Boston Green Justice Coalition Joins Apollo Alliance

BOSTON, Dec. 7  - The Boston Green Justice Coalition this weekend became the newest member of the Apollo Alliance, a national network of clean energy, good jobs organizations working to build a cleaner, more efficient, and more prosperous economy.
Read more

Apollo Weekly Update, 12/8/08: Economic Recovery and Clean Energy Stimulus

This week, as the clean energy, good jobs economy again attained prominence at the top levels of national policy making, the Apollo Alliance introduced the Apollo Economic Recovery Act. Our one-year, $50 billion proposal is a comprehensive quick start, clean energy economic recovery strategy to immediately create or retain 650,000 direct green-collar jobs and an additional 1.3 million indirect jobs in communities across the country. Look for the full proposal on our Web site here.

This week we also applauded the introduction of the Green Jobs and Infrastructure Act of 2008, sponsored by Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow and co-sponsored by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. (http://apolloalliance.org/news/clean-energy/stabenow-outlines-clean-energy-path-to-1-million-new-jobs/).

And we welcomed the Boston Green Justice Coalition as the newest member of the Apollo Alliance.

The Apollo Economic Recovery Act and the Green Jobs and Infrastructure Act respond directly to President-elect Barack Obama’s call this month for a “big stimulus package” in January to “jolt” the economy and “lay the groundwork for long- term, sustained economic growth.”

As you know the Apollo Alliance is all about that. In September we introduced The New Apollo Program, which proposed to spend $50 billion annually over ten years to create 5 million good-paying jobs while helping to solve the climate crisis, the energy crisis, and the economic crisis. Our economic development strategy calls for a sweeping set of actions. They include big commitments to energy efficiency, transit and electrical grid expansion and modernization, road and bridge repair, dramatic increases in the use of renewable energy, and a major investment to reinvigorate manufacturing for clean energy equipment and advanced fuel-efficient vehicles.

House and Senate leaders frame the steps needed to scale up the clean energy economy in terms that are consistent with what Apollo has proposed and at the same magnitude of investment. The president-elect and members of his transition team indicate they are prepared to introduce and pass an economic recovery plan likely to cost $400 billion to $700 billion over two years. And they say that much of the spending will focus on accelerating the transition to cleaner sources of energy as well as more efficient energy use in buildings, homes, vehicles, industry, and communities.

The Apollo Alliance has been busy since the election in making this case in Congress and with the incoming administration. For example, investing in any or all of the more than 30 energy-efficient, cost-effective light and heavy rail transit projects that are ready to go around the country would put thousands to work immediately in high wage electrical, steel, concrete, carpenter, and other jobs in the construction trades.

Investing in other infrastructure projects can boost a sagging economy by adding an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 new jobs for every $1 billion invested. Moreover, such projects occur in communities, giving local workers a competitive edge and producing untold ripple effects in local economies.

Elena Foshay, a researcher on our staff, reports that an aggressive program to promote domestic manufacturing of renewable energy products alone could help create or retain 85,000 permanent green-collar jobs on the factory floor, not to mention hundreds of thousands more indirect jobs in the local economy. It also would benefit up to 70,000 U.S. firms capable of making the required components, most located in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, California, and the 16 other states hardest hit by manufacturing job losses.

Speaking of Michigan, the leaders of the Big Three American auto companies were back in Washington to ask Congress for $34 billion in loans. Lawmakers are as skeptical of the American auto industry as you are. In response to our last Apollo Weekly Update on the auto industry bailout, we received a torrent of views, which you can read in our Apollo Feedback feature here.

Knowing what you know now, is rejecting an auto bailout a sound decision? Is clean energy the way to go for rebuilding the economy? Do you like or dislike what you’re hearing from Washington and the new administration? Let me know and we’ll post your comment in our next Apollo Feedback feature. Send to keith@apolloalliance.org.

Apollo Weekly Update, 11/21/08: Rescuing Detroit

This week, the Apollo Alliance program staff spent two days in Detroit with our colleagues from Apollo affiliates in 12 states and 5 cities. Our work focused on how to begin scaling up the clean energy, good jobs opportunity that Apollo envisioned in 2004 and that Barack Obama embraced as one of his campaign’s central messages.

