Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Since before the 2008 election, the core challenge for the incoming President was clear: JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

Yes, we were amid a collapse of the economic system, it required stabilization. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

Yes, our energy situation was (is) a mess and the climate is boiling. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

Yes, our political system is broken. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

Yes, our health care is a mess. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

What is amazing is that sensible JOBS focused action can help on all the other fronts and set the stage for stronger action tomorrow.

Editorial note: this is a repost from last summer that is built on multiple posts over the years. E.g., this is not a new theme in my discussions or a change in the reality of necessity combined with opportunity. It seems, at least to me, highly relevant to revisit this in the hours before the State of the Union where “jobs! jobs! jobs!” is supposedly to be at the core of the President’s comments. Sadly, in this era of ‘bipartisanship’ with an anti-science and fossil-foolish Republican majority in the House and indicated by Carol Browner’s departure from the White House (highly recommended discussion), it does not seem likely that this sort of win-win-win-win-win-win-win strategy will form the core of President Obama’s speech nor of the White House agenda for the rest of the Presidency.

Last July, Turkana’s (Laurence Lewis) front page post at Daily Kos, Daily Kos NYT editorial: Obama must lead on climate legislation, engendered a huge amount of discussion … with much of it focused on a ‘how dare the net roots attack Obama’ and ‘he has done so much’. One of my responses included these words

Yes, the Administration has acheived things — even ‘historic’ things. Yes, the Republicans make the ‘do nothing’ Congress Truman faced look like cuddly teddy bears. Yes … However, we are talking about an existential threat that requires very, very serious action. I don’t see the push for that from the White House.

I actually think that Obama ‘gets it’, to a reasonable degree about climate change. Yet …

Much of this was ‘why don’t you offer solutions rather than critiques’ (which is an utterly false strawman considering what many of us write) along with ‘what would you do’ questioning. In response to a painful question, ‘what if what is necessary on climate is not politically possible,’ the response really is ‘change the politically possible’ and here are some quick thoughts:
1. Not shy away from talking honestly about climate change — educate and set out a record.
2. Seek paths — even if incremental — that help set the infrastructure (fiscal, cultural, technical, etc …) for being able to do more tomorrow.
3. Make sure to speak of the whole benefits of action — the Administration has, all too often, fallen into a trap of understating benefits. (On the CAFE standards, for example, see: Understating the value of new CAFE standard targets.) If proponents are understating value of action, that is preemptive concession to opponents of action.
4. Take steps that are quite concrete in terms of helping improve people’s lives (JOB! JOBS! JOBS!) that also lead to rapid/serious improvements in terms of reduced/cleaner energy use and reduced emissions. (See: Clean Energy Jobs Stimulate Me!

Clean Jobs could stimulate U.S. … and set us on path to tackle climate change

Too many Americans remain unemployed. Far too many. And, underemployed. And, the prospects are grim for too many. Individuals, families, communities, and the nation are suffering. The ARRA was inadequate … we know that. It helped stave off utter catastrophe but it didn’t fill the gap. This was not inevitable.

Our economic system remains fragile based on wasteful use of polluting energy. The Administration has taken steps, even significant steps, to reduce emissions moving forward that range from investing in clean energy deployment and research, increased CAFE standards, and otherwise. The question is whether, with a JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! focus we could move from ‘even significant steps’ to meaningful, economy wide action on climate change … even without a ‘climate bill’. And, whether taking this path could prove a political plus for the Obama Administration (and Democratic Party) and set the stage for meaningful climate legislation in the years ahead …

Taking that thought, a redacted and slightly edited reprise of Clean Energy Jobs Stimulate Me!

Official unemployment hovers around 10 percent in America. Real un- and under-employment nears 20 percent. There is are real reasons why, even though the worst might have been averted due to Obama Administration and Democratic Congressional action, that JOBS remain the top of agenda for so many in America.

In 2009, Congress passed a stimulus package. It is having an effect, but with so many Americans unemployed and States/Local governments slashing budgets, that impact is not enough.

Looking at the numbers, we shouldn’t be surprised. The financial frauds, collapse of the real-estate bubble, and other elements cost the United States something like $1.3-2 trillion in annual demand. Looking at the stimulus, there was all of about $600 billion or $300 billion per year. As at least half that figure simply made up for state and local government cutbacks. Thus, the stimulus package amounted to covering perhaps 10 percent of lost demand from the economy … and that coverage is running out.

