That insistent rumble and scraping you hear is the sound of a foundation in motion, a great nation undergoing an epic economic transition. The market signals that provided much of the prosperity of the American 20^th century -– cheap energy, cheap land, rising incomes, formidable government wealth, competitiveness in core manufacturing industries, moderate population growth –- have all flipped in the 21^st.  Independence Day looks a lot different in an era of expensive fuel, rampant foreclosure, static incomes, government deficits, manufacturing losses, and the fastest population growth of any industrialized nation on Earth.

Our mettle as a nation is being tested. Our ability to innovate, decide, and act is motivated by very new conditions, many of them beyond our control. The years immediately in front of us will be challenging in ways that are not at all familiar to most of us. The soaring price of oil alone makes that all but certain. A nation and economy built on the principle of plenty is confronting, arguably for the first time, formidable limits.

But what is impressive about this Independence Day is us — our culture, our system. Both provide the stability and flexibility for people and their communities to evaluate the new market signals and make choices about what to do.

In the last week, evidence of the tide of change reshaping the United States has filled my email box here at the Apollo Alliance. For every store closing caused by higher fuel prices and declining disposable incomes is a report of how online retail purchases are growing. The agony of one family’s foreclosure in the outer suburbs is balanced by another family’s decision to sell a car, and invest the money saved in a new home closer to work. 

While major metropolitan regions like Detroit slowly fade because they aren’t willing to buy new survival tools, like a regional rapid transit system, thriving metro-areas, like Salt Lake City and Denver, are spending $billions to build the largest regional rail networks in the Rocky Mountain West.

Homes built closer to city centers are holding their value much better than homes built far away. Green, energy efficient homes are especially prized, say realtors. The Federal Highway Administration reports that traffic and the number of miles Americans are driving is declining, while the Federal Transit Administration reports record increases in public transit ridership. 

Green technology and clean energy was a $170 billion global industry in 2007, and more is being spent this year, according to a report from New Energy Finance, a research firm.  It wasn’t so long ago that the vice president of the United States put ideology and partisanship ahead of common sense, and dismissed energy conservation as a “personal virtue.”

Today, conservation and all the other clean energy tools and practices are among America’s fastest growing economic sectors. They have become what Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Environment Programme calls “an imperative and an inevitability.” 

On this Independence Day we also remark on the intellectual energy of our own supporters. When we focused last week’s Apollo Update on Senator John McCain’s proposal to end a 26-year ban on drilling the outer continental shelf, asking whether the Republican nominee’s focus on high gas prices was a bid to set the message agenda on energy, you responded en masse. More than 250 responses arrived here, more than 30,000 words from across the country. So many of you have views, in fact, that we’re publishing Apollo Feedback as a series of three postings this week on the Apollo Blog. This is part one. 

Green-Collar Jobs Pledge
We’re inviting community leaders to sign the Green-Collar Jobs Pledge and take public action that links global warming to economic strategies to create high-quality green-collar jobs. We are partnering with the Apollo Alliance, Center for American Progress, Green For All, and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez, and King County (Wash.) Executive Ron Sims.

Heidi Pickman reported this week on Jerome Ringo’s appearance in New Orleans last month before the National Conference of Black Mayors.

And my question to you this week is what is the definition of American independence this year. Please write your replies in the comments section of this posting on the Apollo Blog. Let’s see how that works. I’ll keep my eye on the page so that your replies are published.

And have a great weekend. I’m back in Michigan this week, preparing tomorrow to ride my road bike to Onekama, along Lake Michigan, for the annual Engwall (wife’s family) Independence Day celebration. It’s supposed to be northern Michigan summer bright and warm. A good day for a ride. Take care and talk to you next week.

Yours,

Keith Schneider
Communications Director

This week, the price of oil surged above $143 per barrel for the first time. Oil companies would have us believe that drilling the outer continental shelf will slow rising gas prices. It won’t.

See the following talking points for more information:

We’re having the wrong debate. Rising gas prices should spark a movement to get us off of oil once and for all, not dig ourselves deeper into the hole. Instead of continuing our dependence on oil, we should be using record oil profits to invest in clean sources of energy. If we are going to solve America’s energy needs, we must come together to support a new Apollo plan, in the spirit of John F. Kennedy’s visionary project that put the first man on the moon.

The push to develop the outer continental shelf is led by oil companies and their political allies. They are the only ones who will benefit from this scheme. Americans will be left behind to pay more and more at the pump.

