Get Energy Smart! NOW!

This guest post comes from Tim Lange (Meteor Blades), who was a founding (board) member of Energize America. This is posted as part of a serious looking at clean energy jobs‘ opportunities for sparking meaningful employment, quickly, in the United States as discussed in Clean Energy Jobs: Stimulate Me

At the Jobs Summit coming up Thursday, a cacophony of ideas will compete for inclusion on the list of what the President ultimately decides to do. That’s good. The unemployment situation needs lots of ideas because there is no silver bullet. No one approach can accomplish everything.  

Congress and two administrations have already rescued financial giants and two once-powerful manufacturing operations that has so far kept the whole shebang from toppling into the mud. Unlike its predecessor, the Obama administration has also offered hope to out-of-work and barely working people that full-time jobs will soon flow. For many, that’s happened. But for others the hope is fading as the lost jobs keep accumulating. The urgency could scarcely be more obvious.

One element of whatever else emerges to address unemployment should be a modernized Civilian Conservation Corps. Its main arm should be what should be labeled a Clean Energy Conservation Corps.

Government rescue work seems to have taken firm hold at the big banks, considering the bonuses they plan to pay at year’s end. These were earned, it is claimed, in a tone deploring how rude we were for daring to raise an eyebrow. This reaction makes total sense in the upside-down world of unfettered free enterprise to which the top bonus recipients profess loyalty while sucking so hard on the taxpayers’ teat. So, too, does their moaning about the possibility of new laws that would make it more difficult to muck things up again with what – stripped to its drawers – amounted to a giant Ponzi scheme with the whole population as marks. Read between the lines analyzing this muck-up and you’ll find the usual ruling class mantra: Devil take the hindmost.

Why more jobs legislation? Because the first stimulus wasn’t enough. That happened partly because economic forecasters underestimated just how bad jobs were going to get slammed. They can be blamed for blowing their prediction. But it wasn’t Barack Obama who allowed an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow and claim there was no problem even as it was collapsing. The guy who did that is named Ben Bernanke.

Despite right-wing spin, the administration’s stimulus package has created and saved many jobs. Just not enough, and not quick enough. Everybody except the Party of No and their accomplices recognize something more must be done about unemployment. But the only way to get Republican backing for effective jobs action would be to give the very richest of their pals another nice upward transfer of wealth plus some vigerish in the form of new penalties on working people.

Because of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, Americans can go just about anywhere in this country and see FDR’s hand on the landscape. These programs weren’t flawless, but they were smart, effective, pragmatic. To hear some Party of No politicians and rightist pundits tell it, however, this particular use of the public sector was just short of a Bolshevik coup. So, obviously, anything with a whiff of New Deal scent about it is going to set off another round of patented GOP sulking and barking amplified by our ever-helpful national media.

Let them bark. The White House should press for a direct job creation program anyway.

The CCC put millions of young men to work planting trees, curbing erosion, and generally nurturing the National Park System. Nine years the program lasted. Much of the work done still lives today. A Clean Energy Conversion Corps would not only create jobs but also provide a massive public investment with an impact reaching decades into the future. CECC employees could audit home energy use, weatherize, rehab, retrofit and sign up for paid green apprenticeships. These would provide them the skills to move on to green-collar jobs in the private sector as those become more readily available.

Unlike its predecessor, the CECC would probably work best if it included a public-private partnership as a major element. The Kentucky Clean Energy Corps program has some good ideas. In my dreams, the CECC would be authorized to assist the formation of cooperatively owned enterprises since much clean energy work is perfect for small businesses.

I can hear the mutterings of my party’s no-can-do voices. Politically impossible. Not even worth trying. Not enough votes. Wouldn’t work anyway – getting project permits would take eternity. Besides, this isn’t 75 years ago and we need something newfangled. Yes, we do. But we didn’t give up our telephones just because Alexander Graham Bell died 87 years ago. We transformed them. Likewise with the social safety net. Tough? Absolutely. The foes of safety nets in the Party of No and its accomplices in our own party have been shredding them for decades. They ferociously block every attempt at repair and renewal. So what? Progressives don’t whine about obstacles. Well, okay, that’s not true. We do. But we don’t surrender. We find ways to overcome the obstacles.
 
