Modeshift

Last week the Apollo Alliance and the BlueGreen Alliance,  two of the most important national non-profits supporting clean energy development and good jobs, announced that as of July 1 they would merge. The much larger Minneapolis-based BlueGreen Alliance, a five-year-old collaboration of big green groups and unions, will become the parent of San Francisco-based Apollo, which was founded in 2003 and gained its renown for being the first organization to understand that the transition to an economy primarily fueled by something other than oil and coal could produce a flurry of useful  results — jobs, climate action, energy security, and industrial innovation.

The merger is good for both organizations. It consolidates Apollo’s strong policy work with its parent’s considerable networking strength in states and in Washington, D.C. It also reflects the need for one big progressive voice touting the benefits of clean energy in an era, hopefully temporary, in which national interest and public investment in solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable and non-fossil alternatives is in treacherous decline.

That’s because the right — heavily financed by big oil, gas, coal, and utilities — loathes what it calls government intrusion in the market, and sees no justification for curbing carbon emissions because it is convinced climate change is a scientific hoax. At the grassroots, it’s no better. Civic coalitions that defy conventional description — joining left, right, and centrist activists –  have formed hundreds of campaigns in more than 35 states that are devoted to killing renewable energy projects they regard as just too damn big.

China, meanwhile, has no such problem. By the end of the decade, China will produce over 700 gigawatts of electricity from wind, hydro, nuclear, and solar. If that kind of development occurred in the U.S. it would amount to roughly 65 percent to 70 percent of our projected electrical generating capacity in 2020. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have developed in China’s clean energy and non-fossil fuel sectors.

Meanwhile the United States is busier than it’s been in decades perpetuating the domestic fossil fuel economy. Big oil last year spent $100 billion accelerating a hydrocarbon boom at the center of the continent. Canadian tar sands have become the largest single source of oil imports to America. An extensive new oil and gas transport and processing infrastructure is under construction from Alberta, Canada through the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain West, Great Lakes states and on to the Gulf Coast. It includes new pipelines, as well as modernized and expanded refineries. Hundreds of the nation’s heavy onshore drill rigs are tapping oil and natural gas in the northern Great Plains in shale formations nearly two miles deep. North Dakota looks to be on the way to supplanting Texas as the number one oil producer among the states.

I know a little bit more about the Blue Green-Apollo merger than your average bear because I worked at Apollo for 16 months in 2008 and 2009,  as communications director, when the “clean energy, good jobs” message attained a rare salience in policy circles and electoral politics. The email message announcing the merger, sent on Thursday by Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides, reminded me of those heady days and especially one morning meeting in Denver that synthesized the movement’s influence at the time.

It was the second day of the Democratic National Convention and a select group of America’s senior labor and environmental leaders met for an hour with T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire who’d announced a month earlier his interest in investing a good portion of his fortune in wind power. I attended the meeting for the Apollo Alliance and documented some of the participants in the picture above — (right to left) Rich Trumka, now president of the AFL-CIO, Leo Gerard, head of the United Steelworkers, Carl Pope, then the executive director of the Sierra Club, and Bracken Hendricks of the Center For American Progress. And in the picture on the right of T. Boone Pickens.

When T. Boone Pickens articulates much the same thing as the leader of the Sierra Club, never mind a major party presidential nominee, that’s a conversation you don’t forget. Quite a few of the people who’d helped tee up the United States for what looked to be a momentous transition were gathered at that table. Bracken Hendricks, an author and capable strategist, was the founding executive director of the Apollo Alliance. Carl Pope and Leo Gerard were Apollo board members and in 2006 founded the BlueGreen Alliance, a joining of the Sierra Club and the Steelworkers. Rich Trumka, who once headed the United Mineworkers Union, was talking jobs in the same breath he mentioned wind and solar energy.

Emily Dickinson once called hope “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” In 2008 and 2009, clean energy looked to be an idea set to soar. Barack Obama campaigned on “clean energy, good jobs” message and won the nomination and presidency. Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus bill in February 2009 that contained $100 billion or so for renewable energy, energy efficiency, transit, and other clean energy initiatives. The House, in June 2009, beat back a fierce assault from the fossil fuel industry and passed a comprehensive energy bill that was the first time a chamber of Congress set mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Clean energy and climate action were prominent ideas in global economic and diplomatic meetings, including the Pittsburgh G-20 conference in September 2009, and the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.

In the 18 months since the Copenhagen climate summit, the clean energy and climate action messages have been in eclipse. Foundations and advocacy organizations are searching for new tools to revive the public’s interest. Jeff Nesbit, the former director of the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at the National Science Foundation, just accepted the executive director’s post at Climate Nexus, a New York-based climate and clean energy communications group formed by a consortium of big philanthropies. The newly merged Blue Green Alliance has a big job ahead of it, too. We wish them well.

