Modeshift

Monday, in the parlance of Washington policy and journalism, was scheduled to be a potential day of breakthrough in the work to achieve action on the warming climate. Senators John Kerry (Mass.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (Conn.) had announced that they’d come to consensus on what a bipartisan energy and climate policy fit for the 21st century looked like. The results were to be unveiled at a news briefing that had global import.

Instead nothing happened. It was like reeling in a sailfish, all fight and silvery splash, only to have the beast die on the way into the boat.

This is the third time in five months that that I’ve been involved in climate and clean energy campaigns that culminated in less than they promised. “Just say no” is emerging as a far easier answer than saying yes to progress.

In Copenhagen in December, nearly 200 nations gathered at the largest summit ever with the express purpose of reaching agreement on a climate treaty. Instead what they came up with was a novel accord that points in the right direction and may not achieve more than that.

In Traverse City, a small utility’s bid to acquire 30 percent of its energy from local renewable resources, including a state-of-the-art clean right-sized clean burning 10 mw wood biomass plant, generated such fierce hyperbole about unfounded risks among some environmentalists that you’d have thought the utility was proposing a 100-acre toxic waste site for the middle of town. The local push back, led by a grassroots environmental group, is consistent with similar resistance in 30 other states to proposals for new wind, solar, geothermal, wood biomass, and transmission lines. This week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is expected to decide on a big offshore wind farm in Massachusetts that has been the focus on a popular opposition campaign. The clean energy transition may not be televised.

Now comes the Senate’s attempt to push through a climate and energy bill, which over the weekend got washed up on the shoals of partisanship, immigration policy, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s re-election, and the powerful climate change-denying communications machine operated by America’s fossil fuel collective.

Today, Senator Reid retreated just a bit and sought to assure his Democratic and Republican colleagues that debate on the climate and energy bill would come before debate on the immigration bill. That makes sense since there is no immigration bill to debate in the Senate. But Graham, a very lonely Republican in the climate and clean energy space, has not yet indicated whether he’s ready to participate in introducing the ready-to-go energy bill that he’s spent months shaping with Senators Kerry and Lieberman.

The politics of stasis — of doing nothing — is brought action on climate change to a crawl, and that may be kind. The public will to act, to reduce emissions of carbon, to provide for the safety of the planet and all its inhabitants, is just not apparent in the United States, or in much of the rest of the developed world.

Clearly, a new operating program is needed politically and a new communications frame and strategy needs to be developed. Today the Environmental Protection Agency made public a new report on climate change effects that are getting worse:

• Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are increasing. Between 1990 and 2008, there has been about a 14 percent increase in emissions in the United States.
• Average temperatures are rising. Seven of the top 10 warmest years on record for the continental United States have occurred since 1990.
• Tropical cyclone intensity has increased in recent decades. Six of the 10 most active hurricane seasons have occurred since the mid-1990s.
• Sea levels are rising. From 1993 to 2008, sea level rose twice as fast as the long-term trend.
• Glaciers are melting. Loss of glacier volume appears to have accelerated over the last decade.
• The frequency of heat waves has risen steadily since the 1960s. The percentage of the U.S. population impacted by heat waves has also increased.

Still, people in the United States aren’t much concerned. They are clearly indicating,  in grassroots fights and in support for lawmakers who counsel to do nothing, that they are satisfied with the way things are. That is a dangerous sentiment in an unsettled world making powerful and swift transitions in every important sector — the economy, markets, the environment, energy, population, and competition for resources.

– Keith Schneider

This week, just a day before the nation marked the 40^th Earth Day, the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded 50 miles from the Louisiana coast, leaving 11 people dead, dozens injured, and a pulse of crude oil that is spreading across the Gulf of Mexico. The blast, which caused the platform to sink on Earth Day itself, came 16 days after 29 men perished in a West Virginia coal mine – the worst American mining disaster in 40 years.

The two calamities embody the relentless risks – human and environmental – that come with the unceasing pursuit of fossil fuel. They also highlight a stubborn feature of the original Earth Day – the consequences of America’s dangerous reliance on oil and coal – that has expanded and deepened in the 40 years since.