It’s hard to imagine a more apt place to convene. Detroit is one of the regional capitals of the national economic emergency. General Motors, the signature industrial institution of the 20th century, is fighting for its life in the 21st. In the very same hours that we were meeting in a UAW conference room, GM’s chief executive, the head of the UAW, and the leaders of the two other American auto companies were in Washington asking a Senate committee for a $25 billion survival loan. Congress responded with a practical request, asking the executives to lay out a business plan for the federal investment.

The Apollo Alliance and its state and metropolitan affiliates support the bridge loan. Our senior staff and board members are working with influential lawmakers, among them Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, to make the case that the American auto industry has vastly improved its vehicle lineup, quality, and energy efficiency. There is too much opportunity in fuel-efficient design and technology to allow American car manufacturers to melt away. And there are too many family-supporting jobs – including nearly half a million in Michigan alone – to allow the companies to fail.

You should know that the Apollo Alliance hasn’t wasted a moment since the election in pursuit of the clean energy, good jobs economy. Ron Ruggiero, our national field director, noted that the clean energy, good jobs message that the Apollo Alliance developed just four years ago has become the new development strategy for the nation. “When’s the party?” he asked.

The answer is that the party happened on November 4, and since then our game speed has increased. Our playbook is The New Apollo Program, a comprehensive investment strategy, which we introduced in October. It calls for scaling up and accelerating clean energy production, improving efficiency and conservation, building new infrastructure like transit and a 21st century electric grid, supporting American manufacturing and next-generation vehicles, and training millions of people to assume the career-building jobs the clean energy economy has started to produce.

Kate Gordon, our co-director and chief program strategist, asserts that the 10-year, $500 billion New Apollo Program is the economic stimulus package that America needs and that Congress has begun to debate. After leaving Detroit on Wednesday, Kate joined Co-Director Cathy Calfo and Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides in Washington to make that point clear to our allies in the labor, environmental, and business communities, and to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

We see a number of legislative opportunities to compel the federal government to make focused investments in clean energy. Bills to rewrite transportation and energy policy will be considered next year. This week President-elect Obama told a group of governors that he’s determined to take action to accelerate production of clean energy and reduce pollutants that cause climate change. We are working with a number of lawmakers on a proposal to retrofit American manufacturing plants to produce the tools and equipment of the clean energy economy while also making the plants cleaner and more energy efficient.

We’re also working with our partners to increase funding for the Green Jobs Act, which passed last year, to increase the number of green-collar training programs and the number of workers who participate.  And we are making the case that any stimulus plan must include significant new funding for clean energy research and development.

In other words, this organization is deploying all the tools and people at our disposal to implement The New Apollo Program.

Our most important ally, of course, is the president-elect. Just as he did from the very start of his campaign in February 2007, in informal town hall settings and in significant nationally noted speeches, President-elect Barack Obama is using the weeks between the election and the inauguration to describe his determination to switch from fossil fuel to clean energy. His goal: to once and for all fix the problem that started the American emergency.

If there’s one truly audacious idea that Obama rode to the presidency, it’s the notion that America can produce a new era of prosperity by changing how it powers itself. The basic details of his New Energy For America plan – a 10-year, $150 billion investment in wind, solar, biofuels, energy efficiency, transit, and conservation to create 5 million jobs – look awfully familiar to us.

Apollo Feedback: Detroit Bailout Raises Support, Ire

Last week we let you know that in partnership with our members the Apollo Alliance supported government intervention to rescue the American auto industry with a $25 billion bridge loan. We reached this conclusion knowing of the industry’s long-time recalcitrance on fuel mileage, climate safeguards, product lines, and the imperious behavior of its chief executives, who in case you don’t know by now, flew to Washington last week on corporate jets and without any clear plan for how they would use the money.
Read more

Apollo Weekly Update, 11/13/08: President-elect and New Principles

On August 4, 2008, Barack Obama formally unveiled a clean energy strategy to wean America from foreign oil and to begin solving climate change. His New Energy For America plan is a ten-year, $150 billion initiative that not coincidentally is the same title of our own 2004 study and entirely consistent with the goals of The New Apollo Program, which we rolled out in six states last month. All three plans call for scaling up the tools and practices of a clean energy economy, and charting a new development strategy for the United States.

