Modeshift

NEW YORK — The three-day Clinton Global Initiative concluded with a flurry of new commitments including a five-year, $4 billion pledge by Pacific Gas & Electric and Ausra to build solar thermal generating stations that both companies says is cost-competitive with fossil fuel generation. California-based Ausra will build at least 1,000 megawatts of solar power plants and PG&E will purchase at least 1,000 megawatts of solar thermal, and the deal will eliminate over 36 million tons of CO2 emissions in California and neighboring states over the next 20 years. Other projects announced here were these:

• FourWinds Capital Management said it will invest $300 million to develop investment programs that focus on planting, harvesting, and processing of novel sources of bio-fuels using emerging technologies in tropical regions that offer significant environmental and social benefits in addition to alternative energy sources. The investment company also said it would develop a $1 billion global investment program to assist large cities and rural areas in improving their environmental infrastructure, with a particular focus on waste and water management systems.
• Geothermal Power Company of Iceland committed to spending $150 million to help countries in the African Rift Valley develop geothermal energy resources. The project will invest in comprehensive research into the geothermal potential of Djibouti, and if successful, will build a large power plant driven on geothermal power.
• Sea Studios Foundation, a Monterey-based documentary film production company, will produce a $16 million integrated media initiative to help audiences understand the connections between seemingly unrelated problems-and solutions-in global health, poverty, climate change, and the environment. Using television, the Internet, and new media, the studio’s “Strange Days on Planet Earth 2020″  series will include periodic primetime television events featuring Edward Norton; an interactive Web site hosted by PBS.org, an iTunes video Podcast series, ongoing “Search for Solutions” contests to foster user-generated content and showcase high-impact opportunities to make a difference, and live screening events involving the public, business leaders, opinion leaders, and policymakers.
• The Apollo Alliance, the City of Newark, and the Center for American Progress committed to organize Newark’s Green Future Summit in the Spring of 2008. The idea is to identify best practices and mobilize the resources to help Newark catch up with Chicago, Portland, Seattle, New York and other cities that are showcases for prosperity that emerges from developing a clean energy-efficient, green economic development strategy.

These and more than 200 other commitments announced this week were said by President Bill Clinton to touch “at least 100 million people worldwide.” The scope and numbers are stunning, even if half of what was announced here this week is actually executed. Mr. Clinton asserted that nearly 10 million children not in school around the world will enroll for the first time. Some 50 million people will gain access to treatment for neglected tropical diseases. Some 170 million acres of forest will be conserved and restored, an area equal in size to Italy and Switzerland combined. And 11 million adults, most of them women, will gain access to industries and durable jobs.

I wasn’t the only observer who found the proceedings disorienting. There really isn’t anything quite like this conference anywhere on the planet. The Aspen Ideas Festival convenes a similar array of prominent thinkers and voices. The World Economic Forum is much larger and, I’m told, more perceptive and far-reaching in its choice of subjects and how far it asks panelists to advance their thinking. The United Nations, which also convened in New York last week, attracts more global leaders. But none of these, nor any other international conference, does as well in attracting such diverse leaders, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu (see pix). And none is motivated so clearly by one person seeking to make the world a better place and successfully making the ask so that not $millions, not $billions, but that something close to $10 billion is committed by individuals, companies, governments, and foundations to execute an incredible array of worthy projects. More was done to help solve the global warming crisis in these three days than the United Nations or the United States has done in half a decade.

Several more big ideas of the 21st century are at work here. The first is that important industrial companies, particularly those in pharmaceuticals, energy, utlitities, and online media see the value of reducing human and global stress to improving their bottom lines. There’s money to be made in solving misery, not only in the development and delivery of new products, but also in fostering collaborations that help companies gain access to new global markets. The second big idea, one that is becoming Mr. Clinton’s signature in this phase of his life, is the value of what he calls “giving back.”  He frames this in the context of the difference between I wish and I will. There were a lot of willing people in New York last week. 

