Modeshift

Last November Senator Hillary Clinton delivered a major policy speech in Iowa, during which she described her clean energy and jobs proposal. Three months later, in a speech in Seattle, Senator Barack Obama outlined his clean energy plan. Every week now, in many of their public appearances, both Democratic presidential candidates mention the millions of “green-collar jobs” they anticipate from an energy strategy that stresses clean renewable sources and moves the nation away from a carbon (read that oil and gas and coal) energy economy.

Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, who’s assured action on global climate change if he’s elected president, also gingerly notes the need for what he calls “alternative” sources of energy. His policy platform is decent. But he’s under enormous pressure from the Republican governors of carbon energy producing states to refrain from addressing either issue.

There’s good reason for such attention to clean energy and jobs in the campaign. Both concerns attach no partisanship. And evidence of the transition at the grassroots, among the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in the clean and green energy sector, in city governments, in specific metropolitan regions is emerging. The clear outlines of the new green economy are becoming clearer by the week:

1. Three times as many miles of new light rail and commuter rail transit have built in the U.S. since 1992 than miles of new divided super highway.

2. Texas, with nearly 4,400 windmills, is the largest generator of electricity from wind in the U.S.

3. Pacific Gas and Electric has reached agreement with BrightSource to build three solar-powered electric generating stations in California’s Mojave Desert that could eventually produce 900 megawatts of power, or equivalent to the largest coal-burning power plants in the country. An agreement is in negotiation between BrightSource and the state trade unions to build and maintain the plant with high-paying union workers

4. Ford and General Motors have joined Honda, Toyota and other vehicle manufacturers in designing and building fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, and Google has vowed to promote the market for 100 mpg plug-in hybrids.

5. Since 2004, according to Governor Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania has attracted 3,500 new high-paying manufacturing jobs to its new clean energy industrial sector. Iowa counts 1,800 clean energy jobs.

6. The Imperium biofuels plant in Grays Harbor, Washington was constructed by some 300 union workers in 2006 at a cost of $60 million. It is the largest biofuels refinery (see pix) in the country and is focusing its business strategy on developing bio jet fuel.

7. The strongest housing markets in the nation are now in metropolitan neighborhoods, and downtowns with good rapid transit.San Francisco, for instance, is the only city in the Bay Area that experienced a rise in private home prices since last year. The distant suburbs, meanwhile, are experiencing the sharpest drop in home prices.

8. The number of homes sold in Richmond, Walnut Creek, Corte Madera, and other distant San Francisco suburbs have fallen 50 to 66 percent, and prices have tumbled 30 to 40 percent in a year. These trends are consistent with the experiences of other major metropolitan regions on both coasts, the South, and the Middle West.

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.

WASHNGTON — The Hip Hop Media Lab, an online non-profit that introduces low-income kids to the possibilities of making money with their creative talent, is a partner this week in producing the annual Take Back America conference. So is MoveOn.org, Living Liberally, Netroots Nation, and USAaction. This is the sixth edition of a three-day fest designed to introduce liberal America to some of the movement’s new icons — the New Organizing Institute, Hip Hop Caucus, and One Hood, among others — and to pay homage to some old ones — Jesse Jackson was in attendance today.

To be sure, the conference affirms earnest goals that would make America better. Those include ending the war, winning the 2008 presidential election, burying freemarket conservatism, promoting a national health care program, and developing a new economy that rebuilds the American middle class. Behind the broad themes are specific concerns — clean energy, environment, social justice, global climate change, media reform, restoring trust and faith in the legal system, and dealing with the crumbling banking system and housing markets are much featured in plenaries and sessions.

The important question, of course, is whether progressives can actually take back America. They’re making progress. A white woman and a black man are contenders for the presidency. Global climate change is a top tier public concern in the United States and around the world. Clean, green energy — renewables, energy efficiency, clean vehicles, rapid transit, high performance buildings — represents one of the largest and fastest-growing industrial realms in the United States.

Last summer, the American Solar Energy Society published a study that found 8.5 million Americans already work in green-collar jobs and that the various green energy and energy efficiency industries added $933 billion annually to the nation’s gross domestic product. Those industries included manufacturing the equipment and production of solar, wind, biomass, hydropower, hydrogen, and fuel cell power. It also included building efficient buildings and vehicles. By 2030, the authors predicted, 40 million Americans (1 in 4 working Americans) would be in green collar jobs and the value of the green collar industries in which they worked will add $4.3 trillion to the US economy.

