Environmentalists, Capitalists Should Broker Green New Deal

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising via San Francisco Chronicle.

July 4, 2014 - Most environmentalists see themselves on the left of the political spectrum, so what's the Left to do when leaders of finance capital take leading roles in confronting climate change?

That development blossomed into public view last month with a coordinated offensive led by Hank Paulson, the Republican architect of the 2008 Wall Street bailout, and two billionaires, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was a leading opponent of Occupy Wall Street, and Bay Area liberal Democrat Tom Steyer, to try to influence the national dialogue. Paulson initiated the effort with a June 21 manifesto in the New York Times urging a tax on carbon.

At the same time, Bloomberg released an economic report declaring that zero-emission energy sources, led by solar, will make up more than half the world's power mix by 2030. Bloomberg already has given the Sierra Club $50 million for its campaign to shut down Big Coal. The independent Steyer is one of the biggest funders of environmentalist political campaigns, and may one day be a candidate himself.

California's groundbreaking climate-change policies, including its cap-and-trade program, are based on the assumption that "when faced with the certainty of reasonable policy, businesses innovate and successfully cut pollution with consumer-oriented solutions that drive their markets forward and continue economic growth." California's tailpipe emissions standards, for example, overcame Detroit's resistance and led to a doubling of automobile efficiency measures in recent decades.

As more finance capitalists go green, the trend will be problematic for those with an anticapitalist or socialist agenda. They blame capitalism for the unfettered exploitation of the Earth's resources and life-supporting ecosystem. History shows that fundamental critique to be on the mark, though it can be dogmatic in its assumptions.

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North Carolina GOP Leads Attack on Wind Power and Other Renewable Energies

Wind turbines going up in North Carolina mountains

Editorial, NewsObserver.com /NC

April 12, 2014 - Duke Energy’s troubles with coal ash illustrate the hazards of burning fossil fuels and disposing of the byproducts. But another hazard lies in efforts to snuff out a trend that’s decreasing North Carolina’s dependence on fossil fuels: the state’s rising production of renewable energy.

That trend has been fed by a state law requiring utilities – which now effectively means Duke Energy – to get a portion of their electric power from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and livestock waste methane. The Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards law (commonly known as Senate Bill 3) requires that renewable energy sources account for 3 percent of a utility’s sales this year with the standards rising to 12.5 percent of total retail sales by 2021.

The requirement creates a market for renewable energy sources and has accounted for a boom in the solar energy industry in North Carolina. But building one market takes from another, and the fossil fuel industry is mounting an effort to reduce or repeal the standards.

In North Carolina, that effort has been led by state Rep. Mike Hager of Rutherford, a former Duke Energy employee and the Republican majority whip. His push is supported by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which is backing similar rollback legislation around the nation, and Americans For Prosperity, the super PAC funded by the Koch brothers, who operate oil refineries and own some 4,000 miles of oil pipelines.

Hager opposes the requirement that utilities purchase power from renewable sources on the grounds that it’s a subsidy. But as the renewable energy industry grows, it requires less support. And to keep it growing, investors must be assured that there will be a stable market.

Hager’s attempts to limit or repeal the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards were defeated last session. He won’t be taking aim at renewable standards when the next session opens in May. “There are other more pressing issues that are more important to the economy,” he says.

Many conservatives oppose renewable energy standards because they think they inflate the cost of energy. Hager says he’s open to including renewable energy in the state’s energy plans if the alternative sources can contribute to savings. “I’m not anti-renewable,” he says. “The vision is to reduce utility costs in North Carolina.”

R. Bruce Thompson, of the Raleigh law firm Parker Poe, is representing the American Wind Energy Association and monitoring threats to the renewable energy standards. “The thing that worries us is when you see groups like Americans For Prosperity continue to hammer (on the law),” he says.

In 2007 North Carolina became the first state in the the Southeast to adopt renewable energy standards. The law has produced positive results not only in cleaner, safer energy, but also in generating jobs and tax revenue. The Research Triangle Institute estimates that North Carolina’s clean energy and energy-efficiency programs spurred $1.4 billion in project investment statewide between 2007 and 2012.

The state’s solar energy industry is the most dramatic example of renewable energy’s growth. North Carolina was second in the nation behind California for solar-power capacity added in 2013. But wind energy may be the best example of how the law is diversifying energy production and stimulating North Carolina’s economy by tapping a limitless resource.

The wind power on the state’s coast is considered one of the best “wind resources” in the East. It is attracting investment to the economically depressed counties of northeastern North Carolina and some mountain counties. The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy says proposed wind farms represent more than $1 billion in investment in North Carolina. In some counties, wind farms are already the largest taxpayers.

As advances in technology drive down the cost of wind power, it could expand here rapidly as it has in other states. In nine states, wind power meets more than 12 percent of the energy needs. The further growth of renewable energy here requires that the legislature stay the course. Lawmakers should stand behind the renewable energy standards that are producing alternatives to the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/04/12/3776836/nc-must-continue-its-support-for.html#storylink=cpy

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Climate Change Speech: Obama’s Lincoln Moment?

