A study released on the eve of a national conference on green jobs says that emerging eco-friendly work must provide adequate pay and benefits -- or risk damaging efforts to restore the economy and strive for environmental sustainability. The study released yesterday, "High Road or Low Road? Job Quality in the New Green Economy." ..."One of the greatest risks is that, in our haste to create a large quantity of new green jobs, we pay too little attention to their quality," researchers said.

Fortune's eco-blog, Green Wombat ran a story under the headline, "Wind jobs outstrip the coal industry." ...But it's a bogus comparison. According to the wind energy report, those 85,000 jobs in wind power are as "varied as turbine component manufacturing, construction and installation of wind turbines, wind turbine operations and maintenance, legal and marketing services, and more." The 81,000 coal jobs counted by the Department of Energy are only miners.

Wind turbine blade maker LM Glasfiber Group has announced that it will lay off up to 600 workers at plants in Europe and the United States. The Danish company plans to cut a fifth of its domestic workforce - 450 employees - and to close one of its two blade plants in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the loss of 150 jobs. ...Despite this, the company stressed it is confident in the long-term outlook for the wind turbine business.

The American Wind Energy Association claims it is wind power that creates the most jobs per kilowatt hour. One oft-cited statistic is that there are 27% more jobs per kilowatt-hour from wind than from coal, and 66% more from wind than from natural gas. ..."To the extent it's true, it illustrates these technologies aren't that efficient."

The alternative-energy sector has run smack into a credit crisis, probably a recession as well, and almost all industry experts think the fourth quarter is going to be worse. ...The reality today is that it's more expensive to produce renewable energy than it is from traditional resources, and consumers suddenly strapped for cash will start moving away, said Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at Cato Institute. Even proponents are slowing the move toward alternative energy, at least for the moment.

Babcock & Brown Ltd.'s fight to avoid becoming Australia's next victim of the credit crisis may depend on convincing bankers that it can sell assets in a market where others have failed. Babcock slumped 51 percent in Sydney trading since Nov. 6, when ABN Amro Holdings NV analyst John Heagerty said the owner of wind farms and real estate may breach loan agreements next year. ...Babcock said June 16 it was "confident'' the wind assets would be sold this year -- an assumption Heagerty said may prove too optimistic. "The sale of Babcock's wind assets is likely to be postponed further given the difficulties for the acquirers in obtaining financing,'' he said.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama argued that spending $150 billion over the next decade to boost energy efficiency would help create five million jobs. ...Critics say analyzing only new green jobs misses half the story. "It's not looking at the other side of the coin: You are spending more money for your energy," says Anne Smith, a vice president at CRA International. ...gains in green jobs would be "more than offset" by job losses elsewhere in the economy.

A deflating economy has taken the wind out of a massive Panhandle alternative energy project. Tight lending stalled a $2 billion wind farm project headed by billionaire oilman and alternative power proponent T. Boone Pickens. Pickens' BP Capital delayed work on a state permit to build 170 miles of transmission lines carrying enough wind energy to power 300,000 homes.

Texas consumers and taxpayers could pay more than $2.2 billion a year in subsidies and higher transmission costs to take advantage of the state's abundant wind-generation resources, a free-market research group said on Tuesday. The state's current push to accelerate use of wind-generated electricity is "costing, not saving, Texans billions of dollars," said Bill Peacock, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Center for Economic Freedom. ...By 2025, the study said the price tag could total $60 billion as Texas reaches 10,000 megawatts of wind capacity.

For all the support that the presidential candidates are expressing for renewable energy, alternative energies like wind and solar are facing big new challenges because of the credit freeze and the plunge in oil and natural gas prices. ...after years of rapid growth, the sudden headwinds facing renewables point to slowing momentum and greater dependence on government subsidies, mandates and research financing, at a time when Washington is overloaded with economic problems.

Renewable energy's gone in the space of a few months from market darling to whipping boy. Shares in solar- and wind-power companies have suffered even more than the market at large. The outlook for new projects is growing increasingly cloudy. But that's not because renewable energy suddenly got uglier. It's because of the fallout from financial-market turmoil ..."Natural gas at $6 makes wind look like a questionable idea and solar power unfathomably expensive," said Kevin Book, a senior vice president at FBR Capital Markets.