NEW YORK – Live television images from the various plenary and working sessions are everywhere at the Clinton Global Initiative. They appear on screens as big as king size bed sheets in the main conference hall. They illuminate flat screens that stand in the halls and smaller meeting rooms. A row of small screens decorate a refreshment area close to the lobby of the Sheraton New York.

This demonstration of televised ubiquity is just the leading edge of a communications strategy that also includes a well-designed and easily navigable Web site, live web casting of every panel discussion that also is archived and retrievable. There are five interior Wi-fi channels for conference participants and a small army of writers and videographers, most of whom represent online publications and networks, few of which – like treehugger.com — that you’ve ever heard of. 

It’s noticeable that the mainstream media is barely here. The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times did nice wrapups Friday morning. Forbes and Fortune are covering the conference on their Web sites. The New York Times, though, published just three Associated Press and Reuters pieces. The major papers are still useful as arbiters of importance, but as sources of information about the nuances and transitions and ideas explored here this week they played no role whatsoever. The reason: In the age of the Internet and muti-media, it’s not only essential for organizations to tell their own stories, but they now have the tools and skills to do it better than traditional news organizations, and they can reach huge audiences with their own media.

The Clinton Global Initiative, staged by Scott Givens, understands those lessons well. The initiative generates the sort of idea excitement that translates well on television. Invite interesting and knowledgeable people to talk about vital ideas. Carefully set lights and cameras at the right angles. Array the conference with various kinds of titans — movie stars (Jolie and Pitt), media stars (Martha Stewart), political and diplomatic stars (Tony Blair, Al Gore), business luminaries (Larry Page) and grassroots heros (Jane Goodall). Then turn the conference into an eight-hour-a -day talk show broadcast live on the Web.

The beauty of the Web is that all of that content can be archived and readily downloaded for those who didn’t watch in real time. Then producers supplement the video with digital photographs, blogs, and various other print formats — including a running compendium of commitments. The result is that the online visitor can see for themselves on YouTube, MSN, the CGI Website and elsewhere what happened and generate their own narrative. If they need help, they can search the dozens of blogs written here and brought to the fore by Google and Technorati. The combination of self-generated media, mainstream media, new media, all of it instantly available, provides the hundreds of thousands of online visitors who are paying attention this week a kind of instantaneous digital access to this very hopeful global event. Bill Clinton said this afternoon that MSN put the initiative events on its home and that YouTube’s archive of the initiative had generated 500,000 page views.

Also this afternoon, as if to emphasize the presence of new media here, Larry Page, the Google co-founder, shared the stage with Mr. Clinton and YouTube co-founder Steve Chen to talk about a new section YouTube is building to help non-profits raise money.  The company’s news release described the new project this way: “YouTube’s 2007/2008 Clinton Global Initiative commitment enables nonprofit organizations (in the U.S. those with 501c3 tax filing status) that register for the program to receive a free nonprofit specific YouTube channel where they can upload footage of their work, public service announcements, calls to action and more. The channel will also allow them to collect donations with no processing costs using the newly launched Google Checkout for Non-Profits. YouTube’s global platform enables nonprofits to deliver their message, showcase their impact and needs, and encourage supporters to take action.”

It’s important and representative of the current media age that this event, which is defined by news of opportunity and promise, is taken so seriously by the new media. The news conferences are dominated by bloggers and independent news organizations from around the world.

The transparent and unavoidable conclusion is that the 20th century American journalistic principles and values — if it bleeds it leads — don’t fit here. The BBC broadcast a half-hour talk show from here that featured Mr. Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg discussing the green economic development strategy that has revived the city’s economy. No American national news broadcaster devoted even a few minutes to the initiative’s ideas or personalities. 