– Keith Schneider

More than two years ago in Circle of Blue’s The Biggest Dry, I was part of a Michigan-based multi-media reporting team that documented how hard Australia’s primary food-growing region was getting hammered by climate change. The Murray-Darling Basin of southeast Australia, named for the region defined by two of the nation’s longest rivers, was in the throes of a 12-year drought that was crippling grain production sectors, especially the $1 billion rice industry. I called the drought an unmistakable example of the consequences of climate change that were “more visible and dangerous in Australia than in any other industrialized nation.”

This year that distinction, arguably, now falls on China, which is contending with severe droughts in the Yangtze River Basin of the south, and the Yellow River Basin of the north. Today, as part of our Choke Point: China series, which focuses on the confrontation between rising energy demand and declining freshwater reserves in the world’s largest country, Circle of Blue posted my account of China’s other big challenge connected to water scarcity: assuring its growing demand for food.

Lower grain reserves, of course, affects the entire planet this season, including the United States where grain prices are at or near historically high levels. That’s great for farmers and tough for American consumers, and not necessarily, at least not yet, a source of political instability. But in much of the developing world rising food prices generally accompany rising energy prices and inflation, all of which are occurring in China and adding to the central government’s concern about social instability. And because China is the largest market in the world for just about everything — from cars to grain to batteries to glass to steel to energy, to name a few — what happens there affects markets and prices here. The United States has less of a grip on its own destiny than ever before in my lifetime.

Last month I visited a farm district (see pix above) along the middle reaches of the Yellow River, which irrigates 402,000 hectares (993,000 acres) of farmland north of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region’s provincial capital, Yinchuan. There was no mistaking the smell of dry earth and diesel fuel, the abiding scents of a desert province that is also among China’s most efficient grain producers.

Ningxia farmers have relied on the Yellow River since 221 BCE, when Qin Dynasty engineers clawed narrow trenches from the sand, introducing some the first instances of irrigated agriculture on earth. Despite persistent droughts, in each of the last five years irrigation has made it possible for annual harvests to increase by an average of 100,000 metric tons.

The 2010 harvest of 3.5 million metric tons was nearly double what it was in 1990. The 3.9 million people who live and work on Ningxia’s 1.2 million farms, most no larger than three-quarters of a hectare (1.6 acres), produce the highest yields of rice and corn in the nine-province Yellow River Basin, according to central government crop statistics.

In sum, the farm productivity of this small northern China region-about the same size as West Virginia and located 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) to the west of the Bohai Sea-reflects the major shifts in geography and cultivation practices over the last generation that have made China both self-sufficient in food production and the largest grain grower in the world.

Yet Chinese farm officials here and academic authorities in Beijing are becoming increasingly concerned that China does not have enough water, good land, and energy to sustain its agricultural prowess. As Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum have reported in the Choke Point: China series, momentous competing trends-rising demand for energy, accelerating modernization, and diminishing freshwater resources-are putting the country’s energy production and security at risk.

The very same trends also threaten China’s farm productivity. Last year, the national farm sector and the coal sector combined used 85 percent of the 599 billion cubic meters (158 trillion gallons) of water used in China.

Read more here at Circle of Blue.

– Keith Schneider

TOLEDO, Oh. – My newest piece in the New York Times focuses on globalization that’s come full circle in a small Midwest city.

Before it became known as the Marina District, the 128 acres of tall grass, and piled dirt on the Maumee River here was the place where the Acme coal-fired power plant once belched thick black smoke before it was decommissioned in 1994 and  became one of the city’s most prominent eyesores.

Right next to the big riverfront parcel is a 66,500-square-foot formerly city-owned dining and entertainment complex, The Docks, that for years after it was built in 1996 was among Toledo’s most popular destinations. But the Great Recession hit this northwest Ohio manufacturing center hard, and earlier this year two of the five restaurants closed, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent and lost tax revenue.

In short, the open space along the east bank of the Maumee River bounded by Front Street, Main Street, and Interstate-280 looked to be as difficult a place to develop as any urban site in the Midwest. That is until two real estate developers from China, personally recruited late last year by Mayor Mike Bell and his staff, took one look last fall during a reciprocal visit to this city of 287,000 residents and saw an opportunity.

