Modeshift

The most beautiful country in the world, the United States, presents spectacular scenes of nature in every state, like the Cape Cod shoreline on Earth Day in Chatham, Mass. Photo/Keith Schneider

CHATHAM, Mass. — The tides here lay down a walkway of shells — horseshoe crabs, scallops, palm-size crabs — where the water meets dry sand. On Earth Day 2013 a nearly full moon is perched, like a round plate on a pedestal, amid an expanse of cloudless blue sky. Gulls soar and dive in a stout breeze, and in the nearby mudflats men and women with long-handled metal rakes in hand and collars turned up to the wind probe for sweet clams.

Had it not been for the principles of conservation and the values of pollution prevention that defined the first Earth Day in 1970, it’s almost certain that this stretch of Cape Cod beach would be sickened by now by any number of symptoms of environmental disease — sewage, chemical pollution, unsightly development, plastic litter, algae, and smog. The fact that shells mark the beach here, not garbage, and that the air is as clear as fresh-wiped crystal is testament to a streak in the American character that most citizens do not take for granted.

We cherish our beautiful places, and we are a nation rich in them. We’ve actively approved statutes to safeguard that beauty. And despite decades of effort by one faction or another to weaken those protections, our citizens and their allies in government and the courts time and again have insisted that they be enforced.

Gulls at work on a scallop. Photo/Keith Schneider

To do otherwise is to capitulate to the same tide of neglect and dysfunction that has consumed cities, the land, and the water in so many other countries. In Beijing the air is so thick with coal dust and toxic chemicals it’s dangerous to breathe. The Yamuna River is so choked with the raw sewage and chemical effluent of Delhi that it stinks like an open sewer and produces giant bubbles of methane. Old wells in Azerbaijan provide a pathway for streams of crude oil to rise to the surface and pour into earthen impoundments, forming sizable and unguarded ponds of fuel so aromatic they sting the nose, and so flammable they could explode into fire at any time. (more…)

This has been a lousy week of murder in America. It’s also been another intolerable and telling week of cultural contrast best described by what President Obama today called “shameful” politics.

When a terrorist bomb killed three and injured nearly 180 people in Boston two days ago, we reacted with sorrow and agitation and anger. We express a national resolve to study the weapon, hunt down the suspects, renew our collective spirit, and take necessary action to make the country safer.

But we’ve chosen to continue to do nothing about the more serious threat: Gun violence. Since the Newtown shooting on December 24 — during which 20 students, six teachers and staff, the shooter, and the shooter’s mother were killed — almost 3,500 American men, women, and children have died in gun-related violence.

Just since Sunday — four days ago — two children, five women, and 28 men died from gunshots. A miserably revealing compendium of gun deaths since Newtown is posted daily by Salon.com and should be regularly visited by Americans interested in reducing actual risks to our lives.

Today the U.S. Senate blocked proposed legislation that would have required background checks for gun buyers who purchased weapons from gun shows and from other unregulated markets. That represents about 40 percent of gun sales. The proposal is a baby step, but a step nevertheless. Enacting that tiny change would signal that the U.S. could actually act to limit a public health hazard so serious that it threatened, as we’ve seen over the last generation, students in grade school and college, adults in a movie theater, innocent bystanders on ordinary streets, adults killed by children, and children killed by adults.

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Last month an 11-member collaborative – two foundations, five state and national environmental organizations, four energy companies — announced they had formed the Center for Sustainable Shale Development. The mission: to develop and implement drilling and production standards for shale gas that are environmentally safe and can be certified by an independent third party.

In essence, the new Pittsburgh-based center is seeking to do for the unconventional fuels sector what the U.S. Green Building Council did to significantly improve design, land use practices, and energy and water efficiency when it established the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for building construction. LEED standards changed how commercial buildings are designed and constructed. They did so by establishing a market for innovation that is encouraged, expanded, and even enforced not by regulation but by buyers.

It’s too early to know whether the collaborative — which includes Shell and Chevron, the Environmental Defense Fund and Penn Future — will produce meaningful advances in production practices. But there’s no question, at least in my mind, that the center’s formation is a significant step toward much-needed political and social pragmatism in developing the nation’s ample shale energy reserves.

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In Marietta, Ohio, where many authors of the Northwest Territories Ordinance settled, and in the state that twice secured President Obama’s election, a historical marker reminds Americans of our political intelligence. Photo/Keith Schneider

In 2008, on the eve of his election to the presidency, Barack Obama greeted a huge and bouyant crowd in Chicago with this invocation to unity:

“This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.”