The sort of transactions that occur at this conference — funders putting projects together with government and non-profits to do such things as educate women in Africa — are understood as vital to the world’s progress by the new media. They’re not, however, seen as news by enough conventional American news organizations. As a writer who contributes to both I worry. The old media’s frame needs to adjust to new conditions. The new media’s capacity to develop the revenue streams that enable its writers and producers to really dig in needs to improve. The unmistakable conclusion I draw is that with the complexity and confusion that abounds in helping the world understand itself, people just need solid facts and real stories. The world, in short, needs great media in whatever form it’s produced. 

NEW YORK – The X Prize Foundation, which developed a new philanthropic idea called “revolution through competition,” told participants today at the Clinton Global Initiative that it would commit $300 milion in the next  seven years to help solve global crises in each of the four CGI focus areas. The foundation said it is developing new prizes to increase access to renewable fuels, improve energy efficiency, and promote use of cleaner fuels. It also will have new competitive prizes to improve cancer detection and treatment, improving schools and curriculum, and stimulate market-based strategies to produce jobs in poor nations.

The announcement was among the stream of innovative ideas, fully funded, designed to respond to global problems that defy government’s abiity to solve. Other commitments described by Mr. Clinton today include the Sabin Global Health Institute’s $25 million commitment to treat neglected diseases, the Dell Foundation’s $25 million commitment to improve education in poor countries, and Intel’s $300 million five-year commitment to expand and improve its online curriculum to train teachers in developing countries.

The clear priority and focus this year is action to impede climate change, illustrated by multi-billion commitments made by big players. Yesterday Florida Power and Light announced a $2.4 billion energy efficiency and clean energy initiative that includes constructing a solar-powered electric plant. Today Standard Chartered Bank committed to spend the next five years underwriting $4 billion to $5 billion in debt for renewable energy projects with a total project value of $8 billion to $10 billion. The bank said it will target clean energy projects in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and focus its  efforts in areas such as wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, biomass and coal bed methane.

Duke Energy and a coalition of other utilities – Consolidated Edison, Edison International, Great Plains Energy, Pepco Holdings, PNM Resources, Sierra Pacific Resources and Xcel Energy – pledged to increase their collective investment in energy efficiency to serve 22 million customers in 20 states. The collaboration was valued at $3 billion over three years. Mr. Clinton said it will  lead to the elimination of 30 million tons of green house gas emissions per year-the equivalent of taking 6 million cars off the road. With the Edison Electric Institute, the companies also will establish the Institute for Electric Efficiency, enabling them to share and promote best practices in energy efficiency.

I’ve attended a lot of conferences over the years, and elements of this one mimic those. Panels of leading figures in industry, academia, business, and the non-profit communities regularly convene in panel discussions that occasionally divulge some interesting tidbit that you’ve never heard of seen before. Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee greeting yesterday was priceless. 

But I’ve never been to a conference devoted so thoroughly to making things happen, and so much money committed to supporting change that will make a difference. The competition for ideas and attention here is fierce, and the players, particularly the industrial executives, are unexpected. Many of these same suits — Wal-Mart chief executive Lee Scott, for instance, devoted all of the previous years of their careers leveraging the status quo to make billions and contribute mightily to the global environmental crises they seek to solve today. Many of these same people voted for George Bush, no friend to energy efficiency he, and some of them did so twice.   

Redemption, though, is a powerful motivator. And we’ve been told this week, most pointedly by Ted Turner, that there’s money to be made in solving any one of the global problems discussed here — energy and climate change, education, poverty, and health.  

I’ve also never been at an event, national or international, so closely tied to the personality of an individual. The spirit of collaboration and intelligence and adventure that distinguishes the Clinton Global Initiative reflects its founder. Mr. Clinton was on time this morning for a news conference in the press room here at the New York Sheraton and responded this way to a question from a French journalist who wondered “what drives you?”

“I think I should spend my life trying to give back to my country and the world for the great life I’ve had,” said Mr. Clinton. ”I owe it to future of the world, children, and my country. I didn’t lose interest in these matters when I stopped being president.  And, frankly, I like it. The reason I do it is I find it immensely rewarding. It’s more interesting than anything I can imagine doing.”