On March 18, the two investors, Yuan Xiaohona and Wu Kin Hung, closed on the $2.15 million purchase of The Docks and the surrounding five acres of Maumee River waterfront. In an interview Mayor Bell, a 56-year-old independent elected in 2009, said he and other city leaders are convinced the deal is the first step toward a much larger project: the sale of the adjoining 69 acres to Ms. Yuan and Mr. Wu, who said in a signed memorandum in February that they intend to build a new riverfront residential, office, retail, and entertainment district.

“They’ve moved forward to say what they are going to do,” said Mr. Bell, an outsize bachelor who played linebacker at the University of Toledo, rides a Harley, and favors pink ostrich cowboy boots and matching pink ties. “A huge portion of what is happening and will happen is based on the trust we’ve developed. The purchase of The Docks is step one. It shows we have energy, and we have direction.”

See more here at the New York Times.

– Keith Schneider

BENZONIA, MI — Just as the first flying flakes of snow in October signal the onset of winter here in my hometown, the emergence of the snow white petals of the forest-dwelling trillium are a strong forecast of summer’s welcome warmth. No more so than this year.

It’s been an unusually cold and wet spring. The ice didn’t come off Crystal Lake until well into April this year. On April 19 and 20 it snowed for two days. Water levels in Betsie Bay and on Lake Michigan are up this year, higher than they’ve been in awhile. That’s a good thing. But the chill and moisture are worrisome, and for good reason.

It brought back memories of 2004, when the summer was so cold I biked just three times wearing only a short-sleeve shirt. The rest of the time we were in layers.

Ask anyone who lives here and they’ll tell you cold summers are meteorological cheat. We live through the long winters knowing that they will end in the promise of a warming spring and a hot summer. Cold summers mean something much different. They ensure we’ll be cold for 20 months in a row, just as we were when the cold started in October 2003 and didn’t end until May 2005.

This month, fortunately, it looks as though we’re not going in that direction. Our first bike rides of the season this week occurred in sunny, dry, warm weather.

For those of us who’ve found a way to live, even thrive, in this place so far from the mainstream, weather is a big deal. Our lives are bound up in the seasons in a way that is much different than most people we know outside of this part of northern Michigan. That’s part of the challenge and a great deal of the magic of why we are here.

– Keith Schneider

WASHINGTON – The price of gasoline crested to more than $5 a gallon this weekend in Washington, D.C. Along with stressing the majority of Americans completely dependent on their cars, the price rise also will prompt a new level of political agitation and policy nuttiness in the nation’s energy sector.

You’ll recall that the last time gasoline prices rose to such heights in 2008 America elected a black president and the financial sector collapsed. Expect responses of equal import in 2011 and 2012 because the price of gas is the one significant measure of American political, social, and economic discomfort that no one can control, least of all the energy industry. The price of gas is tantamount to a measurement of America’s blood pressure, a signal of comfort or distress.

I’m both distressed and hopeful. Here’s why.

No doubt. I’m a card-carrying member of the American driving majority for whom $5 gas is a genuine pain. Like millions of other Americans my allegiance to the principles of choice and mobility, which lie at the foundation of our economy and way of life, led me to settle in rural northwestern Michigan. When I’m not bicycling in the summer, or writing at home in the winter, almost every excursion away from my house in Benzonia involves a trip by car. I drive a four-year-old Mercury Mariner hybrid, which gets 26 mph in the cold and over 30 mph in warm weather. I drive about 20,000 miles a year, and my monthly fuel bill is now is about $300. I spend over $100 a month for insurance and $500 monthly on the loan. Total cost of operating my car is over $1,000 a month now, $12,000 a year, which means I have to earn about $16,000 before taxes to keep me moving.

I can do that. I make a decent living. But for two-parent, two worker households in my region that own two cars and drive a combined 50 to 100 miles per day to commute to work, $5 gas is a family emergency. Such families typically earn $3,000 to $4,000 a month after taxes in our region on $9 to $12-an-hour jobs. Family fuel expenses that are climbing above $500 a month, and heading to $750 a month, explain why foreclosures are again on the rise, along with assault and divorce.

The hopeful side of me says that Americans are smart enough to understand that high gas prices are another unmistakable signal of what author James Kunstler calls the “long emergency” facing America. Gas prices can’t be controlled by Washington or Houston or any oil company boardroom. They represent the unavoidable fury of history and economics, the velocity of change stirred up by nations and trends operating far from our borders, particularly the power of China to influence markets globally.

The solution to gas prices is a shift in how America powers itself, governs itself, thinks about the future and reacts to the market trends of this century. Instead of highways invest in transit. Instead of petroleum, develop and use electric vehicles. Instead of spreading communities far apart, get accustomed to knowing your neighbors and draw closer together. Instead of drill baby drill, think baby think.

