Obama touts green energy jobs that 'can't be shipped out'

President Obama continued pushing renewable energy and efficiency programs as a tonic for the economy today. Below are his comments during a speech on economic policy in Pennsylvania:

We’ve got trillions of dollars of infrastructure improvements that need to be made all across the country:  roads, bridges, ports.  And that’s just the old infrastructure.  Then we’ve got a whole new infrastructure that we have to build.

So when we talk about, for example, the smart grid, this is not a complicated concept.  We’ve got basically an old electricity network that leaks electricity, it leaks energy, all the time.  It’s not efficient in the ways that it should be.  And if we could create a much more efficient 21st-century grid, we could save huge amounts of energy -- 10, 15, 20 percent -- just in making -- just becoming more efficient, and that would create a whole bunch of jobs for people who would have to lay down lines, put up new transmitters, all that good stuff. The same is true when it comes to clean energy.  There is no reason why we shouldn’t have the corner on wind turbine technology, on solar panel technology.  (Applause.) In fact, some companies that are doing battery and wind and solar technology benefited from the Recovery Act, and they are now hiring people right here in Pennsylvania to do that work.

But in order for us to take advantage of this new future, we’ve got to make some investments now.  We’ve got to have an infrastructure plan, and something that I’ve been working with the governor on is the idea of an infrastructure bank so that instead of us just every six years having Congress vote to figure out what our infrastructure is -- and there’s no real planning to it -- that you had a system where we could actually leverage private sector dollars into making investments alongside the public sector, and it wasn’t based on who’s got the committee chairmanship but it was based on what are the infrastructure needs that we really have in this country and prioritize them.

When it comes to energy, this is a triple-win situation.  If we invest now in clean energy and we acknowledge that we’ve got to change how we do business -- for our economy, for oil independence, but also for climate change -- then we can clean up our environment, we can free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil so we’re not waiting to see what somebody in the Middle East is doing before we know what’s going to happen to gas prices here in the United States.  And we can put people to work right now.  And those jobs can’t be shipped out.  Those are jobs that have to be done right here in the United States of America.