NEW YORK – This morning at the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative, Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s chief executive, explained to hundreds of international leaders why his  corporate behemoth, one of the iconic companies of this age, has very quickly embraced environmental sensitivity and energy efficiency as a business strategy. It’s all about the benefits that occur when you “straighten the noodles,” he said.

Specifically, Mr. Scott described what happened when Wal-Mart asked executives at Betty Crocker, the makers of Hamburger Helper, to join its effort to be greener and more sustainable. Hamburger Helper responded, he said, by making its half moon noodles straight. That simple change, Mr. Scott said, reduced the size of Hamburger Helper packages, enabled more packages to fit into trucks, reduced substantially the number of truck shipments, saved energy, and reduced global warming gases. “It’s basic good business practices that ultimately cause the price to go down,” he said. 

Well, how do you do. It’s not as though environmentalists and green economists, Paul Hawken in particular, haven’t noted the convergence of environmental and economic values for at least 35 years. Nor is it unusual for a chief executive of a company as notoriously ill-suited to advancing the public interest as Walmart to seek a green halo to improve their public image. But Mr. Scott’s focus on sustainable business practices appears genuine, and it’s due to the economic sense such a path makes to Wal-Mart. ”What has shocked us is that there are benefits far beyond what we imagined,” he said. 

A second program of note today was Angelina Jolie’s appearance on behalf of global education for children of poverty. The Jolie-Pitt collaboration is well represented here. Earlier today Brad (see pix) anounced a $5 million commitment to build new housing in New Orleans. Then this afternoon Ms. Jolie (see pix)stepped to a podium at the New York Sheraton amid a strobe flash firestorm and explained the partnership she’s built during six years of globe trotting on behalf of the world’s refugee children. Her project, Children of Conflict, combines 18 organizations globally to educate children, including Nike and Microsoft. 

I haven’t attended many news conferences featuring Entertainment Tonight superstar celebrities. I was impressed with Ms. Jolie’s intellect and poise. She has clear command of her subject, the result of a global travel schedule that Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, said today was more active than most UN Secretaries General. President Clinton today commended her work on an American initiative for childhood eduction. Her message was straightforward. “Just a few hours of spending in Iraq would send 150,000 children to school,” she said. “We have to get our priorities in order.”  

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Three years ago when he founded the Clinton Global Initiative, which has emerged as one of the most influential and prestigious annual gatherings of world leaders, former President Bill Clinton understood that the new century’s formative operating principles depended on collaboration, not hierarchy. Only through the efforts of  untraditional allies working together could people make progress on any idea or project of real significance.

If you doubt this, just consider that in the 20th century the United States simultaneously built an interstate highway system, put a man on the moon, initiated a world-and economy-changing program of environmental protection, and enacted civil rights safeguards for minorities and women. Imagine trying to achieve any of these outcomes in whole or in part today.

Tomorrow I travel to New York to attend the invitation-only Clinton Global Initiative and see how the new global operating software works first hand. The three-day initiative draws together heads of state, academics, NGOs, business executives, and philanthropist to make “commitments” to produce change in four program focus areas — health, poverty, education, environment.

To date, much of the media attention that the affair attracts has focused on its glitter, the who’s who of global leadership that attends, the wealthy and glamorous that clamor to get into what has become the equivalent of the Academy Awards of the global public interest community.

But much more is at play here. In its basic structure, CGI is now arguably the best example of the diverse and untraditional convening organizations that have emerged in recent years across the nation and the world. These convening organizations, which differ in their form and function from traditional civic and governmental groups – chambers of commerce, rotary groups, Lions Clubs, government agencies, UN organizations – arise out of the need for communities and nations to find a way to negotiate the conflicts that too often occur at the intersection of politics, commerce, advocacy, philanthropy, and investment. Their role is to help resolve big public interest issues – like traffic congestion at the local level, or the freshwater crisis globally – that cross jurisdictional boundaries and the lines between race, income, religion, and the public and private sectors.