An audaciously and pragmatically crafted CECC would mesh perfectly with programs already being funded by the $80 billion green portion of the two-year stimulus package and with the still languishing American Clean Energy and Security act passed by the House five months ago. It could provide entry-level positions with good training and a job ladder for one of the most heavily unemployed demographics – men and women aged 18-25, especially those with only a high school diploma, though the program shouldn’t be for them alone. From those first government-funded green jobs, they could move on higher-skilled, better-paying ones in the private sector.

Predictions for such jobs are optimistic. The union/eco-group coalition known as the Blue Green Alliance recently predicted in the white paper, Building the Clean Energy Assembly Line, that there would be 850,000 new manufacturing jobs alone by 2525, based on an economy powered 25% by renewable energy. The  recent Booz, Allen, Hamilton Green Jobs Study for the non-profit United States Green Building Council concluded that the building industry will create 7.9 million green jobs in the next four years.

That’s a lot. But that’s also a lot of waiting. Meanwhile, there aren’t enough workers skilled in the tasks green energy will require. Lack of adequate funding has forced community colleges and other venues to turn hundreds of students away from their overflowing green job training programs.

While the preponderance of jobs created by the Conservation Corps would be basic entry-level positions, others would require previously acquired transferable skills and be compensated appropriately. Every employee should have the opportunity to upgrade their skills through CECC training and credentialing programs. These could be run by public and private entities, including community colleges, unions, those cooperatively owned businesses mentioned above, and private corporations.  

The stimulus has already spurred the creation of additional jobs in small businesses involved with the 33-year-old Weatherization Assistance Program. And those jobs must be paid prevailing local wages under the David-Bacon Act of 1931. WAP received a far larger budget for the next two years than usual, $5 billion in ARRA funds to help low-income home-owners and renters save money, save energy and stay warmer or cooler in the process.

Other green jobs are being stimulated into existence, too. A solar manufacturing facility is being built in California. Wind power companies, both home grown and foreign, are building several turbine factories. The recovery act’s $3.3 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant Program, is starting to gain traction as cities and utility companies start signing up for this important transformation.  

But as co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research Dean Baker told Renee Cho at SolveClimate:

“Clean tech job growth is small scale relative to the economy. … ARRA has helped percentage-wise — with green sectors up by 30 to 40 percent from the stimulus — but it’s starting from a very small base. The absolute numbers are low. We’re talking tens of thousands of jobs when millions are out of work.” The national unemployment rate as of October was 10.2 percent.

As Baker knows, when you add the out-of-workers to the part-timers who can’t find a full-time job, and to the discouraged, the tally is probably double that. Even officially it’s a dreadful 17.5%.

Expanding that small base of green jobs will be a multifacted task. But with a CECC, and perhaps a Green WPA as well, millions of Americans could sustain themselves with reasonably decent jobs while they wait for the better ones to appear. The new Corps and the new WPA could be temporary, as they were in the Depression, or they could be, as L. Randal Wray has wisely argued, part of a permanent direct job-creation program that never stops providing a safety net and a boost into new jobs when old ones go away.

Of necessity, the Jobs Summit will focus most intensely on fast-acting programs. However, attendees should remember that a large portion of the jobs generated, including the green ones, will be lost if the administration fails to simultaneously develop an industrial policy, the kind of policy every other developed country on the planet has in place.

Clean Energy Jobs series posts:

• Clean Energy Jobs Fill Labs
• Clean Energy Jobs Go To The Cleaners
• Clean Energy Jobs Blow In (not Blow Up) Coal River Mountain
• Clean Energy Takes the PHE School Bus
• Clean Energy Jobs Go to the Market
• Clean Energy Jobs Go to School
• Tips for the Job Summit: Can we say Clean Energy Jobs?
• Clean Energy Jobs: Stimulate Me