Today’s interesting story on the front page of The Washington Post presents a nuanced view of the reaction of companies  to new environmental regulations, quoting, for instance, several utility industry representatives on the ways jobs are created during the compliance process. The main channel of job creation occurs through the construction and installation of pollution-abatement equipment, or less-polluting facilities.

The piece is a good overview of the impact of regulatory change on employment in general, but there is an important angle that it did not touch on: the positive job-impacts of regulatory changes are likely to be much more potent in today’s economic context of high unemployment and low rate of capacity utilization. In particular, the construction industry, where many jobs would be created, is in particularly dire shape, with its overall level still nearly a half million short of its level at the start of the recession.

As Josh has blogged previously, when there are large amounts of unused capital and unemployed workers, as there are today, government regulations can effectively move this capital into action in the form of investments to comply with important environmental rules. Partially because of this, Josh’s analysis of the air toxics rule found that it would be a net job producer; in essence, in 2014 the jobs generated by investments in less-polluting technologies would outweigh any jobs lost due to higher prices or plant closings by about 90,000 workers.