By Ted Glick

Progressive America Rising via Grist.org

“Those of us in positions of responsibility will need to be less concerned with the judgment of special interests and well-connected donors, and more concerned with the judgment of our children.”         Barack Obama, June 29 national radio address

I’ll admit it—I was moved several times as I watched and listened to President Barack Obama’s major speech on the climate crisis on June 25^th. As much as I have been angered so many times over the last 4 ½ years since he came into office by the weakness of many of his actions and his pretty-close-to public silence on climate, it is no small thing that the U.S. President, an essential actor if we’re to have any chance of avoiding worldwide, catastrophic climate change, has clearly turned a corner and come out rhetorically strong.

To have Obama speaking for 50 minutes on the subject—to hear him put forward a solid analysis of why this is such a critical issue—to hear him go aggressively after the climate deniers (“we don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society”)—and to hear him say, unexpectedly, about the Keystone XL pipeline that it should be built “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution,” which of course it does, big time—to hear all of this was a very big deal.

What about his specific plans? A number of them are important, without a doubt: directing EPA to come up with a regulatory regime to reduce CO2 from all, both new and existing, power plants; active government support for the spread of renewable energy; a strengthening of energy efficiency; support to communities in their efforts to adapt to a changing climate; advocating, again, a phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies; an end, or close to it, of government funding of overseas coal plants; and more.

But here’s the thing, the very big “but” about Obama’s speech: it was the speech of an incrementalist on climate. His plans are not even close to what is needed. A goal of a 17% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2005 by 2020 is weak, very problematic. And the most problematic of all: in his speech Obama projected as the #1 thing we should be doing to reduce emissions the “strengthen[ing] of our position as the top natural gas producer” in the world. He did this even though in his plan of action he identifies the reduction of methane leakage into the atmosphere as one of his objectives. About 90% of natural gas is methane, and there’s a huge problem of leakage all throughout the lifecycle of gas, especially fracked gas. Talk about a contradiction!

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Global Capital Looking to ‘Global Green New Deal’ for Climate and Other Bailouts

Editors Note: The key phrase below is ‘potential backers of low-carbon projects.’ From the left, there is no reason these can’t be public ownership projects or worker-owned coops—but it will take a fight.

Davos Call for $14 Trillion 'Greening' of Global Economy

Political and business leaders warned of need to ensure sustainable growth

By Tom Bawden
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Independent - UK

Jan 22 2013 - An unprecedented $14trn (£8.8trn) greening of the global economy is the only way to ensure long-term sustainable growth, according to a stark warning delivered to political and business leaders as they descended on the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday.

Only a sustained and dramatic shift to infrastructure and industrial practices using low-carbon technology can save the world and its economy from devastating global warming, according to a Davos-commissioned alliance led by the former Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, in the most dramatic call so far to fight climate change on business grounds.

This includes everything from power generation, transport, and buildings to industry, forestry, water and agriculture, according to the Green Growth Action Alliance, created at last year's Davos meeting in Mexico.

The extra spending amounts to roughly $700bn a year until 2030 and would provide a much-needed economic stimulus as well as reduce the costs associated with global warming further down the line, said Mr Calderon, who leads the alliance.

It is better to try to pre-empt events like Hurricane Sandy, which cost $50bn, by keeping a lid on global warming, concluded the report, researched by the Accenture consultancy.

Mr Calderon, whose six-year term as Mexican President ended in November, said: "It is clear that we are facing a climate crisis with potentially devastating impacts on the global economy.

"Greening global economic growth is the only way to satisfy the needs of today's population and up to 9 billion people by 2050, driving development and wellbeing while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing natural resource productivity."

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Don’t Throw Wind Power Off Fiscal Cliff: Iowa Blue-Green Advocates

By Rod Boshart
Progressive America Rising via Iowa Farmer Today

Dec 9, 2012 -DES MOINES — With Congress facing an approaching deadline to extend a production tax credit critical to wind energy’s future, an Iowa-based environmental group issued a report Nov. 28  extolling the pollution-fighting, health and water conservation benefits of the state’s major source of renewable energy.

According to Environmental Iowa — a statewide, citizen-based advocacy group — Iowa’s current power generation from wind energy has had the equivalent “avoidance” benefit of displacing as much pollution as taking 1,187,000 cars off the road each year and has saved enough water not used to cool fossil-fuel production facilities to meet the needs of 98,100 Iowans.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 28 Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, joined Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., and about 40 veterans who have found post-military careers in the wind energy industry to push for renewing the wind-production tax credit.

Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, also sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner asking him to “give weight” to the Operation Free veterans’ effort to extend a tax credit that helps secure made-in-America energy and the jobs it creates.

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‘Fracking’: Myth Meets Realties

 

A natural gas rig side by side with homes in Washington County, PA | B. Mark Schmerling

Fractured Lives

Detritus of Pennsylvania's Shale Gas Boom

By Edward Humes

Progressive America Rising via Sierra Club

The supple hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, once known for their grassy woodlands, red barns, and one-stoplight villages, bristle with new landmarks these days: drilling rigs, dark green condensate tanks, fields of iron conduits lumped with hissing valves, and long, flat rectangles carved into hilltops like overgrown swimming pools, brimming with umber wastewater.