Early Wednesday, after he’d swept through the swing states, caused a Rovian fit on Fox’s election night coverage, and was elected to his second term, President Obama reminded us again about his grace, his temperament, his fairness. It’s why the majority of Americans hold Obama — a bit worn, a little chastened, still determined — in such regard:

“Tonight, despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight.

I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.”

Walt Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln as “the grandest figure on the crowded canvas of the drama of the 19th century.”  I keep coming up with an image of Lincoln when I consider Obama. The pictures of the president returning to Washington yesterday reminded me of the Civil War president – slim, resolute, shoulders bent with burden. Like Lincoln, Obama presides over a nation divided, fighting a pitched ideological war, much of it centered around racism and intolerance, and its blistering heart firmly beating in the states of the Deep South.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Keith Schneider

Maybe things aren’t as dismaying as we thought a week ago. Or just a little less in the dismay department.

In the last few days, two of the prominent names in American politics and business appeared to reach consistent conclusions about governing, technology, and the warming climate.

On Friday, Karl Rove told an audience of natural gas developers in Texas that “climate is gone” as a Congressional issue. And this week, in a Rolling Stone interview, Bill Gates said it will take a breath-taking leap in innovation to meet rising global energy demand and still cut climate-changing pollution. “To have the kind of reliable energy we expect and to have it be cheaper and zero carbon,” said the Microsoft chairman, “we need to pursue every available path to achieve a really big breakthrough.”

Rove and Gates view the crisis from alternate sides of the political spectrum, of course. But in succinctly describing the problem they also indirectly set out a path for climate activism that involves much greater grassroots agitation to win elections, and higher levels of publicly-funded support for clean energy research and development.

Tactics
Both facets of that tactical strategy are within reach. In Washington, the results of the election, while damaging, also left enough sympathetic lawmakers in place to make some progress on the clean energy investment front. Democratic lawmakers intent on making a difference on climate and energy retained their chairmanships in the Senate. And of the 56 members of the Congressional Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, just seven House and one Senate member lost their bids for reelection. “It should be clear,” said Sam Ricketts, the coalition’s executive director, “that a vote for cap and trade and ardent support for a cleaner environment were not the target of voter anger that many opposed to these policies might lead you to believe.”

In addition, the most important and telling vote for climate action in the country was the strong majority result to enforce the emissions reduction and energy efficiency goals of AB32, California’s climate law. In a game changing marriage of superior campaign financing, message development, and grassroots activism, climate advocates and clean energy venture capitalists outspent, out-organized, and soundly beat the oil industry in a crucial vote.

A New Opening
Climate activists in and outside Washington, who nearly a year ago anticipated a big diplomatic advance in Copenhagen, are justifiably worn by the reverse momentum in the 11 months since. But in the past week, my conversations around the U.S. indicate a resolve among activists to dig deeper and be prepared for a new opening.

That could come sooner than any of us think.

No matter how tightly the fossil fuel industry wraps itself around lawmakers in state capitols and on Capitol Hill, there is still the one motivating electoral factor it cannot control – the American response to rising gasoline prices. The global knife edge that describes the tightening supplies and increasing demand for oil will inevitably tip toward $4-a- gallon gas or higher, say energy industry analysts. When that happens, perhaps in the next year, climate activists need to be ready to identify the culprits who blocked the cheaper and cleaner alternatives and the jobs, prosperity, and safety they would have produced.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – In a gesture that signaled more urgent engagement to cool the planet, the United Nation’s chief climate negotiator today opened this nation’s first international climate conference by sealing a symbolic Great Climate Wall of China with an ancient proverb. Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat and climate expert, who in May was named the new executive secretary for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stamped the proverb – “with everyone’s determination, we can win anything” – on a mosaic wall of 4,000 portaits of people from China and around the world concerned about the increasing evidence of the warming climate.

“The symbolism of this mural is significant,” said Figueres. “Addressing climate change is not just about governments working collectively. It’s also about all of us working collectively and deciding what kind of stamp we want to leave on human history.”

The six-day Tianjin meeting, which ends on Saturday, is the latest opportunity for 3,000 participants from 176 nations to make progress on a global climate agreement, and sets the tone for the annual two-week UNFCCC climate summit, which this year occurs from November 29 to December 10 in Cancun, Mexico. The conference is being held in the brand new and immense 230,000-square meter Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center (see pix above), which opened earlier this year after just 8 months of construction, according to conference organizers.