Obama owned the clean energy message during the campaign. His victory is a powerful demonstration of the economic transformation most Americans expect and want his administration to lead.

We all know how hard the transition will be. But the new president’s work on clean energy will be helped by two new and powerful market forces that the Obama campaign helped to crystallize.

The first is the influence and relationship of the American economy with fossil fuel. Until very recently, one of the underlying principles of the American economy was that the more fossil fuel we used, the wealthier we became. That is no longer the case, not is it likely to be ever again. The more fossil fuel we use the more impoverished and endangered we are.

The second is a profound change in the relationship between environmental and economic principles. Since the early 1960s environmentalists have helped the nation understand how economic principles affect the environment. Economic development produces wealth. It also produces pollution and toxins and ill-advised construction that threatens species, babies, wild lands, and communities.

The Obama campaign, working on the idea that the Apollo Alliance elevated to national prominence since its founding more than four years ago, turned that nearly 50-year-old frame around. Look at the potential, he essentially argued, when environmental principles are applied to the economy. Energy efficiency, conservation, rapid transit, clean vehicles, biofuels, wind, and solar represent the most important new growth sectors in the nation, capable not only of fixing the economy and healing the environment, but also of producing millions of family-supporting jobs.

“We simply cannot pretend that we can drill our way out of this problem,” he said in August. “We need a much bolder and much bigger set of solutions. We have to make a serious, nationwide commitment to developing new sources of energy and we have to do it right away.”

The question, in the face of soaring budget deficits and financial crisis, is can he deliver? The answer, if you pay attention to our Web site, is that America’s clean energy economy already is unfolding. Twenty-nine states have enacted renewable energy standards to compel development of wind, solar, and other alternative energy sources in the utility industry. Clean energy production and development is a $25 billion-a-year industry, and the fastest growing industrial sector in the country. Clean energy is responsible for an estimated 500,000 new jobs since 2004, according to figures from states, investment analysts, and the wind, solar, geothermal, and other clean energy trade associations.

What’s needed from the federal government, say executives and elected leaders is the same thing that The New Apollo Program advocates and that President-elect Obama says he will act on quickly: A big, focused investment program to scale up the clean energy tools and technology that already exist.

Millions of family-supporting jobs are possible. Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers of America and an Apollo Alliance board member, is fond of telling audiences that it takes 26 tons of sheet steel and 19,000 parts to make and install a wind turbine generator.

Along with Obama’s victory, another place where America’s clean energy transition has made its presence known is in political campaigns. More than 70 percent of the transit measures on ballots across the country were approved, including the $10 billion bond for a regional high speed rail network in California. My colleague Heidi Pickman is documenting clean energy’s influence in election victories on the Apollo blog. If you know of clean energy electoral successes please email her.

We know you are intensely interested. When we asked last week what President Obama should do first, so many of you responded that we published your dispatches in two Apollo Feedback posts here and here.

The Apollo Alliance is in the thick of the national work to accelerate the clean energy, good jobs economy. We anticipate some big announcements over the next few weeks as the new administration and a new Congress start to put in place the clean energy, good jobs investments and policies that Americans last week overwhelmingly said they support.

Apollo Feedback: What Obama Should Do First, Part Two

We asked what President-elect Obama should do first. Almost 100 of you from the Apollo Nation responded. There are lots of good ideas here in the second part of our Feedback feature highlighting your suggestions for the new president. The first part is here.

Read more

Apollo Feedback: What Comes First For New President? Green-Collar Jobs, Economy, Clean Energy, Says Apollo Nation

When we asked what comes first for President-elect Barack Obama, almost 100 of you responded. The Economy. The War. Green-collar jobs. Sun. Wind. Zero-emission vehicles. Transit. One writer suggested Just For Men, to cover the new president’s sure-to-gray-hair. Take a look. So many of you replied that we divided the responses into two Feedback features. This is part one. Part two is here. Thanks so much.

Read more

Apollo Weekly Update, 10/24/08: Six State Roll Out Finishes; New State Programs

This week Randy Swisher, the executive director of the American Wind Energy Association, notified us that his organization’s board of directors agreed to support The New Apollo Program. With its endorsement, AWEA became the 48th organization to sign on to the Apollo Alliance’s national clean energy, good jobs economic development strategy. “We view the program as incredibly compatible with our agenda and look forward to working with you to make it a reality,” wrote Swisher.

