At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
Congress this week took up legislation to decide America’s energy future. The question in Washington is the same as it is in the presidential campaign – “drill baby drill†or a policy that promotes real solutions, a plan for a reasoned future that invests in clean energy and good jobs. The Apollo Alliance is pushing back against drilling proposals that won’t solve our energy crisis and promoting a much better one that will, The New …
“The beauty of switchgrass is how hearty it is and how fast it grows,†said Dr. Suleiman Bughrara, a plant breeder at Michigan State University. “One acre can yield 12 or 13 tons of grass. That can produce 500 gallons of ethanol. We have work to do. But that kind of production is possible, and pretty quickly.†Credit: Gary Howe Across Midwest labs race to break down cellulose EAST LANSING, MI – Amid row after …
Energy and climate change are at the top of the list of priorities for both major presidential campaigns this year. In Denver, almost every prime time speaker at the Democratic National Convention noted the need for a new clean energy economic development strategy. In his historic speech on Thursday night Senator Barack Obama committed, if elected, to ending the nation’s addiction to foreign oil within a decade. How? By replacing foreign oil with clean biofuels, …
DENVER –– Beyond what the Democrats contend is the epic misrule of the Bush administration, and beyond what the Obama campaign asserts is Senator John McCain’s obeisance to a belligerent president lies Senator Barack Obama’s new frame for the 2008 presidential election. Here are its pieces. America is in peril. Obama is the man to fix it. And the most powerful tool at his disposal is developing a clean energy, good jobs economy that ends …
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 …
One of the most noticeable features on Newton, Iowa’s Web site is a map of the Newton Union Cemetery. For a time over the last two years, the map seemed a fitting metaphor for the town of 16,000, which lies 35 miles east of Des Moines. After all, the Whirlpool Corporation in 2006 purchased, and a year later closed the Maytag Corporation’s offices and plants in Newton, putting 1,800 people out of work and ending …
Last November Senator Hillary Clinton delivered a major policy speech in Iowa, during which she described her clean energy and jobs proposal. Three months later, in a speech in Seattle, Senator Barack Obama outlined his clean energy plan. Every week now, in many of their public appearances, both Democratic presidential candidates mention the millions of “green-collar jobs” they anticipate from an energy strategy that stresses clean renewable sources and moves the nation away from a …
Last November Senator Hillary Clinton delivered a major policy speech in Iowa, during which she described her clean energy and jobs proposal. Three months later, in a speech in Seattle, Senator Barack Obama outlined his clean energy plan. Every week now, in many of their public appearances, both Democratic presidential candidates mention the millions of “green-collar jobs†they anticipate from an energy strategy that stresses clean renewable sources. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, who’s …
In 1999 Alan Durning, the author and director of the Sightline Institute in Seattle, published a prescient and well-received book about natural resources and economics entitled “Green-Collar Jobs.†“A sustainable economy can generate employment just as well as an unsustainable one,†Durning wrote. “For every declining industry, like those that log old-growth forests, make farm chemicals, and build roads, there is an emerging one to take up the slack, like those that advise organic farmers, …