FOR ALL THE HYPE, it’s “Brown Jobs,” not “Green Jobs” that are growing:

President Obama’s campaign promises of millions of green jobs haven’t materialized. A draft report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Labor Department’s $500 billion program to train people for green jobs produced just 55 percent of its targeted job placements—and most of those jobs were not in the solar or biofuels industries. But while green employment withers, brown jobs are booming: according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the oil and gas industry has added more than 162,000 jobs since 2007, a 40 percent increase. That growth rate is much higher than that of the total private sector, which has grown just 1 percent over the same time period.

The benefits of these new oil and gas jobs—which include positions drilling the wells, extracting the oil and gas, and supporting drilling operations—extend well beyond the men and women working American shale fields, the Energy Information Administration reports. . . . The shale boom isn’t just providing American industry with cheap energy; it’s giving hundreds of thousands of Americans high-paying jobs and a path to recovery from the recent recession.

Good.