On Monday, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman are scheduled to make public a proposal for comprehensive climate and energy legislation they hope will change that vector. By some accounts the steps it takes to diminish oil and coal use will include a phased in cap for the electricity and industrial sectors. It may also contain a pollution fee for transportation fuels and new measures to foster the development and use of domestically produced cleaner energy alternatives.

In these and other provisions, the Senate proposal is said by Congressional staffers to differ substantially from the House energy and climate legislation enacted in June 2009. The House legislation contained robust measures to cap carbon emissions and to develop an emissions trading market that has potential to generate billions of dollars to accelerate the low-carbon economy.

In anticipation of the Senate climate and energy proposal, Public Opinion Strategies, a national market research firm, released on Earth Day the results of a poll that was conducted in five moderate to conservative states.  The firm found that a majority of 800 voters polled earlier this month in Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, and Virginia favored what the pollsters called an “overhaul the nation’s energy system to reduce polluting emissions and increase the use of renewable energy sources.”  The pollsters also discovered what they said was “strong support” – regardless of party affiliation -for any plan to put a price on carbon to also include refunds to citizens.

I’ll be busy on Monday reporting for USCAN on the Senate bill’s content, gather a summary of reactions from the climate action community, and describe the shape of the policy debate over the next few months.

Forty years ago, in response to the first Earth Day, 20 million Americans demonstrated their commitment to Mother Earth in marches, actions (I painted the White Plains train station and dragged tires out of the Bronx River), teach-ins and much more. The civic activism prompted a generation of bipartisan federal and state legislation that cleaned the air, cleared the water, and protected man and animal alike from a good number of industrial hazards. It also opened the way to a much more efficient economy that is many times larger today than it was then.

The legislation made public on Monday is driven by motives and energy that is consistent with the first Earth Day. But the political culture is so much angrier, divided, jealous, and immature — and that encompasses the behavior of extreme voices on every side. The result is that in an era when environmental dangers are just as urgent, and the potential for doing good just as keen, the federal government has scant chance to enact a measure that comes close to what’s needed.

– Keith Schneider

The director of the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor, and Economic Growth last week lauded Traverse City Light & Power for pursuing a renewable energy strategy that fits northwest Michigan’s reputation as a green region, and “complements all the assets and progressive trends this region represents”. Stanley “Skip” Pruss, who is one of Governor Jennifer Granholm’s closest advisors and a nationally known clean energy leader, also supported the utility’s proposal to generate a portion of its renewable energy from a state-of-the-art combined heat and power wood biomass plant, calling it “a tremendous asset.”

“If this community were to do that,” Pruss said, “if TCL&P were to do that, it would be a precedent-setting achievement that we would commend other utilities to emulate. That is real leadership.” (See a full transcript of his remarks here.)

April 7 Meeting Concludes Public Process
Pruss visit came less than a week before the last of the three public forums that TCL&P has held to invite public comment on its plan to acquire 30 percent of its energy from local renewable resources by 2020. Pruss cited the utility’s public communications and engagement process, during which TCL&P has asked its customers and citizens to help choose the appropriate renewable resource, “as absolutely commendable.” Full disclosure: I’ve spent several hours a week since January as a communications and engagement strategist to help TCL&P draw up and execute the public process.

When asked directly by a board member and a citizen whether TCL&P should heed calls from some members of the community to slow the process and delay a decision on building a state-of-the-art biomass plant, Pruss was direct: “There are choices to be made. I would be disinclined to wait a year or two before you act. I think you should be aggressive.” (See attached transcript)

Pruss is leading Michigan’s new economic strategy, which relies on developing renewable energy resources, clean vehicles, and the tools and practices to move from fossil fuels to clean energy. He said over the next 15 months or so Michigan will see nearly $14 billion in clean energy investment, most of it for new plants downstate to manufacture lithium ion battery technology to power vehicles and store energy.

Benefits and Burdens
Pruss was effusive in outlining his support for the utility’s 30BY20 plan, which he said was at the leading edge of the state’s transition. He also described what he called the “benefits and burdens” of pursuing wind, solar, and biomass, acknowledging that there were no perfect technologies.

Pruss described one concern he had about wood biomass as a fuel source for new power plants. He noted that the state is aware of proposed biomass plants in northern Michigan capable of generating almost 200 megawatts of power. The TCL&P proposed plant would generate 10 mw.

