Thank you very much for that question.
First of all, yes, there certainly is recognition of the importance of worker training and retraining, both as part of the strategy of implementation of the transformation to the clean energy economy and as a response to changes in the economy overall, making some skills in some parts of the country redundant and requiring other skills in other parts of the country for economic expansion.
Dealing with those kinds of worker training issues is extremely important. Parts of the recently passed stimulus bill, or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, addressed those questions of worker retraining. In the proposed Waxman-Markey bill, there will be a major section dealing with the training needs of workers in order to respond to those changes in the economy.
I would say, however, that there's an aspect of worker retraining that I think gets overstated. It's important to remember that one of the prime economic benefits of these big clean-energy investments is that they will re-employ people with skills that they already have. In the current economic crisis, the six most common strategies for solving global warming available to us will produce great demand for jobs that people who are currently unemployed could put to quick and ready use.
For instance, in the strategy of building retrofitting to make buildings more energy-efficient, we did a study that picked the ten most common job categories required. Not surprisingly, those job categories are primarily in the construction field. They include carpenters, electricians, wall insulators, drywall installers--all the jobs that currently in the U.S. are experiencing an over 20% unemployment rate.
One of the main benefits of making big investments in energy efficiency in our building stock is that it takes advantage of existing job skills. It takes advantage of the very unemployment weaknesses that are dragging the economy down. It puts money into the hands of important consumers, who then turn it over in the economy and create demand for other products.
I think in our discussion about clean energy and global warming, we sometimes overemphasize the level of worker retraining required to undergo that transformation. We underestimate the degree to which these investments will actually reinvigorate much of our existing infrastructure in manufacturing and construction.