In my work with the Michigan Land Use Institute during the last 12 years I helped to form several convening organizations, which are places for people of disparate interests to come together to talk, get beyond their differences, and reach agreement to achieve some particular goal. I helped design a convening organization in Grand Rapids, in collaboration with local governments, farmers, and Michigan State University, that resulted in the strongest farmland conservation program in this state. The Institute formed another that found a better, less expensive, more environmentally sensitive alternative to a 30-mile highway bypass proposed for Traverse City.

The Clinton Global Initiative is a global convening organization — independent but also intimately involved with governments, NGOs, foundations, academic institutions, and businesses. It is now a model for the  new governing infrastructure that is starting to emerge to respond to huge international problems in a way that fits the political, fiscal, cultural, and environmental conditions of this century. Clinton’s initiative understands the new operating tools and principles, especially the fact that governments, businesses, and citizens acting separately and alone are not capable of developing, never mind executing, the scientific, economic, or political strategy to achieve solutions. A second is that new means are needed to organize governments, businesses, advocates and citizens, and new communications tools must be applied to the various global crises that the Clinton initiative is tackling.

This week I’m blogging about the Clinton Initiative and working for Circle of Blue, a new online global journalism project based here in the Great Lakes region that has set out to help solve the freshwater crisis. The project, invited to participate in the Clinton Initiative, rolls into New York with eight untraditional partners from Europe and the United States. In its outline and concept, using original reporting to elevate and inspire people to respond to a global environmental crisis, Circle of Blue fits its time. So does the Cinton Initiative.

As a lifelong member of the tribe of career adventurists it’s time to announce another turn in the journey. I am leaving the Michigan Land Use Institute to take a new position as senior editor and strategist for Circle of Blue, an independent online journalism, research, and movement building organization focused on helping to solve the freshwater crisis. What’s especially keen, along with the great promise of a new way to influence a global environmental and economic crisis, is that I won’t have to leave home. Circle of Blue, based in Traverse City, is the second organization devoted to public interest journalism, research, and social organizing in northwest Michigan. The first, of course, was the Michigan Land Use Institute, founded in Benzonia on April 22, 1995, the 25th anniversary of Earth Day.

In many ways the same three factors — trends in news and communication technology, a compelling public interest, and opportunity — that drew me to Circle of Blue also prompted the founding and strategic vision of the Michigan Land Use Institute. Both organizations are devoted to executing the highest standards of journalism and perform that mission at a level of reporting, framing, and narrative that well-exceeds the capacity of the mainstream media. Both organizations understand how to apply email, the Internet, multi-media, motion graphics, and the other evolving communications tools to attract and inform large online audiences. And both utilize the power of great storytelling to support citizen movements that influence the course of events on complex economic, environmental, and cultural issues.

In its  basic outlines none of this is really new.  The environmental historians among us will recall that John Muir, the essayist and founder of the Sierra Club, applied his tremendous reporting and storytelling skills in the pages of Century Magazine in the late 19th cenury to argue for conserving the Sierra Nevada. That work, disseminated to Congress, prompted the United States in 1890 to establish Yosemite as the nation’s second national park. 

Yet all of it is new. What we learned at the Michigan Land Use Institute is that great reporting, well-told and broadly disseminated, helps to shape, clarify, elevate, and support the grassroots groups that are making all the difference now in our state. The Institute recruited terrific reporters - Kelly Thayer on transportation, Patty Cantrell and Dianne Connors on agriculture and local foods, Andy Guy on the Great Lakes, Carolyn Kelly on energy, Glenn Puit on investigations — and gave them the time to dig in and pursue important stories. Though there are exceptions, the opposite is occurring in the mainstream media. My epiphany on this subject came in 1995 when my own newspaper flooded the OJ Simpson trial coverage with elite writers only to discover that the National Enquirer consistently produced the best reporting. 