Tall metal methane flaring stacks periodically fill the night with fiery glares and jet engine roars. Roadbeds of crushed rock, guarded by No Trespassing signs, lie like fresh sutures across hayfields, deer trails, and backyards, admitting fleets of tanker trucks to the wellheads of America's latest energy revolution.

 
This is the new face of Washington County, the leading edge of the nation's breakneck shale gas boom. Natural gas boosters, President Barack Obama among them, have lauded it as a must-have, 100-year supply of clean, cheap energy that we cannot afford to pass up. However, recent data suggest that supplies of shale gas may last for only 11 years and that the extreme measures needed to recover it may make it a dirtier fuel than coal. But that hasn't slowed the dramatic transformation of gas-rich regions from rural Pennsylvania to urban Fort Worth, Texas.

Driving this juggernaut is the amalgam of industrial technologies collectively known as "hydraulic fracturing," or "fracking," which releases the gases (the main component of which is methane) hidden deep within layers of ancient, splintery shale. With five major shale "plays" concentrated in eight states, and more under development, America has been transformed from a net importer of natural gas into a potential exporter.

Perched atop the 7,000-foot-deep Marcellus Shale formation, which undergirds most of Appalachia, Washington County not only boasts enormous reserves of methane but also leads the state in producing far more frack-worthy "wet gas" products: propane, butane, ethane, and other valuable chemicals that can mean the difference between a money pit and a money gusher. Although central Pennsylvania has more wells, this wet gas makes Washington County, in industry parlance, a "honeypot."

The lure of million-dollar payouts has led many farmers, homeowners, school boards, and town commissions to lease out their subterranean energy wealth. Royalty payments on leases so far have topped half a billion dollars statewide--money that, for some, is literally saving the farm.

"An unprecedented economic impact," Matt Pitzarella has called it. He's spokesman for the leading driller in this part of the state, Texas-based Range Resources, which in 2004 fracked the first successful Marcellus Shale wells--at the time a shot in the dark and now believed to be tapping the second-largest natural gas field in the world. Pitzarella ticks off stories of poor families who hit the gas-lease lottery and are now able to afford college tuition, new cars, and home makeovers.

But unlocking half-billion-year-old hydrocarbon deposits carries a price, and not everyone shares in the bonanza. For every new shale well, 4 million to 8 million gallons of water, laced with potentially poisonous chemicals, are pumped into the ground under explosive pressure--a violent geological assault. And once unleashed, the gas requires a vast industrial architecture to be processed and moved from the wells to the world. Imagine the pipes, compressors, ponds, pits, refineries, and meters each shale well in Pennsylvania demands, planted next to horse farms, cornfields, houses, and schools. Then multiply by 5,000.

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Time to Get Serious About Full Employment

Yes, We Need a Jobs Program, But One

That Doesn't Tinker Around the Edges

 

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On

Our regional daily newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to its credit, came out with an editorial today, Aug. 22, 2011, urging President Obama to push for a substantial jobs program over Republican opposition.

"Action on jobs: Obama must push hard to get people back to work" is the headline, and a key point stresses "Mr. Obama now needs to offer proposals equal to the size of the problem. That means bold strokes, not half-measures. If his Republican antagonists in Congress are determined to stand in the way of getting Americans back to work, the president must say so publicly -- and then go over their heads to enlist the nation in his effort."

Terrific, a good framing of the question. Unfortunately, however, once you get into the substance of the piece, it turns into a muddle. The Post-Gazette offers up a hodgepodge of proposals that tinker around the edges of the problem-more tax cuts and credits for jobs created, more unemployment benefits, and oddly, more trade deals, even though these deals mostly result in net job losses.

Here's the heart of the matter. In a down economy, jobs are created by increasing demand, by more customers with bigger orders coming to a firm's doors. The problem is that consumer demand has taken a nose dive when the credit bubble burst. People don't have money to spend. They're cutting back on everything, and trying to unload their debt. This means business-to-business orders shrink as well. Companies may be cash-rich and have high profits, but with no increase in orders or customers at their door, they aren't likely to hire people to do nothing just to get a tax credit.

This is where government has to become the key customer. It has to make huge productive purchases for local work and local materials to build productive infrastructure-county-owned green energy plants, new and improved schools, modernized locks and dams, Medicare for all, investment in young students and veterans like we did with the GI Bill, investment in research in new industries, and so on.

Most important, to work well, it can't be nickel-and-dimed to death. It has to be on the scale of the expenditures for World War 2. That's when the 'multiplier effect' can kick in, and related growth in manufacturing can take off in turn. And it has to be paid for by going to where the most appropriate money is, imposing a financial transaction tax on unproductive and destabilizing speculation by Wall Street.

The best the P-G does on this matter is to support Obama's proposal for an 'Infrastructure Bank,' but urges him to find a way to bypass a GOP roadblock in Congress.

But even that is too passive. It says, in effect, here's a small pot of money. If you want to repair some roads, come and get some.

What we really need is something like the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority and Works Progress Administration, but on steroids, a TVA-WPA-CCC 2.0. We need to pass John Conyer's HR 870 Full employment Bill. We need the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of Labor to go to every county in the country with a fully funded proposal to build new green energy wind farms and solar power arrays as public energy utilities, hiring local workers at union scale, with no obstacles to a union election. And that's just for starters.