Swisher’s message came just days after the Apollo Alliance finished its six state town hall tour to roll out The New Apollo Program. Our recommendations for how to scale up clean energy tools and techniques to get America’s economy back on track were greeted enthusiastically everywhere we went.

In Detroit, Senator Debbie Stabenow captured the sentiments of nearly all the speakers who participated in the roll out events. “The New Apollo Program is the kind of bold program we need. We have to be bolder than we’ve been,” she said during a program that included our President Jerome Ringo, and representatives of the governor’s office, the state Legislature, union leaders, and business and environmental leaders. “The next Congress will take up proposals to curb global warming, to seek a system of cap and trade, to invest in biofuels and alternative energy.”

“The $50 billion a year that The New Apollo Program proposes to invest just doesn’t seem like that much money,” Stabenow continued. “It’s not a lot of money to spend on our future, especially when you consider the $700 billion that we just spent to bail out our banking system.”

In Columbus, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland (with Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides, see pix right) calledThe New Apollo Program a “win, win, win, win, win strategy.” Representative Jay Inslee declared in Seattle, “To those who say over the next few months we should be passive, they’re wrong. The antidote is action. The antidote is The New Apollo Program. That’s how we solve economic doldrums in this country.”

Senator Barbara Boxer joined Apollo Alliance Chairman Phil Angelides at the first event in San Leandro, California, where he memorably declared: “We are closing a chapter on policies that didn’t work and opening a new chapter of those that do.”

You can follow the roll out tour on our New Apollo Program Web page, which links to the Apollo Blog posts from each city.  The Apollo Alliance home page displaysvideo reports from Columbus and San Leandro - and soon from Detroit - on our Apollo Video player.

This week I’ve been in New York and Washington talking to mainstream and new media journalists, editors, and producers about The New Apollo Program and the advent of the clean energy economy. “Well what about the price of oil?” one reporter asked. “It’s falling. Won’t that hurt clean energy producers?”

Our response? My Apollo Alliance colleagues and I study the data, look at the trends, and are convinced this moment is different than the other periods in our history, distant (1970s) and more recent (1990s). The four crises that prompted the formation of the Apollo Alliance – energy, climate, jobs, and security – are getting worse, not better. The solution is a dramatic change in how the United States and the world develop and use clean energy. While America’s credit and stock market crisis has drained value out of industrial stocks, including shares of clean energy companies, it’s temporary.

Policy responses reflect that. New Jersey this week completed a clean energy master plan designed to accelerate the development of a new way to power the Garden State. Hawaii this week approved a new energy policy designed to produce 70 percent of the state’s power from clean sources by 2030, the most ambitious program of its type in the country. California’s energy-efficiency policies created nearly 1.5 million jobs from 1977 to 2007. 

The missing piece is a federal commitment to investment in clean energy equivalent in scale and urgency to the original Apollo program to land a man on the moon.

If you agree sign our “Jobs, Baby, Jobs” petition.

You can follow these and other important trends in the clean energy sector on ourApollo Daily Digest. The momentum for a clean energy future is only growing.

Apollo Weekly Update, 10/10/08: New Apollo Program Introduced In 3 States

This week, in events in California, Ohio, and Washington State the Apollo Alliance rolled out its comprehensive clean energy, good jobs investment strategy.  Frankly, it’s the most cogent economic plan out there to get America out of its financial mess.
 
In Columbus on Wednesday, Governor Ted Strickland essentially said as much during our Ohio event (see pix right). “If we do what the New Apollo Program encourages the next president and Congress to do we will see a renaissance in America’s economy and in Ohio’s economy,” he said. “I am happy to do what we can as Buckeyes to facilitate this effort.”

California Senator Barbara Boxer enthusiastically supported The New Apollo Program during the kickoff event on Saturday at the IBEW Training Center in San Leandro (see pix left). Washington State Congressman Jay Inslee, who’s made a career sponsoring clean energy legislation, and who headlines our event on Friday in Seattle, told us this week: “Some may think that it’s not the time for bold ideas like this one. I say it’s exactly the right time for this plan.”

