Modeshift

In 1999 Alan Durning, the author and director of the Sightline Institute in Seattle, published a prescient and well-received book about natural resources and economics entitled “Green-Collar Jobs.”

“A sustainable economy can generate employment just as well as an unsustainable one,” Durning wrote. “For every declining industry, like those that log old-growth forests, make farm chemicals, and build roads, there is an emerging one to take up the slack, like those that advise organic farmers, build windmills, and design walkable neighborhoods. A sustainable economy could be full of opportunity, and not only in these overtly green sectors.”

He added: “But the incremental change from the status quo to an economy that aims for ecological durability, like any major social transition, will be full of painful transformations. The new jobs often require different―and more sophisticated skills than the old ones, and they’re sometimes in different places.”

The phrase Durning coined, “green-collar,” and the basic economic framework that it describes have been embraced over the last year by presidential candidates of both parties, as much a factor in the 2008 campaign as “property rights” in the 1996 contest, and nearly as prominent as “family values” in 1988.

The Apollo Alliance has played a role in elevating the idea that in making the change from a polluting carbon-based economy to a clean energy economy, workers benefit. A 2004 Apollo Alliance study, New Energy For America, found that a 10-year, $300 billion federal investment in clean energy technology, equipment, and practices would yield 3.3 million quality, family-support, career-track jobs. Apollo’s president Jerome Ringo has tirelessly made the same case for green-collar jobs with local groups, major conventions, keynotes in dozens of states, in national media interviews, racking up 200,000-plus air miles a year.

More recently Van Jones, of Green For All, and Majora Carter, of Sustainable South Bronx have embraced the clean energy economy, and green-collar jobs as central to the “pathway out of poverty” for central city residents. The Apollo Alliance and a coalition of partners just published Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities, and a companion report, Greener Pathways, that provide guidance to elected leaders for developing effective green-collar training programs.

How much momentum has the green-collar framework gained? A lot. Here’s a sampling of media pieces in just the last week or so.

The University of Michigan Center for Sustainability Systems just posted this very good online interactive primer on how we use resources. This is a clear and concise check on our excessive use of resources, and a strong way to get kids engaged. It’s also a keen deployment of design and online interactivity. Nice work Michigan. 

SAN FRANCISCO — A couple of people I know out here in the Bay Area attended one of the San Francisco fundraisers more than a week ago, during which Barack Obama talked about white working class Americans in Pennsylvania and the Midwest who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

The comment attracted no attention at all among the liberal, well-heeled Democratic donors gathered in the  handsome homes near the Pacific where Senator Obama posed for pictures with guests. The reason is that Senator Obama, taking a page from the Republican handbook, was speaking in shorthand. Guns, religion, and “antipathy,” an Ivy League word meant to describe racial fear and prejudice, form the contours of a certain kind of voter that utterly baffles wealthy liberals. A voter that puts his or her economic interests second to moral, social, and cultural interests.

San Francisco and its suburbs, after all, are a great showcase of the value of public interest idealism and investment. Decisions to tear down an urban freeway and replace it with modern rapid transit have helped spur billions of dollars in new housing and business construction. The great universities here, funded all or in part with public money, produce an astonishing assortment of well-educated and qualified job applicants. The digital revolution continues apace. Environmental protections and land use policies have cleaned the air and water and surrounded the region with a green belt of mountains, forests, and scenic open spaces. Salaries are high. Housing is higher. Opportunity is everywhere.  People embrace the notion that government has a role to play in ensuring prosperity.

Senator Obama talked a lot in San Francisco about his economic plan and especially the energy strategy he’s fashioned with the help of the Apollo Alliance, where I now work. It calls for 25 percent of U.S. electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025, and for 30 percent of the federal government’s electricity to come from renewables by 2020. He also proposed investing $150 billion over 10 years in renewable energy and biofuels, efficiency, and developing technology to burn coal more efficiently and with far less carbon pollution.

