.
Recent studies have shown that investing in renewable energy such as solar, wind and the use of municipal and agricultural waste for fuel would produce 3 to 4 times more American jobs than a comparable investment in the fossil fuel energy sources in place today.
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