Activism Supported By UN
Figueres described the need to make the transition from the individual actions that nations are taking to reduce global warming to collective global steps that can be formalized in a binding treaty. Her participation today in an event organized by the Global Campaign For Climate Action (GCCA), Tck tck tck, and Greenpeace was clearly intended to signal a new resolve at the United Nations to generate more political and public attention on the actions countries are taking to reduce carbon emissions. With her animated support for more civic activism, Figueres’ unmistakable message is to encourage public activism as a tool to push negotiators to a binding agreement. She also sought to spotlight the broad international support among citizens at the grassroots, including 350.org’s Global Work Party on October 10, which has organized nearly 6,000 events in 183 countries

Her tone and tilt are a departure from her more cautious predecessor, Danish diplomat Yvo de Boer. Figueres called the GCCA’s international work to mobilize citizens for climate action “important, significant, and impressive,” and concluded her remarks with this: “Thank you for the inspiration. I will take it into the negotiations this week.”

Government negotiators and non-governmental organizations said today that the Tianjin and Cancun meetings could produce enough progress for legal decisions that launch a global system to preserve forests, establish a financial system to coordinate adaptation and emissions reduction projects, formalize emissions reductions commitments, and establish a system to review progress toward those goals. The question is whether the Cancun meeting will set a stronger negotiating foundation that can lead to a formal international agreement between all nations in time for the 2011 climate summit in South Africa or the 2012 summit in South Korea.

Though the United States and China, the two largest carbon polluters, have been reluctant to set a binding global emissions limit, there is evidence that nations want to reach that goal. Last year in Copenhagen, heads of state and climate negotiators from 28 countries that are responsible for 80 percent of climate-changing emissions developed the Copenhagen Accord. The accord is a political agreement that indicates nations individually and collectively should check carbon emissions sufficiently to limit the rise in global temperature to less than 2 degrees Centigrade. In the accord, which was reached on the last day of the Copenhagen summit, developed nations also committed to provide $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 to assist developing nations make the transition from a carbon-based to a clean energy economy.

Hope and  Evidence That Nations Are Moving Steadily Toward Big Steps
This month, the UNFCC reported that 139 nations, including the 27-member European Union, have agreed to the accord or have expressed their intent to sign on, The UNFCCC reported in March that it received submissions of national pledges to cut or limit emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 from 75 countries, which account for all but 20 percent of global emissions. In addition 41 industrialized countries formally communicated their economy-wide targets and 35 developing countries have “communicated information on the nationally appropriate actions they are planning, provided they receive the appropriate support in terms of finance and technology.”

In an interview in March, Yvo de Boer, the outgoing UNFCCC executive secretary who managed the Copenhagen climate summit, said, “You can argue that while Copenhagen failed in a legal sense, it was a success in a political sense. The question is now how you take that forward.”

There are as many answers sweeping through Tianjin’s modern and vast conference hall here as negotiators and participants. The focus, as it was in Copenhagen and will be in Cancun is action on climate warming that can be formalized in a written agreements. This week negotiators and the world will gain more insight into what nations are willing to do to accelerate the clean energy economy, reduce the cutting in the world’s forests, and adapt to warming temperatures.

And just as it’s been in the previous meetings over the last several years, China and the United States will suck up most of this week’s attention and concern. There is good reason for that. It’s true that India is acting to reduce its carbon emissions and is expanding solar power, Mexico is adopting new vehicle efficiency standards, and the European Union invested $41 billion last year in clean energy and more than half of the continents new power production in 2009 came from renewable energy sources.

China and U.S. Center of Attention
Still, China and the U.S. are collectively pursuing a kind of schizophrenic energy and climate strategy that by necessity commands the world’s focus.

China’s energy consumption last year was the world’s highest, equivalent to 2.3 billion tons of oil, 0.4 percent more than the U.S. energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. Moreover, demand for energy is rising faster in China than any country, and it is the largest producer of climate emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy. And though Chinese officials say they are meeting the goal, announced last year in Copenhagen, of a 40 to 45 percent reduction in carbon intensity by 2020, an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council concludes that China’s carbon emissions will essentially double over the decade to more than 12 billion tons a year.

The basic reason is that even as China invested $35.6 billion last year in clean energy development, announced closures of hundreds of inefficient coal-fired power plants, and became the unmistakable global leader in solar manufacturing, it also said it will increase coal production by 2020 to over 4.2 billion metric tons annually, an increase of 33 percent from the 3.15 billion tons the country will mine and consume this year, according to the China National Coal Association. China produces and burns more coal than any other country -three times more than the U.S. – and coal supplies 70 percent of the nation’s total energy demand.

