10/12 Industry Report
It represents a monumental shift in mindset. Owners in the industrial space are no longer digging in their heels in resistance to a changing global energy dynamic.
Instead, they are preparing for the inevitable “energy transition.”
Along the way, they’re discovering real job-creating potential in a brave new environmentally conscious world. With that as part of their motivation, in 2021 the Water Institute of the Gulf in Baton Rouge and nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation launched the Louisiana Energy Policy Simulator, or EPS, to model how particular climate policies would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but create jobs as well.
What they found was surprising.
“We looked at the jobs creation potential from the strategies and actions proposed by Louisiana’s Climate Initiative Task Force and found that by 2050 there would be more than 165,000 in net new jobs created through the plan,” says Allison DeJong, senior planner at the Water Institute and project lead.
The Louisiana EPS modeling tool allows users to evaluate specific climate policy proposals and assess the economic, jobs and public health impacts of those policies in an easy-to-use web interface. As a policy simulator, it’s very complex, “but it has a ‘business as usual’ set of variables and then a set of policies that you can turn on and off, set different schedules and intensities or manipulate through a web application,” DeJong says. “From that, you can get a number of different outputs.”