Over at Facebook, Alex Lightman writes:

We have roughly 10% unemployment (9.7% admitted, but US uses China-like techniques to underreport employment - in common sense terms it's more like 16-17% unemployment), and need to create new jobs, especially among men and construction workers.... Men have lost about 80% of jobs, and the rate for construction workers is even higher than this. Let's do GEOENGINEERING!

He provides a link to this infographic at NewScientist. The geoengineering ideas presented all have to do with fighting global warming. I'm not sure I would agree with the designer of the graphic as to whether some technologies are centuries (rather than decades) away; however, I would agree that both biochar and foresting -- to choose what I take to be the most near-term and least controversial of the options shown -- would create a lot of jobs in the construction sector if major initiatives were adopted around them.

But then, so would the T. Boone Pickens plan, right? According to Pickens' site:

Any discussion of alternatives should begin with the 2007 Department of Energy study showing that building out our wind capacity in the Great Plains - from northern Texas to the Canadian border - would produce 138,000 new jobs in the first year, and more than 3.4 million new jobs over a ten-year period, while also producing as much as 20 percent of our needed electricity.

I'm thinking a lot of those windmill-building jobs would be in the construction sector. Plus, running more cars on natural gas per the Pickens plan would cut CO2 emissions and strengthen our economy by helping us cut oil imports.

However, if Bussard Fusion were to pan out -- and Brian Wang reports that it has just gotten a big boost -- would we even bother building those windmills? I think not. Producing energy at 1,000 times our current capability (Brian's estimate) via fusion would probably do more to cut emissions than anything else discussed on this page. And while building the power plants would create some construction jobs, the ensuing economic boom would create many more.