Yes, we need a serious jobs program. But it's time for everyone who utters that phrase to get serious themselves. Why? Because it's going to take a massive upsurge in class struggle to get it by removing those standing in the way.

[Carl Davidson is a Steelworker Associate and a retired computer technician living in Beaver County.  His 'Keep On Keepin' On' column appears in Beaver County Blue, website of the 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America.]

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The Clean and Green Jobs Solution

North Carolina Sees New Jobs,

Rapid Growth in Renewable Energy 

 

By Stirling Little 
 Progressive America Rising via The Daily Tar Heel 

Renewable energy has emerged as a growing industry in the state, according to a recent report by the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association.

The report identified more than 1,800 renewable energy projects in the state this year.

About 1,100 firms were involved with renewable energy activities in 2010, according to the association.

Erik Lensch, president of Argand Energy Solutions, a solar energy company based in Charlotte, said his company has been a part of the industry’s recent expansion.

“We have doubled (in size) every year since 2008,” he said. “We just kicked off a $3 million project this week, our largest ever.”

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Solar: Before It’s Too Late

Michael Lind's Clueless and Fossilized

Thinking on Coal, Oil and Natural Gas

(A Critique of Michael Lind’s Salon Article, ‘Everything

you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong’)

By David Schwartzman

Progressive America Rising

It’s the other way around. Nearly everything we hear from Lind in this Salon piece (May 31, 2011)  is wrong, except for his argument that huge potential reserves of fossil fuel will likely prove peak oil boosters being big exaggerators. The latter news may not be wrong, but it is hardly comforting.

More importantly, Lind’s uninformed dismissal of solar power as a real alternative is typical misinformation that we can expect from the fossil fuel/nuclear lobbies. And his misplaced optimism regarding the unlikelihood of catastrophic climate change (C3) from rising levels of greenhouse gas is still another unsubstantiated claim. We’re used to hearing this from scientifically illiterate global warming deniers. Why Lind chooses to join them is a puzzle.

Whenever peak fossil fuel usage occurs--either from the exhaustion of reserves or replacement by alternatives--the Age of Fossil Fuels will soon be over. Human civilization and existing biodiversity will simply not sustain ever rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane. We have precious little time, if any at all, to radically reduce carbon emissions and replace fossil fuel energy with solar.  This is fundamentally why Lind's born again fossil fuel enthusiasm is so misplaced. If he has the facts and science to claim otherwise, he should produce it. As a scientist involved in this field, I don’t think he can.

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Conservatism's Gulf Blindspot: When Markets Fail, Blame Obama

Conservatism's Death Gusher

By George Lakoff

Huffington Post, July 16 2010

The issue is death -- death gushing at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish, oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to the fishing industry, tourism, jobs; and death to a way of life based on the beauty and bounty of the Gulf.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the Gulf residents affected are conservatives, strong right-wing Republicans, following extremist Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour. What those conservatives are not saying, and may be incapable of seeing, is that conservatism itself is largely responsible for what happened, and that conservatism is a continuing disaster for conservatives who live along the Gulf. Conservatism is an ideology of death.

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Just What Is a 'Green Job' Anyway?

Green Jobs:
More Than
You Think

By Christopher Weber
In These Times
March 25, 2009 - Until recently, most people had never heard of "green-collar jobs." Yet the phrase is suddenly on policymakers' tongues.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has spoken out for such jobs. So has Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). Last year, incoming Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis introduced a green-collar bill in the House. Even Republican Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has noted, "the development of green jobs will be one of the biggest changes in our economy since the industrial revolution."

For his part, President Obama has made green-collar jobs a major part of his approach to the economic crisis. On Dec. 6, he said, "We will create millions of jobs by making the single-largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s."

But will these jobs be as plentiful -- and as worker-friendly -- as the new administration and environmentalists would have us believe? And can green businesses really create opportunities for workers given the current economic crisis?

An Economic Shift

Green-collar jobs are already a growing part of the U.S. economy. As demand has risen for clean energy and environmentally responsible manufacturing, workers are turning out everything from hybrid cars to organic cotton underwear.

In most scenarios, a green-collar worker is one who translates new environmental technologies for consumers, designing and manufacturing goods that use fewer materials and less energy than those of just a few years ago. Environmental groups from the Sierra Club to the League of Conservation Voters say these jobs are a victory for the environment and for workers.

"This is a great time for us to ramp up the level of investment in clean energy," says Pete Altman, climate campaign director for the National Resources Defense Council. "Significantly more people can be employed in energy-efficiency retrofits and building wind and solar plants per dollar invested than just buying natural gas or oil or coal."

One of the grandest election promises -- aside from liberating the nation from foreign oil -- was to create a sizeable pool of new jobs. On the campaign trail, Obama offered a plan to create 5 million green-collar jobs over 10 years. He promised to support this initiative with $150 billion from the federal coffers.

During his Dec. 6 address, Obama condensed the proposed timeframe for this green investment to two years. He outlined green jobs and infrastructure improvements as part of his much larger economic stimulus plan intended to jolt the anemic U.S. economy. Up to $100 billion would go to upgrading the nation's infrastructure, with schools, hospitals and communication systems targeted for "green" improvements.

