The US experience echoes that in Australia, where a government energy efficiency home insulation programme saw a spate of injuries and deaths in workers employed by get rich quick non-union contractors. In the UK, concerns have been raised about fatalities in wind farm construction and the notoriously deadly recycling industry.

In the US, online news agency FairWarning reported in October 2010 that authorities in California alone investigated three workplace deaths in the solar panel industry in slightly over two years. Installing solar panels combines three of the most hazardous jobs — roofing, carpentry and electrical work — with work at height, making it particularly risky.

Wind power, too, has its risks. ‘The dark side of solar and wind power projects’, a 3 August 2011 report in the Los Angeles Times, points out that many technicians on wind power projects work in bathroom-size spaces, high above the ground, surrounded by high-voltage electrical equipment. Workers also sometimes inspect turbine blades while suspended alongside them, on sites whipped by strong winds. The result: technicians have fallen hundreds of feet, and others have been crushed by, or trapped in, moving machinery.

The Times adds that the risks go beyond the manufacture and installation phase. It reports the complicated wiring under solar panels has left some firefighters so bewildered they have allowed residential rooftops to burn. Some panels contain materials such as cadmium and selenium, which could be explosive or carcinogenic, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

While watchdog groups say the existing state and federal regulations are inadequate to protect workers, wind and solar energy industry trade associations say they are offering, or developing, safety recommendations.

The US federal health and safety regulator, OSHA, remains concerned. But OSHA is facing its own battle for survival. As budget cuts to federal agencies appear inevitable as a consequence of the debt deal agreed by Congress, safety enforcement in any workplace, green or otherwise, could itself be in danger.

According to a report in the online magazine In These Times, OSHA has no fat to trim, with a current budget of only $558.6 million. “Many public health and safety advocates say that that figure doesn’t leave OSHA with the resources needed to adequately inspect workplaces. There are only 2,218 inspectors at both the federal and state level who inspect 7.3 million workplaces employing more than 135 million workers (that’s one inspector for every 57,984 workers.)”

The article concludes: “At this rate, OSHA can inspect a workplace on average once every 129 years and state OSHA inspectors could inspect one every 67 years. For a country the size of the United States, health and safety experts say you need at least 12,000 inspectors, six times more inspectors than OSHA currently has, in order to properly inspect America’s workplaces.”

While traditional workplaces fall off the enforcement radar, green jobs may never even make a blip.

But that doesn’t mean clean energy jobs are risk free jobs. Michael Renner of the US-based Worldwatch Institute, writing this week in the organisation’s ‘Green economy’ blog, noted: “Some weeks ago, my former Worldwatch colleague Zoë Chafe—now a PhD student with the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley—queried me whether I was aware of any major occupational health and safety issues in the renewable energy industry.

“What quickly came to mind was a March 2008 newspaper story about polysilicon, a material critical to the solar photovoltaics (PV) industry. The article reported that a number of Chinese companies were cutting corners in the rush to fill booming demand and keep costs low. Instead of recycling a highly toxic byproduct, silicon tetrachloride, the companies were stockpiling the substance in drums or simply dumping it, rendering land infertile and exposing both workers and surrounding citizens to dangerous concentrations of chlorine and hydrochloric acid.”

Renner continued: “It may be tempting to regard this as just another case of China’s “Wild East” development model. The truth is that the solar PV industry, regardless of location, uses “extremely toxic materials or materials with unknown health and environmental risks,” in the words of a January 2009 Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition report. The study speaks of a “limited window of opportunity to ensure that this extremely important industry is truly ‘clean and green,’ from its supply chains through product manufacturing, use, and end-of-life disposal.”

Renner, though, cautions that it is “also important to assess the situation in a comparative manner.” He cites a Journal of the American Medical Association paper this year that, while acknowledging there are some limits concerning available data and studies, concludes occupational hazards in the fossil fuel sector – with regard to mining and power plant operations – are substantially higher than those associated with wind and solar energy.

Renner says: “This is true not just in absolute terms (the fossil sector is presently still so much bigger), but also with regard to the relative risks (ie. per unit of output.)

“The perhaps most rigorous comparative assessment to date, undertaken by the European Union, confirmed this judgment. In the US context, the JAMA authors find that “the potential occupational health benefits of transitioning to renewable energies are considerable.”

Renner concludes: “The wind and solar industries hold tremendous potential to halt humanity’s race to the climate precipice. Their appeal will be even stronger if they are developed in such a way as to respect not only environmental limits, but also to protect those who often find themselves on the frontline of exposure—the world’s workers.”

But this is not the whole story. Many green jobs are old jobs in green livery. The waste industry morphed into the recycling industry, keeping its horrific fatality record all the while. Manufacturing, transporting, assembling and maintaining wind turbines has and will make workers sick. Ditto other “clean” sources, that haven’t had the benefit of a full lifecycle analysis of related costs and burdens (like, say, the chronic diseases of coal mining of the health and waste headache of nuclear).

And novel technologies and substances – for example, nanotechnology – will be hurried into use to save the environment with scant regard for health risks a working generation down the line.

There’s nothing so far to suggest the management of green industries will be any more caring than its less green predecessors, so switching from old to new industries, to recycle Philip Larkin’s memorial comment on the parental legacy, “may give you all the faults they had, and add some extra just for you.”

This is not lost on Renner. He acknowledges that concerns about safety in new and old jobs underscore “that, as always, regulations, transparency, and the right to organize are critical elements in making workplaces safe and working conditions (and wages) decent.”