On Friday, the AFL-CIO organized a rally of thousands of people in Los Angeles to urge policymakers and political candidates to commit to solving our nation’s job crisis. Among the job-creation policies being backed by the AFL is a clean transportation project in Los Angeles County called the 30/10 Initiative.

The idea of the 30/10 Initiative is to accomplish 30 years worth of mass transit projects in just 10 years, which will not only create 160,000 clean energy jobs but also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce vehicle miles traveled in Los Angeles. The mass transit projects to be funded under the 30/10 Initiative include the Metro Orange Line extension, Westside subway extension, Green Line LAX extension, and others.

“I’m talking about real projects, like the LA Metro 30/10 Initiative,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the crowd in Los Angeles. “It’s efficient, it’s smart, it’s strategic.  It accelerates 12 key construction projects to complete a new, comprehensive, rider-friendly rail system in LA—it does it in 10 years instead of 30—and it gets started now. …

“And here’s the best part. You start this investment in a new, environmentally friendly metro rail system, and it will create a virtuous cycle of innovation and creation. You’ll see spin-off businesses, new investments. This is how you rebuild an economy.”

L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and L.A. County Federation of Labor Secretary-Treasurer Maria Elena Durazo also spoke at the jobs rally.  Click here for more information about the 30/10 Initiative and here to learn more about what the AFL-CIO is doing to push policymakers to focus on jobs, jobs, jobs.

United Steelworkers announced a deal with two Chinese power companies, A-Power Energy Generation Systems Ltd. and Shenyang Power Group, to employ union workers at all levels of the supply chain to produce wind turbines.

In addition to buying 50,000 tons of steel from unionized American steel mills, the Chinese firms will employ a substantial number of USW members for the construction, assembly and installation of the wind turbines themselves.

Most of the supplies will go towards the stimulus-funded $450 million, 615-megawatt wind farm in Texas, which originally would have created 2,000 jobs in China and only 300 in America.

The deal — which looks to support “hundreds of jobs” — illustrates that renewable energy systems can be produced in the United States, even in partnership with foreign firms, to benefit the environment and American workers.

Following the surprising and unfortunate July 6^th decision by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to designate Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) loan programs as “high risk,” the California Energy Commission ended $30 million worth of PACE program funding on Wednesday. The $30 million of stimulus investment was expected to provoke an additional $370 million from 23 counties and 184 cities to create over 4,000 jobs and save more than 187,000 tons of CO2 emissions in two years.

Karen Douglas, Chairman of the California Energy Commission, expressed her disgust at the forced decision: “PACE is an essential and necessary tool to help Californians invest in energy efficiency retrofits for their homes and achieve our state’s energy and environmental goals while adding clean energy jobs,” she said. “The Governor, California’s Congressional delegation, the State Legislature, the Attorney General and 21 states recognize the crucial value PACE financing offers and is working with the White House to address the FHFA PACE financing issues.”

The Commission further said that the FHFA “undermined California’s job creation and environmental initiatives by creating significant new regulatory hurdles for PACE programs at the eleventh hour” and that it “should not be in the business of interfering with municipal discretion to use their taxing authority for the general welfare to upgrade their infrastructure and local resources.”

This backlash extends to the California Department of Justice – Calif. Attorney General Jerry Brown, outraged at the FHFA flip-flopping, is suing the FHFA.

Unfortunately, the strict deadlines to spend stimulus dollars by the end of this year forced the CEC to make a decision before the legal battle can play itself out. Hopefully, they can find a new way to efficiently allocate the funds toward clean energy until the FHFA reconsiders its decision.

-Will Rafey

On Monday, July 12th, Missouri Governor Nixon signed PACE-enabling legislation into law. PACE provides a mechanism for upfront financing of energy efficiency retrofits of both residential and commercial buildings. Members of the Missouri Apollo Alliance steering committee pushed the legislation through the Missouri State Legislature this year, making it the only major environmental legislation to pass in the 2010 session.

This comes at a time when PACE programs across the country have been put on hold because of opposition from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, so Missouri’s step forward adds to the efforts by cities and states across the country that want to see PACE become a reality.

Highlighting the need for PACE to move forward in Missouri, Liz Forrestal - the Executive Director of Missouri Votes Conservation and a Missouri Apollo steering committee member - said, “Some people believe that environmental policy will cost jobs… but PACE protects the environment while creating goods jobs.”

Erin Noble of Renew Missouri concurred. Renew Missouri pushed PACE in the state legislature in order to create jobs and drop energy bills for Missouri ratepayers. The Apollo Alliance continues to work with local municipalities, particularly St. Louis and Kansas City, and its own constituencies to identify best practices for an effective PACE program.

–Joe Thomas

Today, the town of Babylon, New York declared its intention to sue the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) over its decision to oppose property-assessed clean energy (PACE) loans, which jeopardizes one of the best ways to move residential and commercial building owners toward efficiency and clean energy measures.