You can follow the national tour on the Apollo Blog, in the Data Points features we are posting that make the case for strong federal action to accelerate the clean energy economy, and on The New Apollo Program page on our Web site. Thanks so much to the IBEW for hosting our events in Columbus and San Leandro, and to the Puget Sound Industrial Excellence Center for hosting the Seattle event. In Ohio and California, our union allies took us on terrific tours of their training facilities, where workers are preparing for the career-building jobs in installation, monitoring, analysis, and the other high skill trades of the clean energy economy (see pix below). 

Next week we roll into Denver, Detroit, and Portland, Oregon. 

We’re finding strong interest everywhere we go, and for good reason. The rollout occurs in the midst of the worst domestic and global financial crisis in nearly 80 years. The New Apollo Program doesn’t talk about a bail out. It talks about a build up, what Apollo Alliance Chairman Phil Angelides calls “a sweeping investment program to put America back to work.”

We asked Elena Foshay, our research associate, to dig into the numbers and tell us how fully implementing the 10-year, $500 billion New Apollo Program would affect the three states we’ve been to so far. Elena’s calculations are based on the Perryman Group’s data cited in Apollo’s 2004 report, New Energy for America. She found that California would gain $64 billion in new clean energy investments and nearly 500,000 permanent new green-collar jobs. Ohio would gain $22 billion in investment and 156,000 green-collar jobs; Washington State would gain $10 billion in new investment and nearly 82,000 new green-collar jobs.

With joblessness climbing and the economy in turmoil, those are the kind of results that make sense for now. As Carl Zichella, the Sierra Club’s director of western renewable programs noted on Saturday: “This is not a partisan plan; it is a roadmap to unite people in a common goal.  This will build public confidence that, despite the enormous mess the country is in now, that we can emerge from it stronger, more prosperous, and in possession of a cleaner environment for future generations.  If we work together the benefits of repowering our economy to a renewable future will belong to us all.”

Apollo Weekly Update 10/3/08: Green-Collar Job Training In California; Rolling Out The New Apollo Program

Our friends at Green For All in Oakland, are preparing for the publication of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones, the group’s founder and president, and a member of the board of the Apollo Alliance. Harper Collins puts the book, Van’s first, on sale on October 7th, but you can preorder it. Green For All says The Green Collar Economy will respond to issues that couldn’t be more crucial right now, like how the next president can create millions of new green jobs. How the U.S. can lower energy prices without drilling our shorelines and burning up the planet. And how the government can help create energy independence. 

The Apollo Alliance makes the same case in The New Apollo Program, which we roll out nationally starting on Saturday with an event in San Leandro with California Senator Barbara Boxer and Phil Angelides, our chairman. Then we go to the Midwest, to the Pacific Northwest, and at the end of the month to the East Coast. You can follow our progress with dispatches from Heidi Pickman and me on the Apollo Blog.

The New Apollo Program is a national economic development strategy that calls on the federal government to be a partner in scaling up the clean energy tools, practices, and good jobs to build a safer, more secure, more prosperous America. With every passing week, the recommendations of The New Apollo Program take on more prominence and urgency. As we noted in our call this week to green the bailout, the resistance in the House to passing the Washington/Wall Street rescue package was “really the clarion call from regular Americans for investment in people and jobs and a new way of life and commerce. We assert those goals are served by aggressively pursuing the pollution-free, clean energy market principles of this century. The best plan out there to do just that is our own The New Apollo Program.”  

And this week California turned policy into law consistent with the goals of The New Apollo Program.  The state enacted a new statute, AB2855, that establishes green-collar job training academies to prepare high school students for careers in building the clean energy, good jobs economy. Among the technologies that will be taught in the new academies: energy audits, retrofitting and weatherization, energy efficiency, installation of energy conservation equipment, renewable energy design and installation, next generation vehicle maintenance, and pollution prevention. TheCalifornia Apollo Alliance and the State Building Trades Council of California co-sponsored the legislation and helped secure its passage and enactment.

By the way, take a look at the Apollo Alliance’s new Web site, designed to be more informative, graphically interesting, and easier to use. Almost every posting on the site has opportunity for you to interact, leave comments, make suggestions. If you have ideas about how to strengthen the site, please let me know. And thank you so much for being part.

Next Page »