“Here is my concern with biomass,” Pruss said, “not that we don’t have the supply and not that we can’t harvest that supply and deliver it in a sustainable way. We can. The concern is that we have a lot of potential biomass fuel projects both for combustion and biofuels, more of the former than the latter. But there are new projects that pop up. If they do advance they would be competing for the same supply. We don’t know a whole lot about price sensitivity except there is price sensitivity at some point in time.”

Sustainable Forestry
Michigan State University and Michigan Tech are working with DELEG on a major study to better understand how to apply the state’s enormous forest resources – they are larger than all but four other states – to biomass generation for electricity and for biofuels. Other states, among them Massachusetts where similar concerns about forest sustainability have been raised, also are conducting intensive assessments.

“What government can do and should do, and what we are doing — we’re building the capacity with our universities,” Pruss said. “We have consultants doing this. We are spending a lot of money to say this is how much biomass we have. This is our best calculation. This is how much there is. So you can plan and know how much is out there on a sustainable basis.”

The TCL&P wood biomass proposal merits state support, said Pruss, because of the plant’s design. TCL&P proposes to build a plant that generates electricity and steam, what engineers refer to as “cogeneration,” or “combined heat and power.”

The proposed TCL&P biomass plant, which would operate as cleanly as a natural gas-fired plant, and much cleaner than a coal-fired utility, would also be twice as energy efficient as a conventional biomass plant. Its construction would generate jobs and its operation would produce permanent jobs and keep $4 million in the community each year that is currently going to Wyoming, railroads, and a coal-fired utility in Lansing.

An Example For The State
“Your plant, I’m guessing, is 70 to 80 percent efficient,” said Pruss. “That is huge. That means you’re going to be twice as energy efficient as anything out there. I think that so important. That is part of the calculus in the equation of benefits and burden. The fact that your plant is going to be so energy efficient is great. I want you to be an example for other communities around the state.”

“With respect to your plan – because it involves cogeneration which doubles the efficiency of the plant – that is hugely important,” Pruss said. “I know Governor Granholm and I would like that plant to proceed.”

Linda Johnson, chair of the Light & Power board, said after the meeting that she was pleased with Pruss’ analysis of the board’s plans. She also shrugged off criticism that Light & Power was rushing into a decision, noting that board members have been studying biomass since 2005 during a tour of energy plants in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.

“We have not been in a rush,” she said. “We have been doing this for four years, and it’s taken us this long to establish what our needs are. To just sit back and do nothing would be irresponsible at this point.”

– Keith Schneider with Steve Kellman, who is a former reporter for the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

The Solar Energy Industries Association last week made public a national poll that found strong citizen support for adding the energy of the sun to the nation’s portfolio. The timing of the results was meant to coincide with the Federal government’s review of big solar thermal projects proposed on public lands in the West.

The poll, though, masks another emerging clean energy trend in the desert. A good number of citizen activist groups are pushing hard to stop solar development, as they’ve done for wind projects around the country, and other clean energy development.

How much influence could such protests generate? A lot. A year ago, the Bureau of Land Management, a unit of the Interior Department, received 199 applications for industrial-scale solar plants that would take up 1.7 million acres in the desert Southwest. Solar Millennium, Optisolar and Chevron Energy Partners, among others,  filed requests for nearly 1 million acres of land in California alone, the vast majority of it in the Mojave.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act calls for generating 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2015. Four days before the Bush administration left office in January 2009, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne authorized the BLM to create renewable energy offices in Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada. The offices are meant to speed permitting for wind, solar, biomass and geothermal projects, as well as transmission lines.

Let’s just say they’re busy. One developing struggle in the Mojave Desert is in Imperial County, where citizens are nervously watching a proposed 750-megawatt thermal array. Donna Tisdale, an activist with an impressive history of stopping big projects in the region over environmental issues, is revving up local opposition to the solar facility, along with a 200-megawatt wind farm in McCain Valley. “Some folks call me a NIMBY,” she told High Country News. “I’m protecting my community. Rural towns always take the brunt of these massive industrial projects. … We’re tired of it.”

“To knowingly run out and destroy pristine habitat in the name of saving the environment is ludicrous,” April Sall, the conservation director for the Wildlands Conservancy, told the Denver Post in September.