We’ve been through this … but, is it time for a summit and legislation to Stimulate job growth? Even in the face of Tea Party dominance of the Republican House Majority?

A core element of all government policy should be to seek win-win-win-win-win-win solutions, wherever possible. We don’t just needs jobs, which are desperately needed, but we need good jobs that help strengthen American society and the American economy so that this stimulating jolt helps turn us (the U.S.) toward a stronger, more sustainable, more prosperous Union.

Stimulate

Etymology: From Latin stimulatus past participle of stimul? (“goad on”) .

Verb: to stimulate: To encourage into action. To arouse an organism to functional activity.

Synonyms: encourage, induce, provoke, animate, arouse, energize, energise, excite, perk up

Antonyms: de-energize, sedate, stifle

For eight long years, this nation was been de-energized, had productive advancing of the economy stifled, and good governance sedated nearly out of existence.

While we have seen change, change for the better, the sweeping change required to emerge truly from the miasma of the previous regime has not yet occurred.

Americans were stimulated via systematic malfeasance (governmental, fiscal, environmental) into a path that offers the potential for change for the better — across all facets of society, from the White House to my House.

Barack …

Stimulate me.

Stimulate us.

Stimulate the U.S. to something better.

Change is reality

The world around us is changing.

This is true when it comes to political power. Sigh … as we saw in November and in the House today.

This is true in terms of “fiscal realities”.

This is true of the world around us and the people we know and …

Change is normal, nothing is static, … except when it isn’t, such as the reality and risk in the pure physical nature of the world that we are creating via our own actions.

What we desire is to drive change toward betterment, not worsening, of our situation. And, of the situation for generations to come. We have started that process, with an election and a move, for “Change we can Believe In”.

I … You … We have been stimulated to action and have been excited to the potential for something better to come.

Re the stimulus package we need

A shorthand …

• Stimulating jobs through “green”. Yes. GOOD
• Stimulating jobs through strengthening societal fabric via, for example, Universal Health Care start-up costs. Yes. Good.
• Stimulus jobs through building new roads and expanding airports and other pollution supporting / enabling infrastructure. Not so smart. Bad.
• Stimulating not many jobs through pathways that have been shown not to work (e.g., more money for ‘abstinence only education’). Imbecilic. Very Bad.
• Stimulating essentially no jobs through sending checks out via the bank accounts of foreigners? Idiocy. These are not ‘tax cuts’ or ‘rebates’ but tax increases on the unborn. It is time to end Tax Increases on the
  Unborn. They were idiocy under Bush. They will be idiocy tomorrow. BAD! [Even as, sigh, this was done this past December under a Democratic Majority in the House and Senate.]

Failure to communicate with Congress has been a problem for the longest, I guess But maybe one day we can make some progress Eminem … Stimulate

We should strive to prod American on a win-win-win path of improved near-term economic activity (putting people back to work or to better employment), improved long term economic performance, a strengthened and more equitable society, and a more climate friendly society. We have the opportunity to Energize America out of the unemployment funk and toward something better. [Please note that the following sentence was written, originally, in late 2008 amid discussion of the stimulus package. While the need remains, “the” opportunity was not truly seized — that opportunity to truly turn the tide on our oil addictions and climate chaos promoting path slipped passed us and might never return.] We have AN opportunity, an opportunity emergent through a smart jobs growth package, to achieve a real win-win-win-win-win path through an E2 solution path to Energize America toward a better future.

Stimulate US in a good way and a good direction

Here are some thoughts as to win-win-win concepts. Some small. Some large. All meeting these criteria:

• Improve near-term economy
• Improve long-term economic prospercts
• Improve societal equity (avoid hurting it)
• Reduce climate impacts
• Create jobs … REAL JOBS … NOW!

Carbon Neutral Private Buildings Architecture 2030 (Ed Mazria) has proposed a $170 billion, two-year package to spur energy efficiency investments in private infrastructure (homes and commercial structures via subsidizing mortgages and refinancing. This program could spark $1.5 trillion in economic activity, save private citizens and business $10s (actually $100s) billions/year in energy/other costs, potentially pay for itself through increased tax revenue, accelerate a massive improvement in US building infrastructure energy efficiency with concurrent reduced energy use and pollution, and foster potentially 8.5 million jobs (with specific elements within to foster green jobs). For more, see: Massively effective way to stimulate the economy. Note, this is high on the list at Change.ORG and a recently introduced question at Change.GOV (you can vote to give these more visibility, if you wish).