Deep sea drilling poses grave environmental risks and does nothing to lower gas prices now or in the foreseeable future. The known outer continental shelf reserves, perhaps 10 billion to 20 billion barrels according to the Energy Information Administration, are difficult to tap, will take decades to develop, and will not make a dent in the nation’s energy supply. Rather than trying to literally go to the ends of the earth to develop the increasingly expensive, dwindling, and polluting resource of the 20th century, we should invest in clean energy technologies that are fit for the 21st.

A robust national clean energy program would provide stable, family-supporting, green-collar jobs for millions of Americans. At a time when Americans are feeling more pressure at the pump, we should be investing in sustainable economic development that enhances our security and prosperity. Investing in an economic development strategy equal in size and significance to the Apollo moon mission will provide good jobs, lower energy costs, and is precisely what Americans need now.

– Eva Barboni

Severin Boreinstein of the University of California Energy Institute sent these figures today in response to proposals to increase offshore oil production in the United States. 

 

Campaigns may be about the future, but politics is about today. And the energy idea of today, says the White House, is to open America’s coast to offshore drilling. With gasoline prices about to hit $5.00 a gallon in the Bay Area — the price down the street from me in Berkeley was $4.71 today — the notion that we can add supply to the market and prices will go down sounds arresting, especially if you’re one of those voters in a swing state that has no public transit, commute 70 miles a day, and you’re driving a 20 mpg vehicle.

The White House also is tapping into a strong pipeline of pro-drilling political sentiment. A survey in May by Zogby International found that 65 percent of Americans support drilling for oil off U.S. coastlines and 52 percent back drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Our analyst friends in Washington say that puts Democrats hoping to make big election year gains in a tricky position.

Democrats, for the most part, are trying to direct voter anger at oil companies. According to a Gallup Poll published June 13, 60 percent of Americans assign a great deal of blame for higher gasoline prices to the oil companies. That was a larger share than blamed either Congress or the Bush administration.

But the real answer is that drilling for oil offshore won’t matter a bit in the price of gasoline now or in the distant future. Why? Because even if, by some unseen act of political expediency, Congress approves offshore drilling tomorrow, the first drop of oil from those new wells won’t reach refineries for more than a decade, if the well is in Alaska, and only a little less time than that if they’re off the coast of Florida, Georgia, California, Texas, or any other state. Nor will the production of new American supplies of oil, a global commodity, have any significant influence on gasoline prices. 

In fact, over the next decade Americans stand to make real progress with energy prices if the United States embraces a new national purpose to invest in dramatically scaling up wind, solar, geo thermal, and cellulosic ethanol production. Wind is already more competitive than electricity generated from new nuclear and coal-fired power plants. In the first quarter of 2008 some 1,500 more megawatts of wind power was put online across America, bringing total wind generating capacity to more than 18,000 megawatts, second only to Germany’s wind capacity, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Investments in cellulosic ethanol research and production could produce tens of billions of gallons of a new fuel source within the decade. Development of the next generation of high mileage vehicles, rapid transit, and high speed regional rail networks in the next ten years would dramatically loosen the noose that oil has around America’s neck. Designing new patterns of community growth that draw people and the places they need to go in closer proximity has the same effect.

The point is that drilling for more offshore oil, aside from the potentially catastrophic effects it can have on shoreline communities and the climate, doesn’t make any immediate economic sense. It won’t alter rising gasoline prices. And if supporters of the clean energy, good jobs economy are doing their job to point that out, it shouldn’t make any political sense either. 

– Keith Schneider

So by now you know Apollo President Jerome Ringo was at the National Conference of Black Mayors in New Orleans (fortunately for me, I was too.) 

Jerome’s main message to the mayors was twofold:  to connect the dots between the melting ice caps and the problems in the minority communities and to galvanize the mayors into action to be part of the solution.  

As Jerome spoke about the social justice consequences of the industrialization of the modern world, the mayors at the luncheon shouted AMEN.  When he spoke about finding a black man in an unknown city, all one had to do was look for the railroad track, the mayors nodded their heads in recognition.  When he spoke about the higher than average cancer rates of blacks living in the petrochemical belt that ranges from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, the mayors responded with ‘I know, I know.’  But Jerome also pointed out that most of the time when he is at an environmental conference, he is the only African-American.  

It is up to the mayors he said to become leaders in the environmental movement by creating green jobs programs in their cities, to take advantage of the opportunities that are out there and to make their collective voices heard loudly to those in power to make the world a better place.