But does all of this add up to a narrative that the majority of Americans 1) understand, and 2) embrace. That, friends, is not at all clear. Republicans built the governing majority that has essentially ruled America for a quarter century by convincing people that a handful of core ideas — tax cuts, deregulation, self-reliance, free markets, security, and prayer — represented the core chapters of the great millennial story of America. That it didn’t work is self-evident. The Republican narrative has produced one disaster after another — Iraq, mortgage crisis, dwindling incomes, widening gap between rich and poor, sanctioned torture, Katrina and New Orleans — and has given progressives an opening.

Yet can they jump through it and win? Maybe. And it’s not because of how progressives talk about their issues? They say too much with words that most people can not taste, touch, and see. One session here, for instance, is called, “Imperial Sorrows: The Domestic Costs of Policing the Globe.” Say what? Another is called, “Enpowering Workers: Progressive Imperative.” Who are we talking to? The introductory government class at Penn?

But we just might win because of two other progressive strengths that fit the 21st century. We’re much better at building the unlikely alliances, executing the effective convenings across race, class, regions, and workplaces that is so vital in this collaborative century. Labor, greens, Latinos, African Americans, women’s rights organizations, business executives, progressive think tanks, diplomatic organizations, research groups, city and state leaders are among the 2,000 attendees. And progressives do a very good job disseminating their work in their own media, much of it Web-based and on independent broadcast outlets.

The media center here is one of the conference’s nerve centers. Dozens of broadcasters congregate morning to night on “radio row,” interviewing attendees and guests. Behind a blue curtain in the same room is “bloggers row,” where roughly as many digital scribes work. And behind us are representatives of familiar magazines — Ms.Magazine, Mother Jones, The Nation, Washington Monthly, In These Times — and even more that I’m just coming to know — My DD.com, and Tapped.

PITTSBURGH — On the day after he buried his father, Van Jones, arguably the most thoughtful and dynamic young leader in the American environmental movement, addressed the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference this morning. Jones, who bore his grief in occasional tears, told the more than 600 people in the room that this gathering was such a seminal event in the construction of a new green/labor/business governing coalition in the United States that his father wanted him to be here.

“He had some principles,” said Jones, who is head of a new California-based group named Green For All. “He stood up for the little people. He was born in abject poverty in Memphis. He joined the Air Force when he was 17-years-old in the middle of the Vietnam War so he could send a check to his mother. He had some principles. He came from the generation that had dogs sicked on them. He was in Memphis when Dr. King was killed and I was in utero. He had some principles. And the most fundamental of them was to stick up for the little people. Don’t leave anybody behind.

“My father got out of poverty,” Jones continued. “He could have bought a big house and could have left the community. He raised us right there.”

Jones stopped at this point. The room hushed. With a tissue, he dabbed at the tears on his cheeks. He bowed his head for a moment and then looked straight ahead. “We need to have principles,” he said. “What we need is to minimize the pain and maximize the gain for the little people, the ones too easy to leave behind.”

Aside from the riveting emotional content of the moment, there are a couple of big points worth noting about Jones’ appearance, and especially the steady evolution of a national political leader capable of tieing together the four essential social and economic movements — environmentalists, civil rights activitist, labor, and progressive businesses — that now have the opportunity to take back America. And it’s no accident that Jones, whose work until the couple of years was distinguished by defending citizens against the police in Oakland, has become a bona fide star.

The environmental movement, with all of its lily white warts and scientific hyping of minimal risks and upper crust chic, has nevertheless been the most important and durable movement on the left during the entire attack on America by what Jones calls “the pollution-based economy,” and “a government on the side of the problem makers.” By tying his work to the green movement, he broadened his base, linked to the considerable wealth on the green left, and found allies in the media and in Democratic politics. In 2007 he emerged in a column by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, shared a stage in New York with President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative, and worked with California Senator Barbara Boxer to hone the legislation, affixed to last year’s federal Energy Bill, that will train over 30,000 low income people in green collar jobs.

