Save the Jobs or the Polar Bears

I've recently recalled a conversation I had with my Mom about her brother-in-law, Mike, who is a petroleum engineer.  Uncle Mike has always been in the oil business, and this loyalty to his trade can be seen by how he wouldn't support buying a hybrid car when my Aunt mentioned the possibility.  According to the website Energy Tomorrow, "America's oil and natural gas industry supports 9.2 million men and women across the United States in a wide range of highly skilled, well paying professions."  The site also touted that the "oil and natural gas industry exploration and production wages are more than double the national average."  It also said public data gathered by the American Petroleum Institute found that "the industry distributed $176 billion in wages paid to U.S. employees, plus benefits and payments to oil and natural gas leaseholders."  In a story done by MSNBC (the video is in this post), a large job boom is discussed due to what the video says are "billions of barrels of oil inside a rock formation here: 14,000 square miles in North Dakota, Montana, and parts of Canada."


Despite the large number of jobs and money created as a result of oil and gas corporations, many believe that they indirectly support global warming by literally fueling the automotive industry.  For example, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says, "Automobiles, the second largest source [of global warming], create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually."  The NRDC also says "hybrid gas-electric engines can cut global warming pollution by one-third or more today."  It also chastises the auto-industry by accusing it of creating "loopholes" making SUVs consume more gas than they should.  They claim that closing this loophole would cut 120 million tons of CO2, and that if companies utilized the technology they have to create more fuel efficient cars, CO2 pollution would be cut by more than 650 million tons per year.

This amount of cutting would in turn, of course, cut jobs in the petroleum field.  If America eventually left gas behind, what would happen to all of these jobs?  It is possible that they can be replaced by new jobs created in the cleaner energy field, but this could very well prove to be a difficult transition.

Despite this possibility, the transition does seem to be plausible.  According to an article on HybridCars.com, making electric batteries for cars is a viable future for jobs.  The article says, "Michigan will add thousands of new jobs as it ramps up to manufacture as many as 400,000 battery packs a year by 2012."  If you watch the video in this post, it shows in high speed the process of making a Chevrolet Volt battery.  What do you think about a switch to more electricity over gasoline?  Do you feel that the negatives of plausible U.S. job loss in the petroleum industry are outweighed by job creation in the electrification field?  On a different note, how, if at all, do you feel U.S. dependency on foreign oil fits into this issue?