Green
The Clean Energy Employment Shift, by 2030
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The Clean Energy Employment Shift, by 2030
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With many countries and companies pledged to reduce emissions, the clean energy transition seems to be an inevitability. And that transition will undoubtedly have an impact on employment.
New sources of power don’t just require new and updated equipment, they also require people to operate them. And as demand for cleaner fuels shifts attention away from fossil fuels, it’s likely that not every sector will see a net gain of employment.
This graphic shows projected global employment growth in the clean energy sector and related areas, under announced climate pledges as of 2021, as tracked by the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.
Which Sectors Will Gain Jobs By 2030?
In total, the clean energy transition is expected to generate 10.3 million net new jobs around the world by 2030.
Though fuel generation will definitely be affected by the clean energy transition, the biggest impact will be felt in modernizing energy infrastructure:
| Clean Energy Jobs By Sector (to 2030) | Jobs Gained | Jobs Lost | Net Job Shift |
|---|---|---|---|
| Efficiency | 3.2M | 0 | 3.2M |
| Cars | 2.6M | 0 | 2.6M |
| Power generation | 2.6M | -0.3M | 2.3M |
| Grids | 1.6M | 0 | 1.6M |
| Bioenergy | 1.2M | 0 | 1.2M |
| End-use renewables | 1M | 0 | 1M |
| Innovative technologies | 0.9M | 0 | 0.9M |
| Critical minerals | 0.2M | 0 | 0.2M |
| Coal | 0 | -0.6M | -0.6M |
| Oil and gas | 0 | -2.1M | -2.1M |
| Total | 13.3M | -3.0M | 10.3M |
In order to properly utilize the new sources of energy, the largest expected job gains are in electrical efficiency, power generation, and the automotive sector. Combined with modernizing the grid, they make up 75% of the 13.3 million in new job gains expected.
Comparatively, new energy sources like bioenergy, end-use renewables, and supply chain resources like innovative technologies and critical minerals combine for 3.3 million jobs. That offsets the 2.7 million jobs expected to be lost in fossil fuel sectors, plus an additional 0.3 million lost in power generation.
But it’s important to note that these expected employment changes are under announced climate pledges as of 2021. The IEA has calculated that in a full net-zero clean energy transition, the estimated quantity of jobs gained and lost would more than double across almost all sectors, with a net addition of 22.7 million new jobs.
Regardless of which path is closest to the reality, it’s clear the job landscape in energy and related sectors will be shifting in the coming years, and it will be interesting to see how and when such changes materialize.
Blockchain
The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining
Gold has a long history as a precious metal, but just how many carbon emissions does mining it contribute to?
The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining
As companies progress towards net-zero goals, decarbonizing all sectors, including mining, has become a vital need.
Gold has a long history as a valuable metal due to its rarity, durability, and universal acceptance as a store of value. However, traditional gold mining is a process that is taxing on the environment and a major contributor to the increasing carbon emissions in our atmosphere.
The above infographic from our sponsor Nature’s Vault provides an overview of the global carbon footprint of gold mining.
The Price of Gold
To understand more about the carbon emissions that gold mining contributes to, we need to understand the different scopes that all emissions fall under.
In the mining industry, these are divided into three scopes.
- Scope 1: These include direct emissions from operations.
- Scope 2: These are indirect emissions from power generation.
- Scope 3: These cover all other indirect emissions.
With this in mind, let’s break down annual emissions in CO2e tonnes using data from the World Gold Council as of 2019. Note that total emissions are rounded to the nearest 1,000.
| Scope | Type | CO2e tonnes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mining, milling, concentrating and smelting | 45,490,000 |
| 2 | Electricity | 54,914,000 |
| 3 | Suppliers, goods, and services | 25,118,000 |
| 1,2,3 | Recycled Gold | 4,200 |
| 3 | Jewelry | 828,000 |
| 3 | Investment | 4,500 |
| 3 | Electronics | 168 |
| TOTAL | 126,359,000 |
Total annual emissions reach around 126,359,000 CO2e tonnes. To put this in perspective, that means that one year’s worth of gold mining is equivalent to burning nearly 300 million barrels of oil.
Gold in Nature’s Vault
A significant portion of gold’s downstream use is either for private investment or placed in banks. In other words, a large amount of gold is mined, milled, smelted, and transported only to be locked away again in a vault.
Nature’s Vault is decarbonizing the gold mining sector for both gold and impact investors by eliminating the most emission-intensive part of the mining process—mining itself.
By creating digital assets like the NaturesGold Token and the Pistol Lake NFT that monetize the preservation of gold in the ground, emissions and the environmental damage associated with gold mining are avoided.
How Does it Work?
Through the same forms of validation used in traditional mining by Canada’s National Instrument NI 43-101 and Australia’s Joint Ore Reserve Committee (JORC), Nature’s Vault first determines that there is gold in an ore body.
Then, using blockchain and asset fractionalization, the mineral rights and quantified in-ground gold associated with these mineral rights are tokenized.
This way, gold for investment can still be used without the emission-intensive process that goes into mining it. Therefore, these digital assets are an environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional gold investments.
Click here to learn more about gold in Nature’s Vault.
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