I was moved.  

And so were the mayors.

Many of the mayors were from small rural towns, but there were some big city mayors in attendance from Cleveland, Philadelphia and of course New Orleans.  I hope Mayor Nagin heard Jerome.  He certainly agreed with what Jerome said.    

But I didn’t see one recycling bin during my visit or one thread of evidence that Nagin ‘gets it.’  I hope I’m wrong, there is tremendous opportunity to create much needed jobs AND housing in New Orleans and that housing can be healthy and environmentally sound and sustainable.

The models are out there.  Take Newark. Mayor Cory Booker and the city is overhauling its Master Plan to include sustainability concerns. Newark seeks to become a leader in urban sustainability by implementing environmentally advanced strategies that will make the city safer and wealthier.  Mayor Booker has made a “Clinton Global Initiative Energy & Climate Change Program Commitment.”  This is despite Newarks many problems: One-quarter of Newark residents live below the poverty line; tthe city’s median income ($34,000) is half that of New Jersey’s; forty percent of the city’s residents do not have full-time work; and Newark’s 2008 budget faces a $180 million gap.

You’ll hear more about Newark in the weeks and months to come.  With help from the Apollo Alliance, Newark is holding a Green Future Summit in September 2008 to identify best practices and mobilize the resources to make Newark a national showcase for clean and efficient energy use, green economic development and job creation, and equitable environmental opportunity.  Three essential elements will be to promote green space, green building and economic development. 

For now, enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Jerome Ringo spoke this afternoon to over 400 mayors from around the country including Ray Nagin, mayor of host city  - the jazzy, lovely, hospitable New Orleans.  Jerome Ringo spoke today at the National Conference of Black Mayors.  

He addressed a small group in the morning and the entire group during lunch thanks to Karen Henley of Johnson Controls. Stay tuned for the video of his speech once we edit it.  You’ll enjoy it.  He really rallied the mayors to become involved in the green revolution.  

I’ll post more photos and write about our trip to the 9th Ward - but it’s time to go listen to some music!

–Heidi Pickman

Jerome Ringo, our esteemed President will be speaking tomorrow (Friday) at the National Conference of Black Mayors.  He will ask hundreds of mayors to sign a pledge to rebuild American competitiveness and environmental leadership by growing a green economy that fights global warming, pollution and poverty (phew) – ALL at the same time. 

Green jobs program benefits to cities include:  a stronger local economy; stronger infrastructure; more high wage, career-path jobs; no outsourcing of jobs; attractive places to do business; and a cleaner, healthier environment.

As a reminder, we define green-collar jobs are family-supporting, career track jobs in green industries such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, alternative transportation and low-carbon fuels.

The pledge is co-sponsored by the Apollo Alliance, the Center for American Progress, Green for All and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability. 

A copy of the pledge can be found at www.usgreenjobspledge.org.

And I’ll update you on the reactions of the mayors.

– Heidi Pickman

I had some more time to look at the report from the profs at UMass-Amherst.  It examines six areas in which green jobs may be found: - building retrofitting, mass transit, energy-efficient automobiles, wind power, solar power, and cellulosic biomass fuels. 

Then the report breaks down employment of different types of jobs within these sectors, e.g. roofers, agricultural inspectors, electricians, and the like, for 12 states (Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.)

For each state, the authors gathered the employment numbers for each job type broken down by green job sector.  For example, they have tables that show data such as how many electricians in solar for Florida or how many agricultural inspectors in cellulosic biomass fuels in Indiana – and they show the average wages.

The report also has a table on all the possible different types of jobs that may be in the green economy and lists how many people are employed in those jobs. 

Some media outlets are implying that there are a possible 14 million jobs in the green economy or about nine percent of the U.S. workforce.  That seemed a little high to me, especially since it is almost five times the Apollo number.  I called the report’s co-author, Robert Pollin, for clarification.  He said that the media isn’t getting it quite right, the table is simply the number of people employed in those jobs, not that all those jobs will be green jobs.  My interpretation (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that IF, and it’s an uber-big, uber-unlikely IF, all electricians, all agricultural workers, etcetera were to be employed in green industries then the green economy would be 9 percent of the economy.  One can only dream.  

Pollin added that this report was meant to be simple and descriptive and he comes out with a more in-depth study later this summer.  We will keep you filled in.

– Heidi Pickman