We haven’t done that. Instead we’ve argued about gay marriage or lied about where President Obama was born or worried that liberals were taking the Christ out of Christmas. That path only leads to even higher gas prices, more fruitless work to hold onto ways of doing things that don’t work, and the lengthening of the already too long American emergency.

– Keith Schneider

Late on Sunday, the day I planned to write this tribute to Ted Bruce, the nation learned that Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden in a daring midnight raid in Pakistan.  It was a rare moment, the first time in my life that death presented itself in such fickle and unexpected garb.

One moment I’m saddened by the illogical death of a 60-year-old friend who I’ve known for 21 years as the generous and hard-working owner of our county’s most popular convenience store. The next moment I’m celebrating the revenge killing of a cold-blooded murderer, a man provided all of the opportunities of an upbringing of wealth and privilege, but who shaped the world for more than decade by fostering fear and mass death.

Clearly, Ted  Bruce’s life and death meant more here in Benzie County. On Sunday, during a 90-minute memorial service held at the Benzie Central High School gym, Ted  was honored for a life conducted with such fidelity to family, community, honesty, and integrity that about 525 people attended. His oldest son, Todd Bruce, described his father as “an ordinary man who did extraordinary things.”

His acts of kindness, generally random and free of suspicion, included loaning money to people, especially young mothers too stretched to buy Pampers or milk. Friends described his relentless appetite for hard work and Ted’s capacity to bring order to events that could easily spin out of control.  He had great poise and patience, including during the increasingly frequent occurrences when his customers confronted Ted about the rising price of gas.

Because of its location, where US-31 and M-115 converge at Benzie County’s only stoplight, Ted’s Stapleton’s Corner Market is a center of community convergence. And the mornings that Ted was behind the counter he was one of those rare people capable in a 30-second encounter of making you laugh. It was fun to go to Stapleton’s for gas or beer or bread or newspapers because the visit put you in Ted’s energy field. He just radiated such genuine strength of spirit and good human warmth that you just figured he’d always be around. Losing him was like cutting a beautiful stand of white pine, or drying up the Betsie River. Ted Bruce was a clear, fresh spring in the landscape of our community, a man who provided the basic stuff of life so well that when the spring was cut off we all recognized the place he occupied was so empty. And he attained that stature in the most improbable Midwestern way. He did what he did by offering the simplest and most important gifts – love, joy, and candor.

There’s a lot about Ted’s life that perfectly predicted the principles and values that were so admired here in Benzie County. According to the biography provided by his family, Ted was born in November 1950, the third of eleven children raised on a farm in Michigan’s Thumb region north of Detroit. He served in Vietnam and married his wife, Kathie, in 1973. Fifteen years later, with their two sons Todd and Kirk, and daughter Kalee, Ted and Kathie moved to Benzie County where he owned and managed Timberline Shell, a convenience store, and she served administrative jobs in the Benzie County government building in Beulah.

Ted’s long hours at Timberline endeared him to his customers, who numbered in the hundreds a week. That’s where I met him in 1990, when I first visited Benzie County, and later saw him two or three times a week for gas and such on my way to and from Benzonia to Springdale Township, in Manistee County, where I lived.

In 1998, Kalee was murdered while working as a hotel clerk in Traverse City. In 1999, Ted sold Timberline and I saw him around every now and again while he and Kathie did what they could to heal. Then Ted kind of returned in 2004, purchasing Stapleton’s, named for its previous gregarious owner, Tom Stapleton, and life for Benzie residents resumed its normal pattern. Most mornings Ted was at the store doing his earnest, warm, interested Ted thing.

He was, indeed, an ordinary man who did extraordinary things. The day that he died people sent social media messages by email and Facebook and dozens showed up at the store for the first event honoring him. Pictures are available on the memorial Facebook page where hundreds have left comments. Ted joked and chided and laughed. His greatest gift was to make us feel good about the day.

– Keith Schneider

Here in northern Michigan, we awoke jubilant this morning to the news of Bin Laden’s death, and not just because it closes a terrible narrative in our country’s history. It’s also personal in the most formidable way. The removal of Bin Laden from the global stage also means the dramatic weakening of U.S. justification for continuing the war in Afghanistan. And that, in turn, means that the chance that Cody Bates is deployed to that theater of operations is significantly reduced.

Cody Bates, my son and a Marine stationed in Hawaii, may think differently about this, as I’m sure he does. But I also know that for all of us, his family, the clear potential to rapidly wind down the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan is a very good thing.

So there are two really good reasons to celebrate the death of Osama Bin Laden today. First, it represents an all-too-rare instance of American resolve and — from what we know today — excellence in execution. And second, it could lead very quickly to a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan.

Let’s pray that it does.

– Keith Schneider