The Institute’s founding came just six months after CompuServe and AOL offered the first dial-up Internet service. We very quickly recognized that the print publishing strategy we initially developed would move online. In 1998, when the Institute launched its first Web site, the organization’s work was read by the 5,000 families and businesses that received our three-times-a-year Great Lakes Bulletin magazine, the several thousand more who saw our work in mainstream newspapers, and others who caught drift of the Institute’s efforts through events and word of mouth. Last July, in contrast, nearly 200,000 visitors came to the Institute’s main Web site, some 25,000 more visited our Taste the Local Difference fresh food site, nearly 20,000 people read our weekly email alerts, almost 1,000 reporters and editors received our weekly Great Lakes Bulletin News Service feed, and some 4,000 people were attracted to our two blogs: this one and Great Lakes Guy.  

What does a public interest organization do with that kind of capacity? Help make things better. You make the case stick for an alternative to environmentally ruinous and needlessly expensive, energy-inefficient, land-wasting new highway bypasses in Petoskey and Traverse City. You help an alliance of a conservation groups establish safeguards for two new natural rivers, the first designated since 1988. You begin rebuilding the market, processing, and transportation infrastructure to make it easier for buyers and producers of fresh home grown food to find each other. You provide citizens the information they need to ban oil and gas drilling along the Great Lakes shoreline. You convince the conservative state Supreme Court to overrule an equally ideological state Appellate Court and reinstate the right of all citizens to walk every mile of Great Lakes beaches. You help Michigan and the nation understand that prosperity is intimately connected to how communities are designed. And you report on the prosperity that Chicago and Salt Lake City, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Traverse City are achieving by embracing a new energy-efficient, transit-oriented, neighborhood sustaining, environmentally-sensitive development strategy.

Although I will continue my affiliation with the Institute early next year as a part-time special projects writer, my departure as a full-time senior leader produces two emotions: lament that comes with things ending, and the ferment that accompanies things new. The Michigan Land Use Institute is a superb public interest organization with a committed and capable staff. Twelve years is a long time in the life of a person and an organization.  One adventure has ended. Another is starting. You say goodbye. I say hello.    

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A long time ago I followed my parents to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and saw for the first time how a television and a phone (so what, say the teenagers who hang around my house) would eventually converge into a new communications appliance that At&T  called a “picturephone.” That was big stuff, though, in those days and it cemented in me a keen curiousity about gadgets and technology.  That was the era of space shots and moon landings, the introduction of color television, jet travel, push button phones, daisy wheel electric typewriters, central air conditioning, power windows, and six-lane concrete highways. 

The other day Eric Daigh, a young multi-media producer and colleague raised in the new era of cell phones, the Internet, Ipods, and broadband showed me a couple of amazing videos of ballons bursting and a man dancing shot that were shot on a Phantom ultra high-speed, high definition video camera manufactured by Vision Research Inc. in Wayne, New Jersey. The camera was introduced earlier this year. Ultra high speed photography, of course, produces ultra slow motion images that are capable of completely changing how we view ordinary events, like water momentarily retaining the complex liquid structure of the rubber balloon that a fist vaporized.

The scientific applications for such technology are well-understood in materials design, defense, soil erosion research, engine performance, emissions studies — anything that requires careful evaluation of movement over time. But it’s keen to see how the technology is applied to art and other pure entertainments associated with seeing the same-old in extraordinary new dimensions.

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This entry in Mode Shift’s Flip category, which spotlights great online applications of multi-media technology, introduces a brand new mapping tool to help local government officials, utilities, and entrepreneurs identify suitable places to build commercial-scale wind turbines in Michigan. Developed by the Land Policy Institute at Michigan State University, and dubbed the Michigan Prospecting Tool by its developers, Charles McKeown and Benjamin Calnin, the online tool provides users an easy and elegant way to find the windiest places in Michigan. It also gives expert guidance on local factors that would advance wind energy farms – like nearby railroads and highways, and the amount of contiguous open space available in the region — or impediments, like wetlands or sensitive ecosystems that might lie in the way. 