The prospects of renewable-energy companies soared with oil prices, but the global credit crunch and the easing of energy costs have brought them back to earth with a thud. With banks reluctant to lend and their stock prices tumbling, many green-energy concerns are struggling to find the long-term funding they need to expand in a capital-intensive industry. In the past three months, global renewable-energy stocks tracked by New Energy Finance, a London-based consultancy, have dropped about 45%, compared with a 23% decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the same period. The sector's problems have been compounded by the skid in oil prices to below $70 a barrel.

The nation's severe credit crisis is dimming the appeal of a long-awaited extension for renewable-energy tax credits. After months of delays, Congress finally passed the extension Oct. 3 - just in time for the alternative-energy industry to face the full brunt of the upheaval in financial markets that has sharply reduced commercial lending. Some wind- and solar-energy projects are moving forward under the impetus of the renewed tax credits. But many others are on hold as developers compete for a trickle of available financing.

Renewable energy projects, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct, are singularly dependent on a small cadre of institutional investors to put up money in return for tax credits and early electricity generation revenue. And many of the biggest backers of renewable projects are on shaky ground or have disappeared altogether, saddled by bad bets in the housing and consumer credit markets. Among them: bankrupt Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers Holdings.

Goldman Sachs on Tuesday slapped sell ratings on the two largest publicly traded U.S. solar power firms, with the broker flagging the possibility of oversupply as overseas subsidies dry up in the face of the global economic meltdown. Goldman analyst Michael Molnar forecast "strong headwinds for valuation" as he downgraded shares of First Solar (FSLR) to conviction sell from buy and SunPower (SPWRA) to sell from buy.

JPMorgan analysts are recommending investors take a neutral stance on electric utilities and independent power producers, a less upbeat position than the securities firm took earlier this year. ...The firm also said it has received calls from a number of investors worried about T. Boone Pickens' high-profile plan supporting wind power could hurt power prices.

Texas billionaire and wind energy developer Boone Pickens said at a hearing in Washington Tuesday that the U.S. is exporting about $700 billion a year to feed its oil addiction, as he joined the call from energy leaders to use nuclear, natural gas, coal, wind, biofuels and solar to wean the country off imported crude. According to the Department of Energy, an investment of $60 billion in new transmission capacity is needed between now and 2030 to enable wind power to supply 20% of U.S. electricity.

"The math is simple and indisputable," IECA President Paul Cicio said. "The EIA's natural gas price assumptions used to determine the cost of S. 2191 are about one-half of today's real-world forward prices." The IECA recalculated the study using forward price figures as of May 30. EIA found that, if passed, the legislation would increase average annual household energy bills between $30 and $325 in 2020 and between $76 and $723 in 2030, excluding transportation costs. EIA found that the increasing cost of using energy reduces real economic output and purchasing power and lowers demand for goods and services, causing real gross domestic product to fall $444 billion to $1.308 trillion over the 2009 to 2030 period.

A study paid for by a group that represents oil refiners found that the global warming bill, co-authored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.), would raise pump prices by around 48 cents (in 2007 currency) by 2030. It also found that the bill would increase gas prices by as much as 13 cents over the next four years. The debate highlights the difficulty lawmakers will face in trying to tackle global warming as they simultaneously try to provide economic relief to the nation's drivers. ...Opponents will use more than costs to lobby against the Warner-Lieberman bill. The NPRA study also questions whether the emissions curbs called for in Warner-Lieberman are achievable.

The reason solar, wind, geothermal and power conservation stocks crashed largely comes down to fears of recession and to politics - as opposed to a major bubble across the green industry. While there are exceptions like waste-to-energy, most alternative energies depend on federal tax credits. The production tax credit (PTC) provides 19 cents per kilowatt hour for renewable energies, while the investment tax credit (ITC) offers a 30 percent rebate on the cost of a solar system. But the tax credits "sunset" every year or two and must be renewed, creating a boom-and-bust cycle. ...And with the PTC and ITC going the way of the dodo on Dec. 31, fears of recession and a credit crunch have all conspired against green investors.