Executive Summary
The New Apollo Program is a comprehensive economic investment strategy to build America’s 21st century clean energy economy and dramatically cut energy bills for families and businesses. It will generate and invest $500 billion over the next ten years and create more than five million high quality green-collar jobs. It will accelerate the development of the nation’s vast clean energy resources and move us toward energy security, climate stability, and economic prosperity. And it will transform America into the global leader of the new green economy.
For Americans, this is a time of daunting challenges and boundless opportunities. We have become ever more dependent on foreign oil, putting our national security and economic future at risk. We have seen the price of gas and energy skyrocket as American families struggle to make ends meet. We have seen the growing threat of global warming and all its economic, environmental and human costs.
And we watched that threat become a reality as Hurricane Katrina pounded our shores, providing a stark reminder that America faces not only a climate crisis, but a crisis of economic inequality as well.
“Building a new energy economy requires a new way of doing business in America, one that takes the cost of global warming into account, ”The New Apollo Program says. “It also requires visionary new investments in our industries, our communities, and our workers.”
10 Years, $500 Billion, 5 Million Jobs
The program would generate and invest $500 billion over 10 years. An annual investment of about $50 billion a year, the Alliance notes, is a smaller share of the gross domestic product than what was spent on the Apollo space program, about one-third of current spending in Iraq, and roughly half of what was just lent by the federal government to insurance giant AIG.
Citing sky-high oil prices and the potential loss of one million jobs by year’s end, Angelides said, “We can and must embark on a new course that will create good jobs and broadly shared prosperity in order to overcome the daunting problems facing the nation.”
A primary facet of the program would make buildings more energy efficient. Homes, commercial buildings and factories account for almost 70 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Three-quarters of U.S. buildings will be new or substantially renovated by 2035. Using an Energy Smart Fund, the plan would funnel money to state and local programs focused on making these buildings more efficient, prioritizing those programs that create high-quality, local jobs in the construction industry. Every $10 billion invested in efficiency upgrades would create 100,000 on-site jobs and hundreds of thousands more jobs throughout the economy.
Expanding the use of renewable energy will require a new and improved manufacturing sector to make and assemble the necessary parts and infrastructure, such as wind towers and turbines, solar panels, a modern power grid, and next-generation cars. The blueprint calls for grants to retool and expand factories that use American-made components and that will create good, middle-class jobs here at home. The U.S. has lost 7.2 million manufacturing jobs over the past decade, and this action will help restore a vital sector that provides family-supporting jobs with benefits to millions of Americans.
Nearly 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector, and transportation costs are eating up an increasing share of household incomes. Consequently, the plan calls for major new investments in public transit systems. It also envisions a “fix-it-first” policy that gives priority to upgrading and maintaining existing highways, roads and bridges to improve efficiency, reduce fuel consumption and discourage sprawl.
The latest unemployment figures, released earlier this month, showed that more than 600,000 U.S. jobs have been lost this year. A centerpiece of The New Apollo Program is not only to create five million new jobs, but also to ensure that they are good-quality jobs. Manufacturing jobs, for example, pay an average of $25,000 more per year than service-sector jobs. The plan would increase funding for job-training programs that put workers on solid career paths, expand union apprenticeship programs and provide 100,000 scholarships annually to raise the number of college graduates with math, science and engineering degrees.
“This is an ambitious agenda,” said Angelides. “But the challenges facing us are equally large and the consequences of inaction even larger. We have the opportunity now to build a new clean energy economy that creates good jobs and shared prosperity. The new president and Congress must take bold action. Our economic health, the nation’s security, and the planet’s future are all at stake.”
At this historic moment Americans face a choice. Do we continue with business as usual, putting our planet, our security, and our economic well-being at risk? Or do we seize the opportunity to forge a new path - building a new clean energy economy that creates good jobs and broadly shared prosperity for our future?
For the Apollo Alliance, a national coalition of business, environmental, labor, and community leaders the choice is clear. We must move forward.
Time and again in our history, periods of great risk have prompted America to mobilize its wealth, skills, leadership, natural resources, and entrepreneurial spirit to overcome the challenges confronting us. Time and again, we have emerged from crisis better and stronger.
The World War II industrial mobilization made America the world’s dominant power, producing half its economic output. The National Interstate Highway System, designed to make America less vulnerable to attacks on its cities, became an economic and social web connecting people, communities and metropolitan centers. And it was the Apollo space program that gave the nation the advances in computer sciences and digital communication that drove this country’s economic expansion for decades to come.
We did it before. We can do it again.
