At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
The New York Times today published my latest piece in the Business section. Subject: What happened to all of those new car and truck dealerships that closed in the last several years. The crux of the piece, which focused on a closed dealership in Whitehall, Michigan is this: Since early 2009 some 2,300 auto dealerships have closed around the country, as new car sales plunged more than 40 percent and the government, after taking ownership …
Day 59. The morning after President Barack Obama called for a “national mission” in pursuit of a clean energy economy the BP blowout gushes oil into the Gulf at the new estimated rate of 60,000 barrels a day. And though the president said “we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater,” the language lacked …
Curt Guyette, a first-rate senior editor at MetroTimes, Detroit’s very good weekly newspaper, just posted one of the most even-handed pieces on the grassroots resistance to clean energy projects that I’ve seen. He interviewed me earlier this week and jotted down this quote: “The environmental community on a national level is pushing like hell for more clean energy,” Schneider says. “I know that because I work in Washington and I see it happening. But what …
The accelerating consequences of the warming Earth, the hazards associated with increasing reliance on fossil fuels, the promise of big clean energy projects, and the difficulties in advancing a national climate and energy policy fit for the 21st century came into sharp focus today in Washington and across the nation. In Boston, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that aftter nine years of public confrontation, the United States had reached a decision to approve crucial permits …
Stanley “Skip†Pruss, the director of the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor, and Economic Growth and a nationally regarded clean energy leader, was in Traverse City last week. The visit came the day after EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the federal government would use the Clean Water Act to tame the rapacious mining practices in the Appalachian coal belt involving removing the tops of mountains. Jackson is proposing to lower limits on salinity in …
The Obama administration threw heaters this week to influence climate and energy policy and practices. The first announcement — to end a long-standing moratorium on offshore oil drilling — was seen as a wild pitch. The president said the Interior Department would open large swaths of the Atlantic, Gulf, and Alaskan coasts to oil and natural gas development. The drilling zone on the East Coast extends from Delaware to the central coast of Florida. The …
Like other nationally prominent public interest leaders, Apollo Alliance President Jerome Ringo spent a few days after Barack Obama’s election considering its full meaning. It wasn’t just that the new president was African American like himself. It was also that President Obama had campaigned and won on almost precisely the same call for a clean energy, good jobs economic transition that Ringo has championed for the Apollo Alliance from one end of America to the …
Listen up kids. This stuff just doesn’t happen but once in a lifetime. Century-old billion dollar financial institutions crumbling in a matter of days. Nearly $100 billion bailouts decided in closed session by a tiny group of government bankers. An American political party tossing out the central tenets of the free-market, deregulatory, anti-tax, anti-government ideology that fostered its political ascendancy for nearly 30 years and is now backing a $700 billion taxpayer-financed government takeover of …
A new American narrative is coming to the fore, and recognizable in the patterns of neighborhood development in Portland, Oregon that puts homes, businesses, and the other stations of American life in considerably closer proximity. America’s resurgent metropolitan regions David Goldberg, the communications director of Smart Growth America, agrees that America won’t be able to drill its way out of the energy crisis. “But we can build our way out of it,†he says. Indeed, …
When we first heard, last year, about the $10 billion investment that T. Boone Pickens (see pix above) is making in the Texas Panhandle to build the largest wind generating station in the United States our response was elemental. Right message. Right messenger. Right scale of investment to foster the clean energy, good jobs economy. Today in New York, Pickens made another thrust to prod America to take charge of its energy future. He launched …