Government | ModeShift

In Washington, Climate and Energy Moves A Bit

by Keith SchneiderMarch 25, 2010March 25, 20100

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 …

Recovery Bill is Breakthrough on Clean Energy, Good Jobs

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 17, 2009May 27, 20111

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 â€“ consistent with the sums spent to launch the Interstate Highway System in the …

Take Back America, The Narrative

by Keith SchneiderMarch 17, 2008June 18, 20141

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, …

Van Jones; An Economy For Problem Solvers

by Keith SchneiderMarch 14, 2008March 14, 20082

PITTSBURGH â€” 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 …

About Those Suburbs and Cities

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 15, 2008February 1, 20080

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. …

A Driving Rain in Northern Michigan; Rings Around Southwest’s Deepening Drought

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 8, 2008January 8, 20080

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 …

Geoff Anderson Takes Helm at Smart Growth America

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 7, 2008January 8, 20082

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 Journalist Turned Environmental Activist in China

by Keith SchneiderDecember 16, 2007December 17, 20070

My new MacBook has a video camera and communications features (okay, don’t laugh all you Apple freaks) that enables me to dial up sources on Skype and also see who I’m talking to on my screen. On Friday morning I used these tools to interview John D. Liu, an American-born videographer, soil scientist, and founder of the Environmental Education Media Project for China, a 10-year-old environmental organization based in Beijing. My questions concerned the growing …

In Seattle, A Change of Heart on Harbor Highway

by Keith SchneiderDecember 13, 2007December 29, 20070

Cary Moon, the founder of the People’s Waterfront Coalition in Seattle, and one of the country’s premier advocates for alternatives to wasteful highways, wrote me this week about the progress she and her colleagues are making to replaced the elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct with a less expensive, neighborhood conserving, energy efficient alternative. “You might find this joint press release from the governor, the county, and the city interesting,” said Ms. Moon (see pix). “Quite a …

Flip: As Bali Climate Conference Begins, One Man Makes a Multi-Media Difference

by Keith SchneiderDecember 3, 2007December 3, 20070

How useful can imagination and multi-media imagery be in helping to explain the risks of global warming?Â Check out this remarkable interactive map produced by Architecture 2030, the non-profit founded by Ed Mazria, an architect based in New Mexico. Each of the red hot spots identifies a coastal community that would largely disappear in a torrent of tidal flooding caused by the melting ice caps. It’s among the most immediately visual scenarios of a potentialÂ national calamity …