BrightSource Energy certainly got that message. Last September BrightSource canceled a solar thermal project in the Broadwell Dry Lake region of the Mojave, joining  Tessera Solar, which also canceled its plan to develop a 5,000-acre solar-thermal site nearby. Both plants faced significant citizen opposition and would have encountered even more because they would be located in the 941,000-acre Mojave Trails National Monument that Senator Dianne Feinstein has proposed. In all, 17 big solar thermal projects and a half dozen big wind projects proposed for the area have been halted by the proposed monument, which would link Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve.

Clean energy developers are surprised by the push back. “I got into this business because I feel it’s the right thing to do for the future of this country,” said Paul Whitworth, co- founder of Lightsource Renewables, a company that has already put one solar project on the back burner because of a combination of lack of transmission capacity and Feinstein’s national monument proposal.

“It’s not ‘We’re either going to have a solar plant or we’re going to have this piece of desert left alone,’ ” Whitworth told the Denver Post. “It’s ‘We’re either going to have a big solar plant out here in the desert or we’re going to have brownouts and blackouts.”

In February, BrightSource made another move to quell public concern by announcing it would reduce the size of a proposed 400-megawatt solar thermal power plant that it initially said would cover five square miles of the Mojave. The new plan calls for reducing the area needed for the plant 12 percent. Reason: the company said it wanted to protect the habitat of the endangered desert tortoise.

The cord tying the solar development together was a 500-kilovolt $500 million transmission line that would have cut through Johnson Valley on its way to Los Angeles. Citizen opposition to the line was a big reason that Los Angeles city officials halted the proposal this month. The 85-mile project was criticized by conservationists because it would have cut through two wildlife preserves and the San Bernardino National Forest. David Myers, the executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, said better routes were available, including using existing transmission corridors. “The bottom line was it was an ill-conceived project,” Myers told Reuters.

The competiton between wild lands and clean energy is dividing the environmental community in California, especially the Sierra Club. Last week California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger held a conference on renewable energy. Carl Zichella, one of the organization’s renewable energy experts, asserted that climate change jeopardizes many desert plants and animals that live at higher altitudes. Reaching the necessary emissions reductions can’t be achieved only through installing rooftop solar systems and conserving energy, he said. “No matter how we look at it, we need large-scale energy development,” Zichella said.

But Joan Taylor, of the Sierra Club’s Nevada and California desert committee, said many energy projects now moving forward would be on pristine, publicly owned land. She suggested building clean energy projects on private lands that have already been disturbed. “The disturbed-land alternative can be embraced by environmentalists and communities,” Taylor said.

More on opposition to transmission lines comes next.

– Keith Schneider

Now that passage of health care legislation proved that Congress is still capable of acting on big ideas, Washington this week was aflutter with action on the climate and energy bill. White House Legislative Affairs Director Phil Schiliro, and the president’s energy and climate adviser, Carol Browner, met mid-week with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Topic: developing a strategy to corral the 60 votes needed to pass the measure in the Senate.

The same day the chairmen of several Senate committees with jurisdiction over climate and energy met with Reid. And Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman spent time with freshman Democrats on the proposal the three senior lawmakers are hoping to introduce in April.

Letters in support of comprehensive action on climate and clean energy also are flying around Washington. One of those freshman Democrats, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, drafted and sent to Reid a letter signed by 21 other Democrats that urged a vote before the end of the year.

“Our lack of a comprehensive clean energy policy hurts job creation and increases regulatory uncertainty throughout our economy,” wrote Udall. “Businesses are waiting on Congress before investing billions in energy, transportation, manufacturing, building and other sectors.” The letter came just a few days after the senator’s father, Stewart L. Udall, the Interior secretary for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and one of the 20^th century’s greatest environmental leaders, died at age 90.

Another letter, signed by 23 climate action groups was sent to the White House, the EPA, and five cabinet secretaries urging the administration to make good on the commitments it made in Copenhagen. The Copenhagen Accord, negotiated in the climate summit’s final hours by President Obama and the heads of 20 other nations, calls for $30 billion in international aid over the next three years to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and to support adaptation, technology development, and capacity building. The accord also encouraged developed nations to commit to “mobilizing jointly $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.”