It also helps that Jones, who’s not yet 40, the grandson of a southern black minister, and a Yale Law School graduate, knows a little about cadence, metaphor, story-telling and theater. The man knows how to talk.

Today his message was this: “There is nothing standing between us and the green economy but our own cynicism, our lack of trust in each other, fear of success, and our being used to being small,” he said. “We have the obligation to be right and in the majority.”

Jones noted that during the Depression farmers, students, working people, and intellectuals built a permanent governing New Deal coalition that defeated Fascism, built prosperity, and created the middle class. He stressed the need to think about the opportunity that lies before the nation to build an economy that helps working people and the environment, that “lifts the nation and everybody in it.”

“This is not a problem we solve that is built on marginal fixes,” said Jones. “We have an economy based on hurting poor people and hurting the planet. We’re talking about an economy about helping poor people and helping the planet. In order to get that change out of the system we need a movement, we need a coalition that can last over time, that can govern for decades. The government is on the side of the problem makers in this economy. It’s time to build a government on the side of the problem solvers in this economy. It’s time to build an economy that leaves nobody behind.”

PITTSBURGH — A long time ago as a young reporter in Pennsylvania I attended a conference in Philadelphia that focused on the ties between jobs, the environment, and the economy. Essentially, said speakers from the state’s environmental community, there were more ties linking working people and environmentalists than hindrances. It was a novel thought then. It’s less so today. In fact, given the rising cost of energy, the threat of global climate change, and dwindling manufacturing and industrial jobs, the gathering strength of the labor and environmental alliance seems almost natural.

Today I’m attending the first of the two-day Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference here in Steel City. There are nearly 800 people in attendance, about roughly split between labor and green, with an important smattering of business executives. What’s remarkable about all the various words and phrases and proposals flying about here — words like efficiency, clean energy, renewable energy, prosperity, transformation, and jobs — is how this economic strategy has so clearly attained a non-partisan frame and an air of inevitability. Who of a right mind can disagree with the idea that in the vast economic transition occurring here and around the world lies the tremendous opportunity to make money, save money, develop new technology, and open new service and industrial sectors that offer good paying jobs? The presidential nominees from both parties are using the same words to describe this new path.

There’s no end to the barriers that will slow progress. For one, there aren’t many lawmakers in state Legislatures or in Congress, Republican or Democratic, willing to switch the spending priorities of the billions of dollars they control in public treasuries. Yet it’s those public funds that are essential to catalyze some of the research and development that is necessary to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, and the holes in the market that can propel development of new tools. There’s also no assurance that the unity about energy that marks this moment will be with us in five years.

Katrina Landis, the chief operating officer of BP Alternative Energy, reminded a plenary session today that three times since the 1970s Congress has promoted the tax credits and subsidies that leveraged new developments in renewable energy nationally, and three times Congress also has let those credits expire. She added that if Congress does not renew the production tax credits that are currently in effect, it will cost the United States economy $19 billion and over 116,000 jobs.

Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, took a different tack to the same point. He noted a conversation he had with Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, who said that GE’s business was largely dependent on new jet engines that were constantly being redesigned, and by the sale of two other major products that hadn’t been substantially redesigned for decades — power plants and light bulbs. The technology for the first is 50 years old, and the technology for the second is 100. In sum, Carl argued, energy production and use is the least innovative sector of the American economy. His suggestion: redesign energy markets to prompt innovation and high performance.

Today, the Apollo Alliance, which now employs me as communications director, released a new guide for cities to take advantage of the potential for green jobs. Take a look at Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities.

As the dimensions of the mortgage crisis both expand and get clearer, a new picture is emerging of a nation in pain that simultaneously is coming to new conclusions about what it means to be safe and secure in America. For the first time since post-war federal policy ganged up on cities to promote suburban expansion, cities are rebounding in remarkable ways and suburbs appear to have reached some kind of new limits to growth. The evidence of this profound shift is easy to find if you look.

First, here in Michigan and across much of the country, the towering growth in homeforeclosures is hitting the newest suburbs at least as hard, and in most cases harder than it is striking the state’s cities. Foreclosures in West Bloomfield and Birmingham are occurring at the same or higher rates than the rate of foreclosures in Detroit and its older suburbs.

The same is true, according to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, in Florida, California, Colorado, Georgia and other states.