Greening Affordable Housing (especially rental) While the above will drive huge investments in the private sector, including in rental units, we should assure ourselves that that the poorest are not left on the side. For roughly $30 billion, affordable-housing rental units can be brought to high energy efficiency levels, reducing utility costs and improving the living conditions for those renters.

Greening Transport: BruceMcF has, among others, highlighted several key initiatives including rail, increased rail-to-trails, and electrification of America’s rail infrastructure. As for the last, a $20 billion federal commitment in the coming two years with a total of perhaps $50 billion/year would help spark a matching private sector investment that would cut perhaps ten percent of America’s oil use, more than paying for the total cost via reduced imported oil costs (without even considering the benefits through reduced pollution, etc …). Combining increased public transport (both supporting improved current operations in the face of local budget cuts and investments in new infrastructure (whether plug-in-hybrid buses or light rail or nodal transport), funding for bike trails and improved pedestrian movement in urban areas, better traffic controls, subsidies for ever-more fuel efficient vehicle developments, electrification of rail and otherwise, the transport sector should see a minimum of $50 billion and preferably $100 billion of the stimulus package.

Accelerate Intelligent Grid / HVDC grid deployment Core to achieving an energy smart future will be an upgrading of the electrical grid to enable more demand management (controlling, for example, cooling loads to reduce peak demands), distributed power generation and storage, along with the introduction of cleaner energy options (whether renewables of all types, increased efficiency of use of existing resources, or nuclear power). The Stimulus Package included $8 billion for the smart grid. The funding for ‘smart grid’ should be accelerated, along with acceleration of standards for appliances/such to be able to integrated into a smart(er) grid. (For example, right now refrigerator ‘auto-defrost’ cycles are random, being able to control these remotely would be invisible to users and enable reducing peak demand cycles.) As for a High-Voltage, Direct Cable, part of the “deal” for federal funding of electrification of rail should be access to rail right of way for HVDC lines for moving power around the country more efficiently. (As an aside, electrification of rail makes essentially every rail spur a potential location for a grid-supported distributed power source whether, for example, a wind turbine, concentrated solar power facility, or small nuclear reactor. The ‘connection’ to the grid would be near free and the construction supplies/equipment could be moved from site-to-site by rail, potentially greatly reducing the installation costs.) An additional 15 $20 billion, over the next two years, could spark real movement in these arenas.

Plug-In-Hybrid Electric School Buses (PHESBs) An example of a ‘narrow’ item, PHESBs are ready to go today, to be coming off the manufacturing line soon after orders flow. But, there are barriers to deploying them (especially as local communities slash procurement budgets to reduce deficits). A $100 million / year program for five years would move PHESBs from marginal (about 18 deployed in a test program) to core in purchasing. This program could easily move beyond school buses to other larger vehicles (think, for example, hotel / airport shuttle buses, local public transport, light trucks, etc …) but even ‘just’ school buses would have a wide range of real benefits beyond simply reducing fuel use, to improve student (and community) health with reduced diesel fumes, emergency power generation (imagine if there had been 15,000 mobile 50 kilowatt generators all around the areas affected by Katrina), and a path toward using centralized locations (schools, school bus maintenance lots) for introduction of localized power storage (Vehicle-to-Grid) as part of a smart(er) grid. While such a program could likely absorb more money, $100 million/year would spark a revolution in school transport and start protecting / creating jobs quickly (as school bus orders are plummeting). School bus sales, an American industry, have plummeted as local governments around the country tighten their belts even further. This measure would spark some jobs (perhaps ‘just’ 2000) while setting the stage for transforming yellow buses across the nation.

AmeriTREC As part of the fostering of renewable energy and a new path forward, the United States should drive forward clean energy deployment (whether targeting Gore’s ten year or Google’s 20-year plans for eliminating coal from the electrical grid (or my 20 year plan). Efficiency is a key element for rapid and significant change, but introducing clean power is important as well. A network of concentrated solar thermal power (CSTP) plants along the US-Mexican border (both sides) could offer a real opportunity for change: clean electricity, employment, desalinated water supplies, ‘greening the desert’ with agriculture, and a path for potentially significant carbon sequestration while enriching the soil. Such an AmeriTREC might provide an effective path for providing a significant portion of America’s energy with all these ancillary benefits. Combined with using this as a path for ameliorating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps $20 billion in commitment over the coming two years, with the doors open for more if these paths prove as successful as the promise suggests. This would create some 200,000+ jobs while creating clean energy, clean water, and clean agriculture infrastructure for years and decades to come.