The U.S. meanwhile passed legislation in 2009 to invest roughly $100 billion in clean energy development, energy efficiency, and fuel-saving transit, and became the largest generator of wind energy in the world. The Environmental Protection Agency, acting at the direction of the White House, formalized in April new rules to significantly improve fuel mileage efficiency in vehicles and light trucks that will conserve energy and contribute substantially to lower carbon emissions, which have been going down in the U.S. since 2008, according to the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the Department of Energy. Yet conservatives in the House and Senate insist that climate change is a scientific fraud, candidates are running this year on campaigns to block any national effort to curb emissions, and the American oil industry is spending an estimated $100 billion annually to perpetuate the fossil fuel era by developing “unconventional” sources of oil and natural gas from tar sands and deep shales that produce more carbon emissions than “conventional” fuel sources.

For both nations, the negotiations about limiting carbon emissions is impeded by economic priorities. Clearly both countries embrace the existing fossil fuel economy as essential to national stability and well-being. Both countries also are pursuing clean energy development; China produces seven percent of its energy from renewable sources; the U.S. produces eight percent.

What’s troublesome is that while the Obama administration continues to press hard for new jobs and investment in the clean energy sector, the U.S. Congress does not seem to view the opportunities from pursuing low-carbon clean energy development as clearly as China’s leaders appear to at the moment.

“A decade ago China made one percent of the world’s solar panels,” said Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts, in September during a House hearing of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “Today it makes nearly half of them. The $15 billion worth of solar panels China exported last year was more valuable than America’s corn, beef, and chicken exports combined. China is no longer coming. They are here. They ate our lunch, and they are moving on to our dinner.”

This week China is putting on display a number of its clean-tech breakthroughs in coal production and clean technology manufacturing. The U.S. Climate Action Network has organized several tours of facilities later in the week. We’ll bring you reports from each.

– Keith Schneider, with additional reporting from Jonathan Adams

I’ll be in Beijing later this week, and then on to Tianjin to cover China’s first UN-sponsored climate summit, which begins October 4. Before leaving, though, I wanted to note that on September 22,  a group of Republican and Democratic Senators sent a rare bipartisan signal to the world that the United States has not abandoned the hard work of reducing climate emissions and speeding the clean energy transition. The group introduced a bill to establish the first national renewable energy standard, requiring utilities to generate 15 percent of their energy from renewables by 2021. Wind, solar, ocean, geothermal, biomass, new hydropower, and methane produced from landfills would be considered renewable sources.

The bill, which is modeled after similar legislation in effect in 31 states and approved by the House last year, is co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall of New Mexico, Mark Udall of Colorado, and Republican Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas, Susan Collins of Maine, John Ensign of Nevada, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

Rare Agreement In Senate
The measure has 18 other Senate supporters. It would allow states to meet more than a quarter of the requirements through energy efficiency efforts and proposes to charge utilities that are unable to meet the new standards a compliance payment of 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour to support renewable energy development or to offset consumers’ bills.

“The votes are present in the Senate to pass a renewable electricity standard,” said Senator Bingaman. “They are present in the House. We need to get on with figuring out what we can pass and move forward.”

“A sensible and modest renewable energy standard will help encourage home-grown supplies like wind in Kansas,” added Senator Brownback, “and help diversify our nation’s energy sources.”

In fact, considering the Senate’s reluctance to act on climate-changing emissions, the new proposal is potentially huge. By requiring new power demand to be met with clean energy sources, especially wind or the sun, carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced by a maximum of 100 million metric tons annually when it goes into full effect in 2021, according to an analysis by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. This is comparable to removing 23 million cars from the road. Last year the Union of Concerned Scientists projected that state standards will provide support for 76,750 megawatts of new renewable power by 2025-an increase of 570 percent over total 1997 U.S. levels.

Effect Could Be Big
The Apollo Alliance, a big supporter of clean energy and jobs, reported last week that a group of 21 businesses, labor unions, think tanks, and advocacy groups recently released an RES Action Statement that called on the Senate to approve a clean energy standard immediately in order to prevent a renewables industry slowdown and stem the flow of clean energy capital and jobs from the U.S. to China. “If we wait another year,” said a senior vice president for Iberdrola Renewables, “we’re going to lose a lot.”