At the same time, more radical visions for the green economy are gaining support. Two progressive think tanks, the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Apollo Alliance, have argued for "green recovery" plans -- economic roadmaps that emphasize the key role of green jobs.

CAP commissioned a study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Unveiled in September, "Green Recovery: A Plan to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy" urges investment in retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency; expanding public transit and freight rail; building a cutting-edge electrical grid; and developing wind, solar and biofuel energy. It also notes:

Public and private investment in energy efficiency reduces energy demand and lowers energy costs. … Lowering energy costs for educational buildings eventually means more funds for teachers, books and scholarships. Retrofitting hospitals over time releases money for better patient care.

These improvements will lead to the creation of 2 million jobs in two years, according to the study's authors, Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz and Helen Scharber. About half of the jobs would be in construction and manufacturing. The rest would come as suppliers, retail and other industries ramp up behind this growth. All told, the authors estimate that their approach would cost taxpayers about $100 billon over two years.

Several unions, including the AFL-CIO, support an aggressive stimulus like the one proposed by the study.

"I think everybody in the labor movement recognizes that we have to make this economy more sustainable as well as more just," says Ron Blackwell, AFL-CIO chief economist. "The particular challenge is to make the transition to a greener economy in a way that does not impose disproportionate costs on working families."

Blackwell points out that the $150 billion Obama has committed to a green economy is only a first step. Still, he says the precedent is encouraging him: "We need to shift from an economy driven by asset inflation -- equities in the 1990s and housing since 2000 -- to more sustainable, public-led growth to restore the competitiveness of our national economy."

Cleaner, Greener Labor

Labor unions and their workers could benefit by organizing this emerging green workforce.

"A lot of industries that stand to grow and prosper in a green economy are ones that you might not expect," says David Foster, longtime regional director for the United Steelworkers. "A lot of people think of steel as a dirty, un-environmentally friendly industry, but the average wind turbine shaft contains 300 cubic tons of steel."

Foster currently serves as the executive director for the Blue-Green Alliance, a labor-environmental partnership that wants to see quality jobs emerge from green investment. The alliance began with a 2006 pact between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club. In October, the Communications Workers of America joined the alliance, as did the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

"We've been building partnerships between environmental groups and organizations, especially labor, because we have a lot in common," explains the NRDC's Altman. "Some of the toughest problems that we face in the United States can be answered by investing in and building our economy around clean energy sources. That creates the environmental benefits we need to keep our world healthy and clean. These are also energy sources that put more people to work by creating more good-paying jobs than traditional energy sources."

The emphasis on emerging technologies might make it seem that workers trained in the old "brown" economy are in trouble. But that's far from true.

"Virtually all the jobs that will be generated by green investments will be for people doing the kind of work they are already doing," says Robert Pollin, a University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor of economics and lead author of "Green Recovery." "In my view, there is no such thing as ‘green skills' as distinct from the skills most workers already have."

Unions aren't championing green-collar jobs solely out of labor concerns. Foster says they're also moved by environmental values.

Six years after the Steelworkers was founded, it helped launch investigations into the 1948 "Killer Fog" disaster in Donora, Pa., in which toxic fumes from several steel mills became trapped over the town, killing 20 people. By 1955, these investigations led to the passage of the state's Clean Air Act, the first of its kind in the nation.

"Steelworkers have drawn close connections between pollution in the workplace and pollution generally," says Foster.

Where Are the Jobs for Women?

A growing chorus of feminist writers and economists are asking about women's place -- or lack of one -- in the green economy. In a Dec. 9 New York Times op-ed, Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work: A Call to Arms for Women of the World, wrote that most green-collar job proposals, including Obama's, focus too heavily on construction and engineering trades dominated by men.

"It is possible that you could, without employing a single female, build your way out of this economic crisis if you spent a humongous amount of money on really energy-efficient things like railroads," Hirshman says. "But by concentrating so hard on this macho attitude toward environmental pollution, you would miss an opportunity to solve two problems at once" -- that is, global warming and gender inequality.

Hirshman points out that Obama, in his December address, compared his building program to President Eisenhower's 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act, a parallel that she says dismays her. "I think Barack Obama and his staff have been watching too many episodes of ‘Bob the Builder,' with their determination to build roads and bridges," she says. "Roads and bridges are what got us into this climate pickle in the first place."

Hirshman says innovative ways exist for women to enter the green-collar workforce in large numbers. "Nine percent of the construction workers in the United States are female, a very tiny number. If you exclude the secretaries, it's 3 percent." An affirmative action program for all federally funded construction projects could dramatically boost this number, she says.

Women workers could also spearhead efforts to retrofit the nation's buildings, Hirshman argues. Given the experience of many women as teachers and communicators, they are ideally suited, she says, to serve as "green counselors," working with homeowners and landlords to weatherize homes for greater energy efficiency. "You wouldn't have to have apprenticeship in the construction trades or a degree in engineering or any of the things that are current barriers to women."