Users can view the potential wind sites from the height of an orbiting satellite, taking in the entire expanse of this 37 million acre state, or dive down to see the land use and environmental details of a single township. The prospecting tool , unveiled at a conference that the Land Policy Institute held last week to promote Michigan’s ability to manufacture the components of wind energy systems, provides developers an easy way to scan potential sites for new turbines. It also gives local government officials in Michigan, particularly those along the windy shores of Lake Huron and northern Lake Michigan, new knowledge that is tremendously useful in promoting a clean energy source that has the potential to help revive foundering rural economies.

Late last month I had the chance to spend the day with scientists at Michigan State University who are involved in carrying out the work of the new Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, a partnership between MSU and the University of Wisconsin financed by a five-year, $125 million federal research grant. It is one of three such centers across the country determined to fill America’s national gas tank with fuel made from plants. Bruce Dale, a chemical engineer at MSU and one of the campus leaders on this topic, told me he’s convinced that “we can replace all of our imported oil with liquid fuels produced from crops.”

Whether that is possible without causing shortages of staple crops, higher food prices, and serious unintended consequences to soil, air, and water is a source of considerable debate in and out of academia. But many respected authorities say it is, including the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental organization, and the WorldWatch Institute, a global environmental research group based in Washington. A full account of how Michigan State has emerged at the center of biofuels research and development will be in the New York Times on November 7.   

But as I toured the genetic engineering labs, greenhouses, and the MSU crop and soil science farm I kept thinking there probably is no state in the country with such a powerful case of energy schizophrenia. 

Just check out what’s going on this state.

First, MSU has assembled a team of nearly 100 researchers and faculty members, spanning almost a dozen departments, to develop the basic science to produce new varieties of ethanol-rich crops, like switchgrass and miscanthus (see pix), new biological recipes to speed fermentation and enzymatic breakdown, new industrial processes to make the products of the nation’s new biorefineries cost-competitive with petroleum-based fuels. If Bruce Dale and his colleagues get this right, the bio-fuels economy will be much cleaner, more environmentally sensitive, and more economically productive, especially for America’s farm country.  Massachusetts-based Mascoma is so enthused about MSU’s prominence on biofuels science and development it announced earlier this year that it will build a plant here to convert wood wastes to ethanol, an expected $100 million-plus investment. 

Second, on Monday in East Lansing, Michigan State also is holding the first “Manufacturing and Developing Wind Energy Systems in Michigan” conference. More than 200 industrialists, utility industry executive, business leaders, policy specialists, researchers, and investors are expected to attend the two-day event. The intent of the conference is to stimulate the $20 billion global wind industry’s interest in settling in Michigan to design and manufacture generating equipment, and also to recruit companies to develop the state’s potential as a source of wind energy. The Department of Energy produced a wind map in 2004 that said Michigan was the 14th windiest state in the country, capable of generatiing enough electricity from wind as 23 new coal-fired power plants. The Land Policy Institute at MSU, which organized the conference, says that landowners also could benefit from thousands of dollars in annual leasing fees for every one of the big windmills they allow on their ground. 

And third, while MSU develops the science of clean energy, state utilities have proposed building at least six new coal-fired power plants in Michigan. In a state where mercury from coal has contaminated almost every inland lake, where the snow sports industry is melting away, and where citizens by a wide margin support renewable fuels that make the state more competitive and produce more jobs,  the last thing Michigan needs is to fuel its new economy with such a dirty source of energy. But that message isn’t reaching the state capital, where Governor Jennifer M. Granholm says she supports at least one new coal plant, and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce expresses skepticism about conservation, renewable energy, or any change in convention other than its steadfast promotion of every form of energy produced by its members in the fossil fuel industry.