A new national renewable energy standard, indeed, could have the same effect on the economy as similar standards have had on the states. The bipartisan support for the proposed bill reflects the marked growth in renewable energy, especially wind, to produce electricity. At the end of last year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, Kansas produced over 1,000 megawatts, New Mexico nearly 600 mw, Maine almost 200 mw, and Iowa more than 3,600 mw. Denise Bode, the chief executive of the American Wind Energy Association, says 85,000 Americans are employed in the industry. Unemployment rates in the big wind generating states of the Great Plains, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are the lowest in the country. According to a recent RES Alliance For Jobs study, a higher renewable energy standard of 25 percent would generate 274,000 new American jobs.

China Conference Awaits
The hopeful Senate measure coincides with China’s big UN-sponsored climate meeting in Tianjin, which starts next Monday. I’ll report from Tianjin here and on other sites — Circle of Blue, Grist, Energy Collective, Climate Media Partnership — writing about any diplomatic breakthroughs, covering US NGO-sponsored events and trips to Chinese clean energy manufacturers and looking closely at how China uses water for energy production. I’ll report on how China is responding to the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions — including building new nuclear plants like the one in the pix above — and bidding to control the $multi-trillion market for clean energy equipment and technology.

In holding the meeting in Tianjin, a new and very short ultra high-speed bullet train ride from Beijing, China is sending its own message to the world. The world’s largest country is outpacing the U.S. in manufacturing wind, solar, and advanced lithium-ion battery manufacturing. With the bipartisan renewable energy standards proposal, that message appears finally to be reaching the Senate.

Talk to you from China.

– Keith Schneider

Given the dearth of new economic strategies that make sense and actually work, it’s appropriate to again take note of what’s happening here in my home state of Michigan around clean energy development. The more you think about it, the clearer the significance of what Governor Jennifer Granholm (with the president in pix above at July 15 groundbreaking of a new lithium-ion battery plant in West Michigan) has accomplished becomes clearer and clearer.

In short, one of the important and unsung low-carbon economy success stories in the United States, one that’s been shaped by a fortunate convergence of state and federal investment, is rapidly taking shape in Michigan. More than 40 new plants have been built, are under construction, or approaching ground-breaking to manufacture components for wind and solar energy, and to scale up Michigan’s electric vehicle sector, particularly the construction of new manufacturing plants to make dense, powerful lithium ion batteries.

Some $9 billion has been invested — $6 billion for next generation electric vehicles, $3 billion for solar, wind, and other energy alternatives – which represents a mix of private capital, state tax incentives, and federal grants from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Gov. Granholm asserts that the first phase of the state’s industrial redevelopment already has produced over 3,000 new jobs and will soon produce 86,000 more.

Senate Failure, Michigan Advances
This morning, just days after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that action on a proposed Oil disaster response  bill would not occur at least until September, and advocates worried it may not happen at all, Gov. Granholm appeared at a clean energy briefing in Washington at the Center For American Progress. She was asked what she would do to advance comprehensive national climate and energy legislation.

“We have to get off the debate about whether global warming is occurring,” said the two-term Democratic governor. “We have to talk about jobs.”

She added: “Assume that the 132 countries that made commitments to cut their emissions are serious. Assume that those countries have analyzed the jobs that are inherent to do that. Then the best argument is about jobs for America. We need all kinds of jobs for all kinds of people. We are turning our back on this opportunity. Let’s just talk about the opportunity for jobs.”

Over the last eight weeks, as the work to achieve a comprehensive national climate and energy policy devolved from President Obama’s “new national mission” to no bill at all, the reasons for the collapse have been turned over and again like a compost pile.

It’s Jobs Stupid
The environmental community mounted a multi-faceted campaign in and outside Washington to accomplish its goal of cooling the planet. It hasn’t worked at the federal level. Gov. Granholm’s advice is to focus on heating up the economy.

We ought to think hard about embracing the counsel more than we have. Michigan has served for years as a warning sign for the economic and social dysfunction that occurs when major industries and government utterly fail to keep pace with changing markets. It still has the second highest unemployment rate in the nation.

Yet since the signing of the federal stimulus bill in February 2009, the state has emerged, arguably, as the nation’s clearest example of the real progress that can be made in job growth, modernization, and carbon emissions reductions when industry and government collaborate to command a new market.

In a nation where people care most about either finding or hanging on to a good job, isn’t that the best way to reach voters and the political leaders who represent them?

– Keith Schneider