It’s an economic development strategy that will produce millions of new green-collar jobs to replace those high-paying manufacturing jobs lost in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.

But there are all these other voters in California and elsewhere, people not nearly as well-off, many who’ve been displaced, who aren’t listening. They’ve allied themselves with the wealthy to form a Republican governing coalition that has ruled America since 1980. And though they support certain liberal ideas — mass transit, open space conservation, clean air and water, Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment compensation come quickly to mind — most would never vote for a Democrat, regardless of whether his economic and energy strategy made sense.

Some of my friends and most of my wife’s family from northern Michigan fall into this camp. They’re lovely people. The ideas and candidates they support for state and national office just don’t make much sense to me.

It’s those voters that Senator Obama characterized as “bitter” and clinging. I’m not sure he used the right words. “Resigned” is how I’d put it. Regardless, though, neither he nor Senator Hilary Clinton are likely to get more than a smattering of their votes. It’s not that he’s African American or she’s a woman. It’s that they’re Democrats and those bitter, clinging, resigned white working class voters don’t cast their ballots for the  Donkey party.

Nearly 13 years ago, in a first floor conference room of the Park Place Hotel in Traverse City, Marty Lagina and Frank Mortel sat side by side across a large wooden table, glowering at me through narrowed eyes. Lagina (with wife Olivia above) was the founder and chief executive of Terra Energy, an independent that had grown to become the most active driller and one of the largest producers of natural gas in Michigan. The aptly named Mortel, who looked and dressed in the dark suits of an undertaker, was chairman of the Michigan Oil and Gas Association, the state energy industry’s trade group. I was a 39-year-old journalist and advocate, the executive director of the brand new Michigan Land Use Institute, a Benzonia based non-profit with 3 staffers and an irregular newsletter, The MCLUC Reporter.

Our publication — circulation 400, printed on a photocopier, collated, stapled, addressed, and mailed by hand — had discovered and was busily publishing a series of probing original articles about a little-known agreement in Michigan’s energy patch between the industry and the Republican-led state government. The pact sharply increased the number of production expenses that producers could write off before paying state royalties. It was negotiated without any Legislative oversight, and was quietly netting natural gas producers about $8 million annually. The same amount was being drained from the state treasury and a popular state trust fund to preserve natural lands. We also discovered that the industry was applying the “post production cost” formula to reduce royalty payments to its private leaseholders, moms and pops who’d leased their mineral rights and were expecting healthy monthly royalty checks. In some cases families received bills from natural gas producers, arguing that the leaseholder owed the company money.

The MCLUC Reporter articles caused a stir and eventually led to an investigation by the Democratic state attorney general, formal audits by the state Department of Natural Resources, an end to the revenue drain from the Natural Resources Trust Fund, lawsuits by the state to recover millions more from natural gas producers, counter suits by some companies, and changes in the law and regulations for managing Michigan’s energy industry.

On that day, early in the unfolding scandal, Lagina and Mortel were after one objective. Halting the reporting. They accused me of hyping an insignificant agreement, getting my facts wrong, having a vendetta against the industry, partisanship, and general unprofessional behavior. They believed the oil and gas industry was essential to Michigan’s economy, provided good jobs, and royalty income for owners of mineral rights. They were tired of defending themselves.

Lagina said it was personal. He’d graduated from Michigan Tech in the late 1970s, and worked as a petroleum engineer for Amoco before founding Terra Energy in 1981. He’d earned a law degree at the University of Michigan in 1982. He was a Michigander, proud of his success and his industry’s value to the American way.

I politely thanked him for the feedback, and asked for assistance and collaboration in improving the industry’s environmental practices. He declined. A few months later, Lagina sold Terra Energy to CMS Energy for $62.6 million. He became an entrepreneur, opened a successful brewery restaurant on Front Street in Traverse City, got involved in a winery, took a long sabbatical in England, contributed to various civic projects. Every now and then his name was mentioned in one gathering or another I attended.

