Looking To Newark For Clean Energy Leadership
NEWARK, New Jersey — Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Apollo Alliance, issued a call to arms on Friday morning at Newark’s Green Future Summit (see pix above, with Mayor Booker below), a two-day event in New Jersey’s largest city. “The nation is looking to Newark to set an example about how to build a green economy, about how to set a clean energy example, about how to put people back to work,” he declared.
Moments later Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker declared himself to be “an Apollo advocate,” a “green go-getter,” and explained how “in partnership with the Apollo Alliance everything we are trying to do can be supercharged if we have a green consciousness and a green agenda.”
“As Phil works to bring a green consciousness to the national agenda,” Booker continued, “we want to be on the front lines of that fight. We want to create more green jobs. We want a green economy that can create safer spaces for our children, that can deal with prison re-entry, that can respond to the really epidemic rates of asthma. Those things can be solved if we have a green consciousness and a green agenda.”
This is formidable and rare stuff in policy making and civic partnership, even in these times of collaboration. The four year-old Apollo Alliance, a national nonprofit focused on clean energy and good jobs, and a 342-year-old post-industrial East Coast city climbing out of eight decades of economic dissipation. The work at the two-day Newark’s Green Future Summit, which took Apollo, Newark, and a number of other players a year to plan and organize, concludes this afternoon when Booker returns to the summit to announce which ideas discussed this weekend he wants to pursue. 
Those ideas — park development, green building, neighborhood redesign, green-collar worker training, greening major industries including Newark’s massive port, new master planning and zoning — have been implemented in other cities episodically with significant economic results.
Boston, for instance, buried its highways and built the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a grand boulevard that is attracting thousands of new housing units. Denver residents voted to raise their sales tax in 2004 to generate $5-plus billion to build 150 mile of light rail, heavy commuter rail, and bus rapid transit. Chicago planted trees, and green roofs, and invested in clean energy businesses. New York has PlanNYC, one of the greenest and most energy efficient master planning tools in the world.
These and other ideas have proved to be factors in generating more jobs, raising median incomes, attracting new businesses, and increasing urban populations. Cities are turning out to be the most important economic engines in the United States. And a generation after the definition of “sustainability” largely focused on a home in the woods surrounded by clear waters and wildlife, sustainability now means something else: A clean, green city that provides good job, recreational, housing, and education opportunities close to home in a safe and familiar urban neighborhood.
In a carbon-constrained world where energy prices are soaring, that cabin in the woods doesn’t make nearly as much sense as it once did. The Apollo Alliance understood that in 2004 with the New Energy For America report, the first substantive study to define the various national and global crises — energy, economic, climate, and security — as the biggest market opportunity of all time. We have to build and invent and invest our way out of this mess, the Alliance’s founders declared. Four years later, the Alliance has published The New Apollo Program, a comprehensive investment strategy to accelerate and scale up the clean energy, good jobs economy. Many of the policy approaches and ideas discussed this weekend at Newark’s Green Future Summit are contained in The New Apollo Program, particularly the recommendations on promoting open space and park development, new community designs, and green-collar job training.
A last point. What makes Newark’s commitment to a clean energy economy so interesting and promising is that the city has the opportunity to implement its green economic strategy comprehensively. Other cities did so piece by piece, learning which facets — energy efficiency, neighborhood redesign, transportation improvements, others — made sense. And its decision to seek the Apollo Alliance’s expertise just enhances the credibility of a distinctive organization that like few others can display its considerable capacities to strengthen a community’s work while also influencing thinking and policy choices at the national level.
– Keith Schneider