“As leaders in the Senate finalize a new approach to comprehensive climate and energy legislation,” said the letter, “we urge you to work to ensure that the Senate bill includes significant and predictable investments in international action to combat climate change and its consequences.”

There was new light focused this week on the dangerous campaign by the fossil fuel industry and its allies to discredit climate science and clean energy. Greenpeace published “Dealing in Doubt: The Climate Denial Industry and Climate Science,” that reports on the 20-year effort to block progress with specious attacks on the science, and accuses ExxonMobil of being the ringleader.

And six months after NRDC blogger Pete Altman \reported that a Danish study critical of Danish wind energy was financed by an American activist think tank with financial ties to oil-rich Koch Industries, that revealing connection generated headlines in Europe.  (http://jp.dk/uknews/article2015323.ece)

Pretty good week for climate and clean energy action in Washington.

– Keith Schneider

In signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act today President Barack Obama ensured that $113.5 billion will be spent over the next two years on developing clean fuels, modernizing rail transit, pursuing energy efficiency, developing high-mileage electric vehicles, and scaling up electrical generating stations powered by the wind, sun, and heat of the earth.

The magnitude of the clean energy investment – consistent with the sums spent to launch the Interstate Highway System in the late 1950s, and to put a man on the Moon in the 1960s – is intended by President Obama and Congressional leaders to begin charting a new national economic development strategy that is based on much different priorities than those that preceded it.

Instead of consuming more energy, land, and natural resources the clean energy provisions in the stimulus bill are aimed at conserving energy and sharply improving efficiency. Instead of reaching deep into the earth and far overseas to secure increasingly scarce and insecure oil reserves, the president looks to harness the abundant sun, wind, and geo-thermal resources within America’s boundaries.

In place of adding more carbon dioxide and other climate change pollution to the atmosphere, the clean energy provisions of the stimulus bill will spur non-polluting sources of energy. And President Obama and Congressional leaders have set in place investments in research, development, and training in a bid to ensure that more of the parts of the clean energy economy are invented and installed in America by American workers.

President Obama signed the bill during a ceremony in Denver at the Museum of Nature and Science, which generates a portion of its power from a solar array of 465 photovoltaic panels on its roof. The president was introduced by a solar industry executive, Blake Jones, the president of Namaste Solar Electric.

The president said the clean energy provisions of the recovery bill are “an investment that will double the amount of renewable energy produced over the next three years.” He said the clean energy provisions would help “transform the way we use energy.” And he introduced a new Web site, Recovery.gov, to enable Americans to track the bill’s progress.

“Our American story is not — and has never been — about things coming easy,” the president said. “It’s about rising to the moment when the moment is hard, converting crisis into opportunity, and seeing to it that we emerge from whatever trials we face stronger than we were before.”

He added: “I hope this investment will ignite our imagination once more in science, medicine, and energy and make our economy stronger, our nation more secure, and our planet safer for our children.”

The $113.5 billion that the president and Congress directed to clean energy and green-collar job generation and training make up one of the largest portions of the $505 billion that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act authorizes in spending. The balance of the $787 billion stimulus bill – $282 billion – is for tax cuts.

In order to qualify for federal investments, the law requires states and cities to develop criteria for stimulus projects that gives priority to energy efficiency, repairing roads and bridges rather than building new capacity, green-collar job training, family-supporting jobs that include job quality standards, and access to stimulus jobs for low-income people.
A Plan For A New American Century

In both the scale of the spending directed to clean energy and good jobs programs, and in its specific goals the stimulus bill reflects years of work by the national Apollo Alliance coalition of labor, environmental, business, and social justice organizations.

“This is the largest investment in clean energy development in our history,” said Phil Angelides, a California businessman and chairman of the Apollo Alliance. “It represents the focused work of labor, business, environmental and social justice organizations who developed a clear strategy about where the nation needed to go, and worked together to achieve it. President Obama and members of Congress deserve the nation’s appreciation for taking this important step to guide the country down this new and essential economic path. But this is only the start of the economic transformation that America must undertake to ensure prosperity and provide for good family-supporting, green-collar jobs. More needs to be accomplished in the months ahead to accelerate development in the clean energy sector to limit oil imports, reduce the threat of climate change, and rebuild the American middle class.”