Last month, Lagina and I connected again over energy. This time it was much more comfortable. Reason: We’re working in the same field. He’s founder and chief executive of a renewable energy company called Heritage Sustainable Energy, which is building a $300 million, 12,000-acre wind farm in northern Michigan. Though our conversation started with some old complaints about my ability as a journalist, we gradually moved to the issue at hand: The promise of replacing carbon-based polluting fuels. Lagina said he was committed to the enterprise as a businessman, investor, and as a citizen of northern Michigan. He’s also got an interest in an electric vehicle company in Traverse City.

“I’ve always viewed myself as being in the energy industry,” he told me. “At this point, with all that’s going on, wind makes a lot more sense.”

A few closing thoughts. The shift by former oil and gas industry executives to renewable energy investments is gaining momentum. T. Boone Pickens, for instance, told the New York Times earlier this year that he is planning to raise over $10 billion to build windmills in Texas, the largest wind-producing state. Market conditions are pushing investment capital to wind, solar, conservation, efficiency, and other clean energy practices.

The second point is the influence of Traverse City on its residents. Lagina is among the increasing number of people I know in northern Michigan pursuing much different lives than those they led prior to arriving here. I start with myself, a national journalist turned activist turned non-profit executive in the 15 years that I’ve lived near Traverse City. The director Michael Moore, a gadfly Academy Award winner, whose career was distinguished by aggravating people from the time he left Flint, through his days at Mother Jones in San Francisco, to telling off the president on national television. He arrives in Traverse City, puts charm and collaboration to work to found a film festival and a gorgeous remodeled old movie theater on Front Street.

Ray Minervini built Hooters restaurants in new suburbs before taking control of the old state hospital in Traverse City in the late 1990s and turning it into the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, one of the largest historic restorations in the country and a national showcase of sprawl-fighting new urbanist design. And Marty Lagina, a petroleum engineer who earned his first fortune in the carbon-based energy industry in northern Michigan, and is trying to earn his second in the clean energy sector. What a place we call home.

SAN FRANCISCO — Since late March I’ve been living in a one-room cottage behind an old Craftsman-style home in Berkeley, and commuting to downtown San Francisco. It’s not your typical daily trip. But as gas prices rise, congestion mounts, and family incomes fall, it may well become a new kind of commuting norm in the United States. Of course it may not, too. This being San Francisco. And the weather is just unbelievably good most of the year.

But this is how it goes. I am a casual carpooler. Every morning I stand on line in front of the Safeway on Claremont Street, about six minutes walk from my house. Usually there are other people there, too, along with a line of cars and drivers waiting to pick up other casual commuters, two or three at a time. The goal in all of this is to save time and money for driver and passengers. Crossing the tragically congested San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on a weekday morning can take over an hour because of the longest toll lines I’ve ever seen. The cost also is $4.00.

But cars with three or more passengers zip through in the free carpool lanes. I save the $3.30 it would cost to ride the BART from the Rockridge Station to Embarcadero.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now and it’s just a marvel of ingenuity, convenience, and overcoming the fear of the stranger, which has gripped our country for 40 years or so. I’ve ridden with two student artists at San Francisco State, a manager of high rise buildings in San Francisco, a graphic designer, and a developer of affordable housing. I’ve had the chance to check out a two-seat Mercedes, a brand new Volvo, a Land Rover and any number of Toyota Prius’s. Nobody, and I mean nobody, drives an American car here. One of the guys I rode with is an engineer who gave me a lead on an apartment in Oakland, which turned out to be too expensive. Another told me about a hot graphic designer, who is as good as advertised and may fit into our publication schedule at the Apollo Alliance, where I work.