Cities meanwhile are attracting new residents and new wealth, so much so that vast tracts of the urban landscape in cities as different as New York and Salt Lake City, Boston and Denver, Seattle and Knoxville, Chicago and Atlanta, and dozens of others, are being completely rebuilt.

This is a remarkable transformation. For most of my life cities were places to dismantle, not build. I was a kid in the 1960s when city officials and U.S. housing administrators teamed up to tear down much of White Plains, N.Y., my home town, as part of the federal urban renewal program. An elegant network of narrow streets and historic offices and walk-ups was replaced by Houston-like boulevards. A windowless mall was built near the center of town that became one of the most dangerous places to shop in the whole state. White Plains gradually came to its senses and slowly began to replace the urbanism that was removed, and the city is experiencing its own economic and cultural renaissance.

Chicago, too, is undergoing more than $1 billion in new housing, retail, and commercial investment along south Michigan Avenue, an area that encompasses hundreds of acres of old warehouses, storage buildings, and light industrial facilities. Boston is building a new city above the Big Dig. Los Angeles is rebuilding Grand Avenue. New York is planning 45 million square feet of homes and offices above a rail yard along the Hudson River.

A third bit of evidence is the popular clamor for modern transit. Grand Rapids recently won federal approval for a new rapid bus system, and as much as $29 million in US support to build the 10-mile line, which could be the first rapid transit line built in Michigan since early in the 20th century.

Northern Virginia is planning to build a new streetcar line, which would join a growing number of other streetcar systems, including operating lines in Portland and Kenosha, Wisc. And Atlanta is considering a new streetcar line along its famous Peachtree Street.

What appears to be occurring in the United States? Time-wasting, costly, energy-inefficient, land-consuming, and obsolete exurban patterns of development are taking new forms. The institutions that supported the old patterns are grievously injured. Citibank today announced a $23 billion write off connected to sour loans in its mortgage business. The American auto industry continues to shrink. Developers are going bankrupt, among them Levitt and Sons, which built the first auto-dependent cookie cutter suburb after World War Two, New York’s Levittown.

Coming up in their place are builders of new transit systems, designers of new green housing and LEED certified office buildings, and the entrepreneurial high tech businesses popping up downtown in small places like Traverse City, and big places like Charlotte.

The era of global climate change has produced such rainy and warm conditions in northern Michigan that a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted completely here over the last two days. Meanwhile it’s dry, desperately so, in several huge and significant regions of the country.

The striking contrasts are putting strains on the culture and economy in ways we’re only starting to understand. Yesterday I stood in a driving January rain talking to Jim MacInnes, the chief executive of Crystal Mountain, our local ski resort. He was interested in new economic data he’d read online. I was watching the deep gullies forming at the bottom of Buck, the resort’s steepest slope.

The signs of changing climate and an economy that has been slow to respond, are everywhere.

Judging by the thickening white sashes of salt lining Lake Mead and Lake Powell (see pix), the largest reservoirs in the United States, the drought on the Colorado Plateau is not only deepening, it is pushing water supply conditions for roughly 25 million people from serious toward dire. The moment of reckoning over water supplies, anticipated since the 1960s, appears to have arrived.

Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and southern California form the fastest growing region in the country. All are served by the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and hundreds of smaller communities. Lake Powell, north of the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, which lies just south, are less than half full and dropping steadily. Both are 105 feet lower than their full pools, and dropping about eight to ten feet a year.

The ring around the reservoirs is beginning to be seen as a noose around the neck of the region. Not surprisingly it’s become politically palatable to consider changes in water management and use once deemed impractical. Conservation measures were put into effect in Phoenix, and in Las Vegas the water district is paying homeowners $1 a square foot to tear up their lawns and install desert plantings.

The Colorado Plateau states and California last month finished an agreement that provides both more flexibility and certainty in who has the right to what’s left in both reservoirs, and sets triggers for declaring emergencies that dramatically cut use. The Metropolitan Water District, southern California’s major water provider, announced in November that they will buy 65 billion gallons of water annually from Central Valley farmers north of Sacramento.