Among the clean energy investments in the stimulus are $10.9 billion to build a state-of-the art national energy grid, $6 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy, $2 billion for advanced battery manufacturing, $5 billion for home weatherization, $3.2 billion for state energy efficiency and clean energy grants, and $17.7 billion to modernize and expand rail transit.

James K. Gailbraith, an economist and professor of government at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, also commended the Obama administration and Congress for the speed in drafting and passing the stimulus bill. But Galbraith, like other leading economists, said in an interview that the just-approved stimulus should be followed by more spending measures of similar scale.

“The policy needs to be bigger and we should be prepared for the crisis to go on longer,” he said. “That point is important for the Apollo Alliance. It is legitimate and important to have strong elements in the program that can spend out over a period, and on which you can build.”

“The reason why you want a program which builds for the long-term on energy and the environmental front is because that is the direction that the public and private economies want to take,” said Galbraith. “You can build an industrial sector on clean energy for the U.S. economy and it can serve as an export sector.”

“To me, the stimulus is a first step,” he said. “But we don’t know what scale we need. We need to be on a scale sufficiently large to make a decisive impact reasonably soon. If we don’t do that the bad news just keeps flowing in.”

More Action Needed
The Apollo Alliance is heeding that lesson. The Alliance’s national, state, and local organizations are preparing to be deeply involved in upcoming Congressional consideration of major investments in energy, manufacturing to make the components and parts for the clean energy sector, and in capping climate change gases and generating investment revenue for clean energy and green-collar jobs.

Today Congressional lawmakers and public interest leaders paused to consider the importance of the stimulus bill and the role played by the Apollo Alliance to gain its passage.

“This legislation is the first step in building a clean energy economy that creates jobs and moves us closer to solving our enormous energy and environmental challenges,” said Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and Senate Majority Leader. “We’ve talked about moving forward on these ideas for decades. The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them.”

“President Obama and Congress made a huge investment to expand clean energy efforts,” said Dan Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate security at the Center For American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington. “The economy, national security, and our planet mandate that we become more efficient and cleaner. The Apollo Alliance understood this and worked with labor, business, social justice and environmental organizations to support an economic transition that will put people back to work, save families money, and reduce oil use. The Alliance deserves applause for its efforts to help shape and pass this bill.”

Apollo’s Vision Realized In Part
To be sure, the clean energy provisions in the stimulus bill reflect the sound idea first introduced by the Apollo Alliance in 2003, when the group was launched. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the founders of the Apollo Alliance steadily gained support for a message that distilled more than 30 years of conversation in the environmental and business communities about the relationship of the environment to the economy. The Apollo Alliance, named for and inspired by the American space mission, cut through the complexity by arguing that the United States could simultaneously solve the energy crisis, the climate crisis, and the jobs crisis if it pursued clean energy development.

In its widely read New Energy For America report in January 2004, the Alliance called for a “new Apollo Project” to invest $300 billion over ten years in the clean energy sector to “revitalize our manufacturing capacity, rebuild neglected infrastructure, close the growing technology gap with foreign competitors, preserve the environment, and generate good jobs for America’s working families.” The report estimated that such an investment would generate 3 million jobs.

Many of the provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are consistent with recommendations that the Apollo Alliance made in its two reports last year.

In September 2008, the Apollo Alliance published The New Apollo Program, a comprehensive investment strategy and implementation plan that called for the federal government to make a $500 billion, 10-year commitment to clean energy development to generate 5 million jobs. In December 2008, the Alliance published the Apollo Economic Recovery Act that recommended a one-year, $50 billion investment to create or retain 650,000 direct jobs and 1.3 million more indirect jobs in communities across the country.

“The signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan marks a fundamental shift in our nation’s economic and energy policy – a shift toward energy independence, climate stability and broadly shared prosperity,” said Angelides, in a press statement today. “Across the nation, business, labor, environmental and community organizations have come together to create an unstoppable momentum that is making good green-collar jobs the focal point of America’s economic recovery. We must now turn our attention to the energy and climate initiatives that are needed this year to bring our critical mission to rebuild America’s economy from launching point to full speed.”

– Keith Schneider

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.”

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.”