Support for Clean Energy Manufacturing in Congress
This week, Apollo Alliance Chairman Phil Angelides joined Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown on Capitol Hill to introduce the “Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology Act (IMPACT) Act of 2009.” The measure, which Sen. Brown hopes to enact as part of our new national energy policy, proposes a $30 billion revolving loan fund designed to help small- and medium-sized manufacturers improve their energy efficiency, retrain workers for clean energy manufacturing jobs, and retool plants in order to expand into the clean energy supply chain.
Senator Brown (pix left, with Angelides center, and Blue-Green Alliance Director David Foster on right) based his proposal on Apollo Alliance’s Green Manufacturing Action Plan (GreenMAP), which was introduced in April and lays out aggressive steps to scale up production of American-made clean energy systems and components while making U.S. factories more energy efficient.
The country’s manufacturers are poised to act on our recommendations. The recovery bill signed by President Obama in February, the appropriations bill enacted in March, and the budget agreement approved in April commit more than $300 billion to clean energy investment and green-collar job generation. These investments will provide vast new clean energy markets, but “without a program to support our own domestic manufacturers, policies that create new demand for clean energy will just lead to more imports,” explained Angelides.
IMPACT Act
We estimate that Sen. Brown’s IMPACT legislation, once enacted, will create at least 680,000 direct manufacturing jobs nationally and 1,972,000 indirect jobs over the next five years. “The domestic manufacturing industry helped build our nation’s middle class and is critical to national security,” said Sen. Brown. “It accounts for 12 percent - $1.6 trillion - of the U.S. gross domestic product and almost three-fourths of the nation’s research and development. Despite this, the U.S. manufacturing industry has contracted for 16 consecutive months.”
Earlier this month, Angelides, Apollo Alliance President Jerome Ringo, and Board Member Michael Peck joined several prominent business, labor, and policy leaders in calling on Senate leaders to make significant investments in retooling plants and retraining America’s manufacturing workers.
Letter to the Senate
“Including investments in domestic manufacturing in the energy bill will deliver economic rewards to all 50 states,” they wrote in a letter to members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Some committee members hesitant to support the legislation may be pleased to learn that their constituents will benefit enormously. The states hit hardest by manufacturing job losses over the past few decades - states like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Missouri - are the ones that have the most potential for a revitalized manufacturing sector capable of making the clean and efficient energy systems that will be the backbone of the new energy economy.”
An aggressive program based on Apollo’s GreenMAP that focuses on manufacturing would benefit tens of thousands of U.S. firms capable of building the equipment and components of the clean energy economy, the majority of them located in the 20 states hardest hit by manufacturing job losses.
Green-Collar Jobs Are Here by the Thousands
A number of new studies of the clean energy sector, including one made public this month by the Pew Charitable Trusts, confirm that manufacturers and states all across the country are poised to benefit from a major federal investment. Pew researchers found more than 68,200 businesses across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, many of them manufacturers, and 770,000 jobs in the clean energy sector. Over the last decade, jobs in the clean energy economy grew at a rate of 9.1 percent nationally, while traditional jobs grew by only 3.7 percent. (URL to our blog on the report)
Be sure also to keep track of the quickening pace of state and federal action on clean energy policy on our Apollo Blog and Daily Digest.
House Committee Approves Energy, Climate Bill; Conference in Ohio
This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a new national energy strategy that puts a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and sets up a market for regulated industries to buy and sell “allowances” that encourage companies to reduce emissions beneath that limit.
The proposal will soon be taken up by the full House, and the Senate is starting work on its own bill. At issue in both chambers will be not only the cap and trade provision, but also the effect of the bill on the American economy, especially for the clean energy manufacturing sector. Fortunately, the House bill now includes several important domestic clean energy manufacturing provisions that will:
• Help finance clean energy manufacturing and deployment.
• Encourage manufacturers to retool or expand their facilities to produce clean energy systems.
• Help auto manufacturers produce the batteries that will power the electric cars of the future.
Capping Carbon, Michigan Moves on Clean Energy
Over the last three months, with determination and legislative success born of economic urgency, the White House and Congress have done more to treat America’s addiction to fossil fuels than any government in history. The $787 billion Recovery Act enacted in February and the appropriations bill approved in March invested nearly $200 billion to scale up wind, solar, clean fuels, next generation vehicles, a smart energy grid, energy efficiency, and transit. President Obama’s budget outline, approved in April, calls for $150 billion more in clean energy development.
