General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt voiced his hope that climate-change talks in Copenhagen would lead the U.S. to devise a green energy policy that would help the economic recovery, the Associated Press reported. Immelt told a renewable energy conference at Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville, S.C.: "What's most important for the U.S. is that we go from Copenhagen, go into 2010, and have the courage to act on clean energy for the good of the country from the standpoint of creating jobs."
Immelt warned that the 10 million new green jobs he expected to be created within the next five years would not necessarily go to U.S. workers. He said: "The Chinese will build more nuclear plants than we will this year. The Chinese will install more wind energy than we will this year. Europe is moving ahead on renewable energy. If we don't get off our butts and move aggressively forward, the world is not going to wait for us." Immelt said developing the jobs in the U.S. would depend on whether the country passed renewable energy standards.
Immelt committed to working closely with Clemson and the state of South Carolina on wind energy research along the coast, WBTV 3 reported. He was quoted as saying: "We are long on wind energy, and you never know where that’s going to go. No specific plans right now, but we're quite excited about what the potential can be." He said GE's Greenville, S.C., plant was a model of the kind of high-tech export manufacturing business the U.S. would need to be globally competitive and to create new jobs. The GE complex, which make turbines to generate power from natural gas or wind, he said, "is a model site for what can be created across the state and across the country," adding, "High-tech exports. Productive workforce. Globally oriented. That's the future."
Related stories also appeared in Anderson (S.C.) Independent Mail, Charleston (S.C.) Post & Courier, and Charleston (S.C.) Regional Business Journal.
