America’s Green Skills Gap Raises Concerns About Energy Transition
In 2022, U.S. green job postings on LinkedIn jumped 20%, but green talent grew only 8.4%
5 min
Green skills in the U.S. aren’t growing as fast as green jobs, pressuring companies to get creative to find the workers they need to carry out the energy transition and take advantage of the historic amount of money pouring into climate technology.
Generous incentives in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act have prompted billions of dollars in clean-energy investment announcements that are forecast to create millions of U.S. jobs. But recent data shows strong growth in demand for green skills exacerbating an already tight market where demand outstrips supply.
In 2022, the number of U.S. LinkedIn profiles with at least one green skill grew around 8.4%, compared with a 20% rise in green job postings on the platform, according to data from LinkedIn provided to The Wall Street Journal. The online professional network defines green skills as those that make economic activities more environmentally sustainable, such as carbon accounting, hydrogen engineering and battery manufacturing. It considers green jobs to be ones which include climate action objectives such as removing pollution and preserving natural resources.
Likewise, more than 114,000 U.S. clean-energy jobs were created in 2022, according to last week’s annual employment report from the U.S. Department of Energy. Every state recorded an increase in these jobs and the rise outpaced employment growth in both the wider economy and the overall energy sector. More than 40% of all U.S. energy jobs last year were in clean energy, defined as ones that include technologies aligned with a net-zero future such as electric vehicles, renewables or hydrogen.
“We need this concentration of workers with green skills to be higher,” said Sue Duke, head of global public policy at LinkedIn.
The IRA earmarked around $369 billion of government incentives for energy and climate-related programs over 10 years. The legislation was predicted to create more than nine million clean-energy and climate-related jobs over the next decade, according to the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The utility-scale clean energy industry has announced more than $150 billion of investment as well as 18,000 new manufacturing jobs associated with new or expanded facilities since the IRA was passed in August 2022, the American Clean Power Association, an industry group for wind, solar and battery storage, said in April.
“The transition to a cleaner economy, as envisioned by many policy makers, will involve building a vast amount of infrastructure,” said Kenneth Gillingham, economics professor at the Yale School of the Environment.
“There has certainly been an uptick in hiring,” Gillingham said. “But much of the building of infrastructure and clean energy is yet to come if the goals of the IRA come to pass.”
The current green skills supply shortage has raised concerns about how U.S. companies will find the workers they need as the IRA-related projects are built and eventually start operating. However, there are some mitigating factors.
“Today’s workforce is not ready for such a scaling up, but the skills needed are not always specific to green technology,” Gillingham said. There are also plenty of traditional economy roles that can quite easily transition to green jobs, such as from construction, electrical work and engineering, he said.
To help close the green skills gap, companies are getting creative. For newer, fast-growing roles such as sustainability manager and energy auditor, some businesses have recruited workers without prior green job experience, according to LinkedIn. It also said around half of the solar consultants and waste managers hired in the U.S. had no prior experience.
Businesses are also upskilling current workers and hiring people from areas of the economy that are shrinking. For example, Gillingham said coal-power plant workers are being trained to run renewable-energy farms, operate electric-vehicle charging networks or expand transmission lines.
Universities are also stepping up to help close the green skills gap. For example, the Yale School of the Environment has begun a “major push” into certification programs to train professionals with new greenskills that they can quickly bring into their companies, said Sara Smiley Smith, associate dean at the school.
Yale offers two online certification programs, each taking roughly 11 months to complete. One is on financing and deploying clean energy, while the other concerns restoring, conserving and sustainably using tropical forests. It is developing three more certifications and experimenting with the Coursera learning platform.
“The applications to the master’s program I run here have doubled in the last three years,” said Steven Cohen, director of Columbia University’s Master of Science in Sustainability Management. Cohen added: “The growth of programs to educate people to play sustainability roles in private corporations is exploding.”
The need for green skills varies across industries: The green shift in the energy and transport workforces are quite pronounced as they develop lower-carbon energy sources and electric vehicles, respectively.
More than 84% of net new electric power generation jobs last year were in clean energy such as renewables, geothermal and nuclear, although oil and gas jobs grew too, with only coal jobs falling, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. However, LinkedIn data shows that even within the U.S. oil-and-gas industry there has been a steady increase in the share of its workforce acquiring green skills, which has risen to 22%, well above the average across U.S.industries, at around 12%.
Likewise, there were more than 200,000 jobs added last year in the clean energy vehicle sector, reflecting year-over-year growth of more than 20%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.As of 2023, nearly 11% of U.S. transport workers, such as employees of carmakers, have green skills, according to LinkedIn. The U.S.’s share of auto workers with electric vehicle-related skills rose by 68% between 2018 and 2023.
In contrast, the U.S. finance industry is lagging behind the national average despite many businesses talking up how they are increasingly basing their investments on environmental, social and governance criteria. The proportion of U.S. financial workers with green skills reached 8% in 2023, but is growing faster than most industries with a 14.8% year-over-year increase.
—Rochelle Toplensky contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications
Yale School of the Environment offers two online certification programs to train professionals on new green skills, both taking roughly 11 months. A previous version of this article incorrectly said Yale’s course on financing and deploying clean energy was 10 months and a second course on restoring, conserving and sustainably using tropical forests was eight weeks. (Corrected on July 7)
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The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
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