Ensuring "Green-Collar" Jobs Are Good Jobs



Greg Norton, a retired union steelworker in Dundee, Ill., says he worries about "the long-term prospect of keeping [green] jobs in the United States. The same forces in the marketplace that have managed to destabilize the housing industry can just as easily export any new ‘green' manufacturing jobs to wherever they find most profitable for themselves."

Others like Laura Owen, a labor economist at DePaul University, find hope in the promised federal investment. "The question I would ask is whether the technological knowledge for outsourcing green technology exists in all other countries," she says. "Encouraging production on a larger scale through government assistance can help reduce costs and give the new firms advantages over future competitors."

However, current trade agreements pose a significant barrier to any federal invesment in green jobs. According to consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, a stimulus package that provides funds, tax breaks or loan guarantees to green businesses could run askew of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules banning such subsidies.

Thus, trade reform is critical to building the green economy. Obama has indicated he wants trade rules renegotiated in favor of green businesses. He wrote to the Oregon Fair Trade Coalition last May, "I will take all the necessary and appropriate steps to ensure that policies designed to reduce global warming pollution are not constrained by trade agreements."

What those "appropriate steps" entail remains to be seen, but the United States will have to incorporate environmental standards to a much greater degree than the WTO does. Under current law, corporations can elude emission standards by setting up their dirtier operations overseas -- nullifying green jobs in the process. To address this problem, in December 2007, Obama pledged to the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign to have "binding environmental standards" added to trade agreements, "so that companies from one country cannot gain an economic advantage by destroying the environment."

As for wages, the best way to ensure that all green-collar positions pay a living wage, according to Pollin, is to push for a low unemployment rate of 4 percent or less. "Historically, those circumstances have forced wage increases and better conditions for low-wage workers," he says. "Beyond that, we need the traditional institutions -- decent minimum wages and union bargaining power -- to make sure the employment expansion generates decent jobs, not poverty-level jobs."

Van Jones, founder and president of the advocacy group Green for All, argues that the new economy must address social and economic injustices. In his book, The Green-Collar Economy, Jones writes that green jobs can uplift marginalized workers:

The green economy should not just be about reclaiming thrown-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. … Formerly incarcerated people deserve a second shot at life -- and all obstacles to their being able to find that second chance in the green sector should be removed. Also, our urban youth deserve the opportunity to be part of something promising. Across this nation, let's honor the cry of youth in Oakland, Calif., for "green jobs, not jails."

Activists and local politicians are now building training programs so that low-income workers, people of color and immigrants can access green-collar jobs.

In New York, Sustainable South Bronx runs a program that teaches participants how to install green roofs, clean toxic spills and restore rivers. Of the 128 low-income workers who have completed the program, 85 percent currently have jobs. In California, Women's Action to Gain Economic Security has helped low-income immigrant women build four successful green housecleaning cooperatives that employ hundreds. And in Chicago, Growing Home has trained 100 formerly incarcerated, homeless or addicted individuals in organic farming. Sixty-five program graduates are now employed, and 90 have found permanent housing.

In 2008, similar training programs opened in Los Angeles, Newark and Oakland. Obama has also pledged to expand federal job-training programs to include green skills.

But for all its promise, the green economy offers no guarantees of justice for workers. Campaigns to raise wages, to improve benefits and to unify labor will remain as important in the green future as they are in the present.

© 2009 In These Times All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132139/

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Obama: Think Windmills on Coal River Mountain

Photo: West Virginia Wind Turbines

New Energy
West Virginia
Can Believe In

By Jeff Biggers
Huffington Post

July 9, 2008 - If Senator Barack Obama ever needs a living symbol of change we can believe in, and a hopeful way to transcend the dirty politics of our failed energy policies, he should go and see the future of renewable energy in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia.

Yes, renewable energy in Appalachia.

Something historic is taking place in West Virginia this summer. Faced with an impending proposal to stripmine over 6,600 acres -- nearly 10 square miles -- in the Coal River Valley, including one of the last great mountains in that range, an extraordinary movement of local residents and coal mining families have come up with a counter proposal for an even more effective wind farm.


Mother Jones, the miners' angel, once declared: "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living."

Having witnessed the destruction of over 470 mountains and their adjacent communities in Appalachia, the Coal River Valley citizens are doing just that. On the frontlines of one of the most tragic environmental and human rights scandals in modern American history, the community-wide Coal River wind advocates have devised a blueprint to get beyond the divisive regional politics and break the stranglehold of King Coal on the central Appalachian economies.

The Coal River Wind Project is the first bottom-up community-based full scale assessment to directly counter the nightmare of mountaintop removal with a renewable energy and economy alternative prior to the actual mining.

We have a choice. It is not simply coal or no coal. Jobs or no jobs. The issue is how do we create jobs and clean energy forever, and begin the transition in Appalachia and America away from dirty coal.

And Barack Obama, and all Americans, have a chance to be part of Coal River Valley's landmark decision for our nation's dependence on renewable or nonrenewable energy sources. Either we continue to hand out permits for mountaintop removal (two permits in this area have already been granted), unleashing millions of tons of explosives, blasting local communities to Kingdom Come, provide less than 200 jobs for 14 years of coal mining, contributing the dirty coal firepower for continued carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, or, we can stake out a third way in renewable energy and economic development.