Orange County is preparing to turn on a new waste treatment plant that will pump “highly treated wastewater from their new purification plant to percolation ponds in Anaheim. Eventually, the recycled water will be delivered to about 2.3 million people.” And all the desert states are more intensely eyeing the Great Lakes.

Hot Atlanta
The other region of the United States where water demand is outrunning supply is the Southeast. There’s been more rain there this week; Nevertheless, for the first time in the lives of most of the 10-county Atlanta region’s 4 million residents, turning on the tap is an invitation to consider the limits of growth. The U.S. drought map continues to show that precipitation, soil moisture, and lake and river levels are in “extreme” dry condition.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a nice piece on the region’s inability to plan and invest in water supply infrastructure. And Atlanta Water Shortage keeps a near-daily update of conditions.

Texas Too
Water authorities in the Texas Panhandle late last month said they were cutting the water supply from Lake Meredith to 11 cities, including Amarillo, Plainview, Lubbock, and Brownfield. The reason, according to the Houston Chronicle: “brutal drought conditions in two of the past three years.”

Don Chen, the very sharp founding executive director of Smart Growth America, announced late last year that he was taking a position with the Ford Foundation. Interesting move for a canny advocate and non-profit executive with the sort of keen entrepreneurial instincts to take an eight-year-old organization from a Washington-based start-up to a national leader in new designs for development. Smart Growth America has a $2 million annual budget and a 10-member staff that includes a former Democratic governor of Maryland, and a former editorial writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This week Smart Growth America announced that Geoffrey Anderson (see pix), who directed the smart growth program at the Environmental Protection Agency, succeeds Don as executive director.

The choices made by both men seem plainly apparent. How the organization and the movement it fosters will fare is less so.

The role of non-profit founder and executive director unfolds in evolutionary stages that generally occur in two-year time frames. The first two years is all youthful energy, rapid response, program building, strategic choice, and instinctive fundraising. The next two are generally consumed with hiring, training, coalition building, program expansion, and a more formalized program of donor and foundation development. The next two are consumed with the limits of growth, more intensive fundraising, the start of moderate staff turnover and replacement, and the installation of administrative procedures designed to make operations more efficient, but sometimes don’t. And then comes the really hard work of sustaining programs, budgets, board relations, coalition partner relations, formal development programs. By year eight, non-profit directors tend to get so immersed in the administrative and fund-raising programs, and so distanced from the principles and values that prompted them to start their organizations, that they begin to wonder what happened. Year eight, in short, is a long time in the life of a non-profit director and often the time of greatest peril in a non-profit’s development.

When an institution as stable, prestigious, and well-funded as the Ford Foundation comes knocking it’s easy to understand why a talented guy like Don Chen would respond.

Overseeing a government program is the other end of the spectrum. The working environment is stable to the point of being calcified. The sense of adventure and accomplishment comes from distributing grants to capable organizations that produce solid work that attracts some (but not too much) attention. Program directors like to hire good people. They are challenged by treading paths through the administrative and Congressional briars that don’t leave too many nicks. They build relationships in and out of government, in and out of Washington. They speak at the right conferences. They become expert in policy and national practice. If they stay long enough, as Geoff Anderson has, they get recognized as significant leaders in the field.

I’ve worked with Don and Geoff for years and know them well. Both are experienced, knowledgeable men who are capable managers, fair with their staff, and generous with their time. But here is the big challenge: Can the organization and the new director sell the goods?

There is no doubt that Smart Growth America and the other gold standard public interest organizations that focus their work on the consequences of growth have made an effective case for seeking changes in public and private investment that make places better. They’ve developed the ideas that have resulted in building communities and neighborhoods fit for the 21st century that are more economically competitive, use less energy, reduce congestion, invest in transit, curb pollution, establish open spaces, and provide housing opportunities for people of every income level. Smart growth is a set of policy and investment tools proven to work in more than 40 states.

The question is whether the Smart Growth movement can command these ideas and build the strong coalitions that translate them into policy and investment practice at the federal level, where the real money lies. With the exception of the transportation funding bills of the 1990s, which produced more rapid transit, the Smart Growth movement has been less successful in changing the old spending priorities for highways, housing, natural resource protection, and urban investment at the federal level. It will take a powerful alliance of untraditional allies at the grassroots — advocates for halting global climate change, improving housing, strengthening labor, transit advocates, and metropolitan business and neighborhood groups respected by both parties — to convince Congress and the White House to break with convention and alter how and where federal money is spent.