Drivers dispatch their passengers in San Francisco at the corner of Fremont and Howard, which is a couple of blocks from the Embarcadero along magnificent San Francisco Bay. In 1991, two years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, San Francisco demolished the elevated Embarcadero Freeway, replacing it with a palm-lined boulevard. An active lightrail line now runs in the median, passing gardens and parks and thousands of new units of housing, and swanky bars, the Giants baseball stadium, and all the other centers of human commerce that blossomed in what had been the shadows of a loud, dangerous, transportation eyesore.

If I walk, with the sun rising over the bay, it takes about 25 minutes. When I ride the Muni train to 4th Street, a block from my Townsend Street office, it takes about 10 minutes and costs $1.50. Total commute time: 45 minutes to an hour. Going home, I take the Muni to the Embarcadero BART station. BART takes me to the Rockridge Station, and I walk the 12 minutes up College Avenue and Claremont, stopping by the Safeway to get something for dinner. Travel cost: $4.80. Travel time: 45 minutes. Total expense saved from not having to own or drive a car: At least $1,000 a month, after taxes.

Two weeks ago, at the Take Back America conference in Washington, Majora Carter took a moment to explain the motivation behind The Dream Reborn, a celebration this weekend in Memphis that honors the life and marks the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

“The work now is solutions-based,” said Carter, who founded and directs Sustainable South Bronx, a seven-year-old non-profit environmental and economic development organization in New York. “We’re applying our knowledge, our research, our advocacy to places to help people participate in this new economy.

“We are on the cusp of something so huge,” she added. “We’re activating the green economy to transfer wealth and the capacity to participate to include poor people. We’re reaching across the traditional lines. It’s a very big change and a very big opportunity for everybody.”

The Dream Reborn is not likely to attract the media — mainstream and new — that it deserves. But in the view of this environmental journalist and advocate, the conference is a happening for environmentalism, the social justice community, and the nation. The reason: it brings together the leaders and activists from the newly energized sectors of progressive America — greens, social justice, business, labor, government — around principles and values that have attained new cultural and economic salience in the United States.

Those, of course, are justice, and peace, and freedom, and equality. The legacy of Dr. King. Carter and her colleague, Van Jones, the head of Green For All, the conference sponsor, have found a new path to 21st century relevance for Dr. King’s vision in the clean energy economy, in environmentalism, in the emerging industrial sector tied to efficiency, pollution prevention, renewable energy, and halting global climate change. The Dream Reborn is the latest in a series of high-profile gatherings around the nation this year that are pointing to the development of a new governing coalition based not on exploitation of natural and human capital — the economic principle of the 20th century — but on conservation and collaboration and reason. These will be the generators of millions of new green-collar jobs.

Bill McKibben, in a new piece for The Nation, wrote: “There are people starting to think along these lines: the Green for All campaign has been pushing for a billion-dollar commitment for a quarter-million green jobs of just this kind, designed to pull people out of poverty.” He added: “Were King still alive he’d be fighting to take on the twin scourges of global warming and global inequity with a massive new public works campaign.”

Van Jones described the conference’s purpose this way in an interview: “I wanted to get people together, on the 40th anniversary of his death, around the idea of Dr. King’s dream. Many were not around during his life. He’s been gone longer than he lived. I wanted to introduce a new generation to Dr. King’s dream. His message was uplifting the people. The new message is uplifting the people and the planet, too.”

One of the leaders speaking this weekend to 1,000 people — the conference sold out this week — is my colleague Jerome Ringo, the president of the Apollo Alliance, who spent part of his career in a Louisiana petrochemical plant and has spent two decades making the case that environmentalism and social justice are tied together.

Other presenters are Winona LaDuke (Honor the Earth), Malia Lazu (The Gathering for Justice), LaDonna Redmond (Institute for Community Resource Development), Mary Ann Hitt (Appalachian Voices), Reverend Yearwood (Hip Hop Caucus), Adrienne Maree Brown (Ruckus Society), Tony Anderson (Morehouse College Student Leader), Ian Kim (Oakland Green Jobs Corps), and Rinku Sen (Applied Research Center).