Greening Public Infrastructure: We must, as well, invest quite seriously in improving the energy efficiency of public infrastructure. Beyond “energy efficiency”, we should “green” our public infrastructure: reducing not just energy wastage but other resource wastage and other forms of pollution. The benefits will go well beyond fiscal savings, as discussed in Greening the School House. Dependent on the analysis and approach, this merits between $26 billion (a low-ball, basic energy efficiency figure, imo) and perhaps $100 billion over the coming two years. A $100 billion program, split between general maintenance and Greening schools, would create (or, at least, protect) over one million jobs throughout America.

Renewable Energy Ammonia Fertilizer Production: Currently, fertilizer comes principally from natural gas and the fertilizer is key to providing enough nutrients for human nutrition. We must move to a cleaner process (even if moving toward more ‘organic’, natural production globally, much fertilizer will still be needed, at least for decades to come), not-reliant on a fossil fuel. The potential exists to foster wind-based fertilizer production, with even the potential for siting this in the Arctic region and having the ‘waste’ product be creation of large amounts of ice (reforming the Arctic ice shelf each year?) to help battle the devastation of global warming. $5 billion in the coming two years would move this process along smartly, creating working plants along with test programs for the more aggressive Arctic option. This measure would create entire new industries, setting the stage for sustained job and economic growth, while creating some 50,000 jobs in the coming few years.

ARPA-E: The Stimulus package contained $400 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to support energy research and development projects around the nation. When ARPA-E put out a call for research proposals, for a tranche of $150 million, there were nearly 4000 proposals. (And those 4000 were just a small share of potential projects, as institutions pared down the numbers of proposals to avoid having too many proposals on the table.) Based on conversations with key players in this process, between 33-50 percent of the proposals (33 on a “high probability of success”, 50% with higher degree of risk) merited funding. At the end of the day, less than 2 percent of the proposals were funded. ARPA-E could, without difficulty in terms of finding projects meriting funding, spend an order of magnitude more funding and not run out of great projects to execute. Give ARPA-E $8 billion of additional funding for two years (with a commitment of at least this amount of funding to ARPA-E for the rest of the decade, or a commitment of $40 billion of additional clean energy research and development funding). This would create some 80,000 jobs while sparking inventions and developments to rocket America into a leadership position in the clean energy revolution.

Greening the Urban Space: Greening public spaces, such as done by groups like Sustainable South Bronx, in an incredibly powerful way to improve urban life, reduce pollution, and cut into the urban heat island. We should dedicate at least $10 billion, over the coming two years, to changing the livability of America’s cities via greening public spaces and encouraging urban greening (such as greening roofs). This would spark in the range of 100,000 jobs (including significant numbers in some of America’s most neediest communities, whether in the Bronx, Oakland, Anacostia, Southside Chicago, or East LA).

The key point

If there is one, any jobs package won’t be perfect. I understand that. It will have elements that will help dig our holes deeper. The reality of the American political process and structure make this an inevitability. It will, as well, have elements that could help change the situation for the better. Our necessity is to maximize the second and minimize the first.

And, the reality, we could have the opportunity before us for win-win-win-win solutions that will help get the US through (and out of) current economic doldrums, strengthen the economy into the future, reduce social inequity and strengthen society, reduce our polluting ways, help turn us (as individuals, as the U.S., and as a global society) on a path toward a prosperous, climate-friendly future which creating huge numbers of Green Energy Jobs (JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!).

The challenges are real. The risks and dangers are not just real, but terrifying. In face of these challenges, we have a tremendous opportunity. We, quite literally, cannot afford to blow this opportunity. The win-win-win paths are there, we must work to convince the national leadership to chose them.

Stimulate Me

I … You … We must make the call on our leaders to stimulate U.S. toward something better, to not simply seek to breath life with ineffective and short duration jobs that will strengthen a polluting and wasteful economic structure that will drive us to even greater problems tomorrow.

My call …

Stimulate me, stimulate US to something better!

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

NOTE: Again, this is a limited editing of a post that seems relevant as the SOTU approaches. And, well, the Republican Study Committee’s Senseless Retrenching Act (SRA) has these very sort of sensible, cost-effective, job-creating paths in the cross-hairs for axing rather than on the table for increasing.