Consider this: The Coal River Mountain Wind Project would:

-- Create 200 local employment opportunities during construction, and 50 permanent jobs during the life of the wind farm. It takes only 35 years for a wind farm to provide a greater number of one-year jobs than the proposed four surface mines combined.

-- Provide 440MW or enough energy for 150,000 homes -- indefinitely, as well as a sustained tax income that could be used for the construction of new schools for the county.

-- Allow for concurrent uses of the mountain, including harvesting of wild ginseng and valuable forest plants, sustainable forestry, and mountain tourism, as Coal River Mountain is one of West Virginia's finest mountains.

-- Preserve the historic Coal River Mountain heritage, and protect the land and communities from blasting, dusting, poisonous drinking water, increased flooding, damaged homes and personal property, and devastated wildlife habitat.

In 1892, in Barack Obama's adopted city, the Chicago Tribune wrote in an editorial: "How long can the earth sustain life," if we depend on the "wonderful power of coal?" The Tribune editors lambasted Americans for our lack of vision and our lack of energy conservation, and our need to "invent appliances to exhaust with over greater rapidity the hoard of coal." They declared:

"Doubtless the end of the coal, at least as an article of a mighty commerce, will arrive within a period brief in comparison with the ages of human existence. In the history of humanity, from first to last, the few centuries through which we are now passing will stand out prominently as the coal-burning period."

The Tribune editors in 1892 assumed Americans would move beyond coal and onto renewable energy sources.

We may be a hundred years late, but the realities of global warming and climate change, and the brutal process of extracting coal, should remind us that it is not too late for Barack Obama and the rest of the nation to be a part of this exciting new energy future for Appalachia, and the entire country.

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The Mission: Energy, Health, and No War

Photo: Montana Rally with Crow Tribe

Obama
Talks to
Montana

By Mike Dennison
The Montana Standard

July 5, 2008 - For his first task as president, Barack Obama said Friday he’ll call in the nation’s top military officials and "tell them we have a new mission": End the war in Iraq.

Next on the list is reforming the nation’s health-care system, so everyone in the nation has basic health care and costs are reduced for families and businesses.

And, third, craft a new energy policy that "requires a shift away from the sort of wasteful energy usage of the past, and to develop alternative fuels like solar, wind and biodiesel," Obama said in an interview on his campaign bus near the Montana Tech campus.



Obama, 46, a U.S. senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, spent the day in Butte, taking in a Fourth of July parade and attending a picnic with hundreds of well-wishers and supporters. But he also took time to chat with local reporters, both on his bus and on the grounds of the World Museum of Mining, standing before a small grove of aspen trees that wavered in the breeze preceding an afternoon thunderstorm.

Obama said he has a good chance of winning in Montana because people are struggling here and will respond to his message of change and reform, to stop the war in Iraq, to reduce the weight of energy prices and ensure access to public lands. Obama has been polling strongly in several Western states where Democrats traditionally lose in presidential elections, Montana included.

Yet Republicans have signaled they certainly won’t be rolling over in these states, and will go after Obama on at least one issue dear to the hearts of many Montanans: Gun ownership. Earlier this week, the Montana Republican Party called on Obama to "clarify his muddled record on the 2nd Amendment," saying Obama has a record of supporting restrictions on gun ownership. Obama said Friday he believes in "common-sense gun laws" allow law-abiding citizens to purchase and own firearms, including items such as background checks when buying guns.

"There is not a sportsman or hunter in Montana who is a legal possessor of firearms that has anything to worry about from me," he said.

Regarding the war in Iraq, Obama repeated his call for bringing home U.S. troops in a "careful and deliberate fashion," consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On health care, he said he wants a system that regulates insurers more stiffly and helps people who can’t afford health insurance acquire it.

But he’s not in favor of a national, single-payer system like Canada or other countries, that offer the same care for all, usually financed by taxes. "The problem is, we’ve got a legacy of employer-based health care," he said. "People are accustomed to those sorts of arrangements and they’re fearful about what they might have to give up in a transition to a different system."

Obama said his plan works within the system we have now, offering "alternatives" to families who can’t get insurance now and finding ways to lower premiums for all. "And we’ve got to emphasize prevention, which is the most important thing we’ve got to do long-term," he added.

Obama also said his broad base of donors make him the candidate who can stand up to well-heeled special interests who have been controlling policy in the country. The Obama campaign doesn’t accept money from political action committees or from people who are federal registered lobbyists. However, it has accepted tens of millions of dollars from big individual donors connected with insurance, Wall Street investment houses, hedge funds, banks and pharmaceutical companies.

"When we have 1.7 million donors, there is no donor that we’re dependent on, there is no industry that we’re dependent on," he said. "I can say ‘no’ to anybody because I’ve got a broad base of support. "I’ve been able to show independence not only in the past, but will be able to show independence as president."

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Battleground Report - Energy in Nevada

Obama Urges
Green Energy,
Green Jobs

By Molly Ball
Las Vegas Review-Journal

Under the bleach-bright Las Vegas summer sun, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Tuesday checked out the solar panels that shade cars in the parking lot of the Springs Preserve while powering the facility.