Geoff Anderson has the inside government experience to know where the pressure points lie, as well as the earnest temperament to build the coalitions to press for new policy. But it’s not clear whether he has the political instincts to step outside the safety zone he understood so well as a government manager, or the entrepreneurial energy to simultaneously lead a staff, develop new programs, and serve as the chief fundraiser. If he does, Smart Growth America will take its place among the nation’s truly influential public policy organizations. If he doesn’t, the young group will gradually decline. A lot of us out here in the provinces wish him the best in his important new venture.

The weight of history is a heavy burden. Just ask the developers of nuclear power, or the manufacturers of toxic farm chemicals, or the makers of cars that aren’t competitive in fuel economy or quality. These industrial sectors, and many more, were reshaped by cultural, political, and economic trends they neither anticipated nor were able to manage. Now that weight appears to be pressing hard on the American coal industry and the utilities that buy its globe-threatening product.

Here in Michigan residents in five communities have aligned with the big hitters in the state environmental community to oppose new coal-fired power plants and promote renewable sources. Four years ago just that sort of coalition halted in its tracks a proposed 425-megawatt, $700 million coal-fired plant in Manistee.

Now from the coal-producing West, and from several more critical states in the South and Great Plains, comes word of enormous turbulence in the coal market and utility construction industry. Montana residents and alternative energy advocates, according to a report today in the Helena Independent Record, are giving coal producers unaccustomed fits in mining production and power plant construction. Citizens are challenging the air quality permit of a proposed 250-megawatt, coal-fired power plant near Great Falls on the solid legal ground that the state did not consider the CO2 emissions.

Other proposed plants and coal mines are in limbo across Montana because of the market uncertainty prompted by citizen concern about coal’s primary role in causing global warming. Those proposals include a new mine near Bull Mountain, another new mine near Carpenter Creek that was meant to supply coal to Michigan and other Midwest states, and two coal liquification refineries planned for Great Falls and Butte.

Meanwhile, according to a new public opinion poll in Kansas, voters by a 2-to-1 margin agree with the decision by the state to block construction last year of two coal plants in western Kansas. The poll by Cooper and Secrest Associates, a Democratic political consulting firm, found that the 62 percent margin of support was less in western Kansas, but still a majority — 51 percent, while 40 percent disagreed and 9 percent weren’t sure.

In October, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment rejected a permit that would have allowed Sunflower Electric Power Corp. to build two 700-megawatt plants. According to the Kansas City Star, “Secretary Roderick Bremby blocked the proposed coal plants because of concerns over the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on global warming. But Sunflower is fighting the decision and some legislators have vowed to tackle the issue this session. ”

Indeed, the coal and utility industries have tremendous stakes in what is gradually becoming an epic struggle between an industry’s economic prospects and a planet’s ability to support life. For the time being, the industry is more than holding its own. Coal accounts for at least half of the energy used to meet America’s electricity needs, and coal-fired power plants produce 40 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 2001, coal consumption nationally has risen gradually, according to US government figures, but several industry officials have forecast that demand could double by 2017. That surge would be the result of new technology to turn coal into liquid fuel. Last month, Congress approved an energy funding law that largely ignores the rising sentiments against coal as a fuel source, but nevertheless provides the industry what it wants — political and financial support in Washington, support that none of the presidential candidates of either party are challenging.

The law allows the government to give up to $8 billion in loan guarantees to develop what Congress calls “clean coal” power plants and create liquid coal. Both are an urgent threat to accelerate global climate change, according to scientists. Meanwhile, the new energy bill provides up to $240 million a year through 2012 on projects that would capture and store underground the carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired plants.

Bottom line here: a whole lot more organizing is needed, along with making the case that alternatives are a much wiser investment for the economy, jobs, the environment, and public health.

A note to Mode Shift readers. It’s good to be back after a much-needed break. Thank you all for making this blog a treat to write. At year’s end Mode Shift had attracted 2,150 visitors a month, about 70 readers a day. I found a good pace for posting. About nine or ten posts a month. In 2008 I plan to increase the number of posts and to add new features. If you have ideas please let me know. And have a great year.