PACE loans, which are incorporated into housing mortgages, enable energy-saving projects like weatherization, replacing old water boilers or putting up solar panels. By allowing homeowners to finance improvements with future savings on electricity bills, they create green jobs and reduce energy dependence at zero up-front cost.

Backed by the White House and the Department of Energy (which allocated $150 million for PACE programs in the stimulus), PACE was on pace not only to assist Babylon’s cutting-edge Long Island Green Homes program, but millions of houses across the nation.

Despite this widespread support among homeowners, contractors and local governments, the FHFA mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie Mae’s surprising characterization of the loans as involving “unusual and difficult risk” has essentially frozen PACE implementation.

Dorian Dale, energy director for Babylon, disagrees with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s description: “We wanted to say, ‘Here’s the impact of what you did with the flick of a pen,’” he said in an interview.

Photo of Bablyon protesters courtesy of grist.org

UPDATE: It looks like the state of California beat Babylon to the punch: California sues Fannie, Freddie over clean energy

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), BlueGreen Alliance and the United Steelworkers (USW) released a report today mapping the policy directions required to build a robust domestic wind energy component supply chain and create tens of thousands of jobs.

The blueprint advised some of the priorities outlined in our April 2009 GreenMAP report: passing Sen. Brown’s IMPACT Act, extending and strengthening the Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit, and fully funding the Green Jobs Act.

IMPACT (the “Investments in Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology Act of 2009”) will devote $30 billion for low-interest loans to help small- and medium- sized manufacturers retool their factories to build clean energy parts.

Read more about “Winds of Change” and its other recommendations in this press release.

The U.S. rail manufacturing industry – and the workers who depend on it – stand to benefit immensely from greater federal investment in public transit, says a new study by Duke University prepared for the Apollo Alliance. A new transportation bill would assist at least 247 manufacturing locations in 35 states, especially New York (with 32 rail manufacturing facilities), Pennsylvania (26), Illinois (23), California (22) and Ohio (13).

This welcome news was echoed by another study released today, which finds that a transportation bill that invests heavily in public transit will create 7.2 million jobs across the economy – 400,000 more than a bill that doesn’t. The analysis, by the Economic Policy Institute, called for a $500 billion six-year plan.

As lawmakers consider a new transportation bill that would substantially increase public transit financing – the last one expired last September and the Department of Transportation is running on fumes – these latest findings should rekindle their efforts.

The full report, “U.S. Manufacture of Rail Vehicles for Intercity Passenger Rail and Urban Transit: A Value Chain Analysis,” is available here.

It’s easy to forget that global warming has sparked a global response when the stalemate in Congress over national climate legislation continues, even despite the fact that the latest consequence of our fossil fuel addiction – the “worst” environmental catastrophe in America’s history – flickers across televisions nightly.

Yet the global clean energy industry could be worth $2.3 trillion by 2020, according to a December 2009 report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Who capitalizes on these new markets depends on governments’ willingness to establish favorable clean-energy policies – and everyone except Congress seems to know it.

China, moving rapidly into the void left by U.S. inaction, is poised to leap beyond the U.S. and seize control of the emerging clean energy economy. China’s overall clean energy investments surpassed the United States for the first time in 2009, with nearly $31 billion compared to just under $17 billion.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), fresh from another visit to China, released a memo on Capitol Hill yesterday reaffirming the widening transpacific clean-tech gap in the wake of its latest report. The memo comes on the heels of a comparative analysis done by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Bloomberg New Energy Finance which also concluded that America’s clean-tech leadership is slipping. Without comprehensive clean-energy legislation focused on investment, innovation and infrastructure to match that of its competitors, CAP argues, the United States will forfeit the chance to be a major player in the global clean-energy economy.

Investment

China anticipates 2.88 million new clean-energy jobs by 2020 – just by meeting its national demand. Already, thanks to robust national commitment, it has the most installed renewable energy capacity in the world – even though its economy is a third of the size of America’s. This unprecedented growth can be directly traced to China’s regulatory policies that create stable markets to encourage clean-energy investment.

One of China’s smartest policies, its renewable portfolio standard (RPS), requires utilities to generate 15 percent of their energy with renewables by 2020, with additional provisions that could reach double their target. Germany has a goal of 20 percent by 2020, and Spain aims to achieve 30 percent by 2020. Here, while 24 U.S. states already have RPSs, Congress has yet to pass a national standard (although one is included in the current draft of the American Power Act).

In addition, the Chinese government is aggressively pursuing feed-in tariffs, which most people in the United States haven’t even heard of. Feed-in tariffs set prices for utilities to buy renewable energy that producers feed into the grid, and their incredible success across Europe and in a few U.S. cities is well documented. Together with the RPS and fuel economy standards that are more than a third higher than ours, China’s feed-in tariffs reflect the country’s realization that market-expanding national clean-energy policies matter to global clean-tech investors trying to decide where to place their bets.