Now, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee are working on a new energy policy that, if done right, would put a cap and a price on carbon emissions and drive demand for a whole new generation of jobs in the clean and efficient energy sectors.
Green Manufacturing Action in D.C., New Apollo Staff
The substantial investments that the Obama administration and Congress are making in the clean energy sector also are the start of a wave of new green-collar employment. Reports from California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Nevada, Iowa, Minnesota and other states show that as federal funds flow out of Washington for energy efficiency improvements, weatherization, plant retooling and other programs, green-collar employment is on the rise.
Serious Materials, the California company that manufacturers energy efficient windows, is a case in point. Since the start of the year, Serious has hired more than 200 new employees to reopen two plants, and it has plans to develop several more plants.
Apollo Weeky Update 4/17/09: Manufacturing Action Plan Launch, Greening of Southie
In December 2007 Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which sought, for the first time, to address two of the three primary economic challenges of the century: energy security and climate change. Among other measures, the law promoted clean energy alternatives and established a green-collar job training program developed by the Apollo Alliance. The act also provided grants and loans to manufacturers to retool plants for clean energy products, encouraged higher mileage vehicles (particularly plug-in electric hybrids) and renewable fuels, increased energy efficiency standards in appliances, declared that all government buildings must significantly reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, and required that new government buildings be carbon-neutral by 2030.
Apollo Weekly Update, 4/10/09: Green Room Launch, LA Ordinance
The Apollo Alliance covers a lot of territory in pursuit of our mission to communicate and advocate for a clean energy, good jobs economy. Our national coalition of labor, business, environmental, and social justice leaders and organizations works in the states, in Washington, on university campuses, in business front offices, in communities, the media, and dozens more settings to advance the Apollo mission.
Apollo Weekly Update 4/4/09: Manufacturing and Jobs Need to Matter in Washington
We’re enthusiastic about many of the provisions of the energy and climate legislation introduced last week by Representatives Henry Waxman (see pix at bottom) and Edward Markey. The two lawmakers, respectively chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and chairman of the Environment Subcommittee, embraced key ideas about improving energy efficiency and spurring renewable energy initiatives that we proposed last year in The New Apollo Program.
Apollo Weekly Update, 3/27/09: Administration’s First Clean Energy Investment, Pennsylvania’s Success
Though it wasn’t money from the just-passed stimulus bill, the Obama administration this week made its first big investment in renewable energy and good green-collar jobs. The Department of Energy, under a $40 billion clean energy loan guarantee program that the prior administration never used, awarded a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra Inc., Solyndra is a four-year-old California-based maker of cylindrical solar photovoltaic generating systems that has a state of the art manufacturing plant in Fremont, California.
Apollo Weekly Update, 3/20/09: Training Green-Collar Workers, Core Principles
One of the five central goals of The New Apollo Program, our comprehensive economic investment strategy, is to train workers for the new clean energy economy. “Scaling up to meet the demands of the clean energy economy,” we said, “will require investments in worker training at every level of the green-collar career ladder.”
That’s not just talk. The focus on making the case for good green-collar jobs (like those at Litecontrol in pix at left) is intense around here and has been for several years. We helped develop the ideas that led to passage of the 2007 Green Jobs Act to train green-collar workers, especially those in disadvantaged communities. In February, with enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Congress appropriated $500 million for programs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors defined by the Green Jobs Act.
Apollo Weekly Update 3/13/09: Recovery Act Core Principles, Good Jobs, Jones Appointed To White House
We’ve got green-collar jobs on our minds this week, good green-collar jobs.
The White House estimated in February that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would generate 3.7 million jobs, 541,000 of them in clean energy development and in rebuilding highways and modernizing public transit.
Our researchers at the Apollo Alliance are convinced that the White House estimate is low. More than $100 billion of the $787 billion appropriated in the Recovery Act is devoted to scaling up the clean energy sector and for infrastructure repair and modernization. We are convinced the Recovery Act will create or retain over 1 million green-collar jobs.