"What we are seeing here ... is that the green, renewable energy economy is not some far-off, pie-in-the-sky future," Obama said in a speech at the local nature attraction. "It is now. It's creating jobs now. It is providing cheap alternatives to $140-a-barrel oil now. And it can create millions of additional jobs, entire industries, if we act now."

The Illinois senator said he wouldn't rule out expanding nuclear power, but he would first require an acceptable way of dealing with the radioactive waste that results.



Obama opposes the proposed nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, and he used the local issue to slam McCain.

"He wants to build 45 new nuclear reactors when they don't have a plan to store the waste anywhere besides right here," he said.

The federal government, Obama said, should provide incentives for the development of wind, solar and other types of renewable energy.

"But Washington hasn't done that," he said. "What Washington has done is what Washington always does: peddled cheap gimmicks that get politicians through to the next election."

McCain has proposed a $300 million prize for development of battery technology for cars, an idea Obama ridiculed.

"When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn't put a bounty up for some rocket scientist to win," he said. "He put the full resources of the United States government behind the project and called on the ingenuity of the American people."

Obama was also critical of McCain's proposals for a summer holiday from the federal gasoline tax and allowing offshore oil drilling. He noted that McCain had admitted that drilling off America's coasts would have only a "psychological impact" in the immediate term.

"In case you were wondering, in Washington-speak, what that means is, 'It polls well,'" Obama said. "It's an example of how Washington tries to convince you that they've done something to make your life better when they really didn't."

Oil companies, he said, already have drilling rights to millions of acres of federal land, "and yet they haven't touched it," Obama said. "John McCain wants to give them more when they're not using what they already have."

The companies ought to pay a fine on drilling rights they're holding but not using, he said.

In the case of the gasoline -tax holiday, he said that when he supported such a measure in Illinois, oil companies simply pocketed the money to pad their profit margins rather than passing on the savings to consumers.

"These are not serious energy policies," Obama said. "I wish we could wave a magic wand and make gas prices go down, but we can't."

In the near term, Obama proposed a second round of stimulus checks to families and a tax cut for workers to help people deal with rising costs. To help pay for it, he called for a tax on oil companies' profits and closing the "Enron loophole" that allows speculators to drive up oil prices.

Over 10 years, Obama said he would devote $150 billion to alternative energy sources, which he said would create "up to five million new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced."

Republicans responded to Obama's attacks on their candidate by calling him "the Dr. No of energy policy."

Obama has put forward just one concrete proposal on energy, the stimulus checks combined with taxing oil profits, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said in a conference call with reporters. Meanwhile, he has opposed McCain's many proposals: the gas tax holiday, offshore drilling, more nuclear power and the $300 million prize.

"I am not sure he has done anything other than mirror the inaction of the Democrat majority in the Congress," Burr said.

McCain's economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, defended the concept of offshore drilling's "psychological impact." Futures markets, he said, would respond to the prospect of increased drilling capacity by lowering oil prices right away.

"If the United States makes a strong commitment to additional exploration ... that sends a strong signal to the traders in the market that future supplies will be greater," he said.

After his 14-minute speech, Obama took questions from the audience of about 50 energy workers and conservationists seated in the small conference room at the preserve, which was built to national green building standards of energy efficiency and with sustainable materials.

Local electrician Eddie Gering, 48, thanked Obama for opposing the gasoline-tax holiday, saying he felt the proposal insulted his intelligence as a voter. He wanted to know why nuclear power shouldn't be a bigger part of the nation's energy future.

"The problem that we've got with nuclear energy right now is that we have not figured out how to store the waste in a safe and effective manner," Obama said. "That's why Yucca is such a big issue here in Nevada. The basic theory was, we won't solve the problem, we'll just dump it all in Nevada."

He said he would increase investment in research and development to find a better way to store nuclear material.

"If we can figure that out, then nuclear has some big advantages, the fact that it doesn't produce greenhouse gases being the most important one," he said.

To another question, about government red tape preventing new energy projects from getting off the ground, Obama became philosophical.

"I'm a Democrat, and at times in the past Democrats have gotten so regulation-happy they lose sight of efficiency," he said. "Republicans attack us as wanting government for the sake of government. I want enough government to do what needs to be done, but I also want government to get out of the way where it's blocking progress. I want to streamline government so it's working. I want it to be consumer-friendly."

While he was in town, Obama met briefly with a local family to talk about how his tax plan would affect them, according to the campaign.

Later Tuesday in Los Angeles, Obama raised nearly $5 million at a celebrity-packed fundraiser that was the equivalent of the entertainment industry's coming-out party for the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

"He's my candidate, and I think you have to put your money where your mouth is," said actor Don Cheadle. Actor Dennis Quaid said Obama is "the Superman for everyone."

Obama's campaign refused to say how many millions he and the Democratic National Committee raised at the gala, but Democratic officials put the number at close to $5 million. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the numbers publicly.

Campaign officials severely limited media access to the event at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. No television cameras or photographers were allowed inside.

Obama, who is counting on Hollywood's reliable support for Democrats, appealed to the those in the crowd who might have supported his former foe, Hillary Clinton.

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com

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