Innovation

America is also losing its clean-energy innovation edge, which is crucial to generate more efficient renewable energy technologies. Applied Materials, the world’s biggest solar manufacturing supplier, is relocating its chief technology office from Silicon Valley to China and constructing the largest solar research center ever built in Xi’an. One of its stated reasons for the move: China’s concrete commitment to a renewable energy future.

The sustained, programmatic R&D funding from the Chinese government looks to eclipse the U.S., where ad-hoc stimulus funding ($6.8 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) doesn’t amount to the long-term support required for good R&D.

China’s national Science and Technology plan contains what CAP’s memo described as “tangible benchmarks” like patent and citation quotas through 2020 and specific clean-energy targets designated by the Ministry of Science and Technology in transmission, wind turbine, and efficiency development.

Infrastructure

CAP representatives also noted that China’s infrastructural commitment left a “particularly deep impression” during their visit – especially the “impressive, tangible, and breathtaking” $300 billion Beijing has allocated for railway expansion through 2020. Coupled with what will be the largest urban rail system in the world, and a vast network of ultrahigh-voltage grid transmission wires, this concrete investment will facilitate rapid movement of people and goods across the burgeoning Chinese economy.

The U.S. Congress, in stark contrast, hasn’t even started talking about a new surface transportation authorization bill, even though the last one expired in September 2009. The Department of Transportation is operating on a series of temporary extensions that barely cover operating costs. Revitalizing the U.S. transportation infrastructure to meet environmental and economic pressures requires cohesive, national leadership which short-term stimulus funding cannot replace.

All too often, critics try to dismiss China’s edge in the clean energy marketplace by referencing that the Chinese passed the U.S. in absolute emissions in 2006, that they build “two coal plants a week,” etc. The emerging work on China’s headlong rush toward alternative energy indicates the opposite. As President Obama heads to the June 26-27 G-20 meeting, he should keep in mind how much we have to learn.

–Will Rafey

Read The New Yorker’s excellent exposé on Beijing’s 863 program here to get a clearer idea of the magnitude of their innovation drive.

To see the analysis by the Breakthrough Institute and Americans for Energy Leadership of the American Power Act’s impact on U.S. economic competitiveness, go here.

Graph courtesy of the Pew Charitable Trusts (“Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?,” p. 17)

A bill that would provide $6 billion for weatherization, or retrofitting buildings to conserve energy – considered to be one of the simplest and cost-effective ways to cut emissions  – looks likely to pass this summer.

“Cash for Caulkers” (H.R. 5019), which passed in the House of Representatives on May 6th, is expected to create 168,000 jobs and save $9.2 billion on energy bills over the next decade.

Cashing in on these new rebates, however, will take a bit of work – look to Houston Neal’s excellent breakdown of the various subsidies.

This morning, California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown caught the attention of national media by proposing a massive clean energy investment program to create 500,000 jobs and 20,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity by 2020. He unveiled his plan at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s “Road to the State House” event (an event for candidates to outline their general priorities to high-tech executives).

Lisa Hoyos, Apollo’s California state coordinator, attended the event and recapped several of the proposals that came out of Brown’s thirty-minute opening speech, which focused primarily on clean energy and its potential to lift California out of its economic crisis.

Brown identified a few crucial points:

• As governor, he would incentivize the production of 20,000 MW of clean energy by 2020 to create approximately 500,000 jobs.
• 12,000 MW would come from small-scale projects, like photovoltaic panels placed along highways and on residential or commercial roofs.
• 8,000 MW would come from large-scale, baseload projects like concentrated solar.
• The initiative would be managed by a newly created “Renewable Energy Jobs Czar.” Interagency collaboration (particularly between the California Air Resources Board, the Public Utilities Commission, and the Energy Commission) and expediting the regulatory permitting process would be essential.
• He touted the efficiency standards passed during his previous tenure as governor (1975-1983), emphasizing the 1.5 million jobs created and the $56 billion in savings for consumers.
• He also emphasized the need for California to lead the way forward, building on policies like the low-carbon fuel standard that became a model for federal legislation.

During the Q&A, he clarified his support for AB 32, the state’s landmark climate change bill, emphasizing its “flexible” implementation and its potential for job creation. AB 32, opposed by his opponent, Meg Whitman, “isn’t a precise book of detailed prescriptions,” Brown said, “but rather sets goals to reduce GHGs.”

Brown acknowledged that his vision would require a great deal of “real trench warfare” and pledged a hands-on approach characterized by “honesty,” “frugality,” and “innovation.”

The San Jose Mercury News’ analysis is here, earth2tech’s here, and the Associated Press’ here.

-Will Rafey