The New Apollo Program will set the nation on a new path to prosperity. Its five key initiatives will reduce pollution, increase efficiency, promote research and development, provide good jobs, and expand opportunity for all.
The New Apollo Program will:
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REBUILD AMERICA CLEAN AND GREEN. America must generate cleaner power and use the power we have more efficiently - especially in the residential, commercial, industrial, and technology sectors that make up nearly 70 percent of our current energy use. We call for a range of solutions including an Energy Smart Fund to upgrade the energy efficiency of all buildings by at least 30 percent by 2025; consistent long-term public support for clean energy projects in order to produce 25 percent of the nation’s power from renewable sources by 2025; new environmentally sound transmission corridors and “smart grids” to bring new clean power to market; efficiency measures for existing utility and industrial power systems including mass recycling of waste heat; investments in carbon capture and storage (CCS) deployment projects; and affordable and convenient transit to connect America’s 21st century neighborhoods and cities.
MAKE IT IN AMERICA. Retooling the nation’s energy systems will require a new and improved manufacturing sector to produce durable equipment like advanced heating and cooling systems, biofuel refinery boilers, next-generation cars and trucks, efficient transmission lines, wind towers and turbines, and solar panels. To capture the low-carbon markets of the future and lower the carbon footprint of our manufacturing sector, we call for new grants to retool and retrofit America’s factories and retrain skilled workers. So that we never again rely on other nations for our energy security, and so that we do not dramatically increase carbon emissions by importing parts, these grants will be directed to companies that use American-made components and parts, assemble systems in America, and put Americans to work.
RESTORE AMERICA’S TECHNOLOGICAL LEADERSHIP. The new clean energy economy will be built on innovation. The rich scientific and technical resources of American universities, private-sector inventors, and national laboratories have been responsible for significant breakthroughs in building efficiency, solar panels, wind turbines, carbon sequestration, and other clean energy and environmental technologies. Yet funding for basic energy research and development has not kept up. We call for an aggressive energy innovation agenda to double the annual federal investment in energy research and development, and to create a National Energy Innovation Fund to take the most promising new technologies to commercial scale.
TAP THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. America must scale up its workforce to meet the demands of the clean energy economy. We call for expanded investment in state and local green-collar worker training initiatives, higher education scholarships, and union apprenticeship programs that focus on preparing workers for everything from low skill, entry-level jobs that help Americans climb the ladder of opportunity all the way up to high-skill, high-wage jobs at the leading edge of technical innovation. Resources will be dedicated to creating green pathways out of poverty for low-income job seekers so they may better access green-collar job career ladders. At the same time we must invest in an effort to graduate significantly more engineers and natural science majors from our universities. Finally, we call for a clean energy service program that allows Americans from all walks of life to serve their country by working for clean energy independence.
REINVEST IN AMERICA. Building a new energy economy requires a new way of doing business in America, one that takes the cost of global warming into account. It also requires visionary new investments in our industries, our communities, and our workers. To generate and strategically reinvest the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to build the new clean energy economy, the next president and Congress must enact a cap and invest mechanism to reduce carbon emissions, trade the allowances, and invest proceeds directly back into energy efficiency, renewable power, transit and transportation, and green workforce initiatives. We recommend the creation of a new Clean Energy Investment Corporation to invest these funds, to ensure accountability in spending public dollars, and to help hard hit communities and families make the transition to the new energy economy.
This is a bold agenda, meant to move America toward a sustainable and vibrant future. But it is not unprecedented. What we propose to invest - $50 billion per year - is a smaller share of our gross domestic product than what we spent on the original Apollo program. It is one-third the amount that we spend each year in Iraq. Surely, our energy security challenges are serious enough to warrant this level of national commitment.
The New Apollo Program can and must be financed without loading debt on future generations. We know that it will generate billions of dollars in savings each year through greater efficiency in buildings, industrial facilities, power plants, and the power grid. Yet, to make the promise of fiscal responsibility real, we must commit ourselves to redesigning federal programs - for transportation, housing, workforce training, and agriculture - to support progress towards America’s clean energy, good jobs future. We must eliminate wasteful expenditures, like unneeded and unwarranted subsidies to the oil industry. And we must pass a carbon emission cap and invest program - expected to generate $50 billion to $300 billion per year - to strategically reinvest in the new clean energy economy.
As we move together toward the clean energy future, we must ensure that a core set of American values and standards are embedded in the new energy economy. We must ensure that all Americans have a chance to participate in the clean energy transition, and that the new clean energy economy creates broadly shared prosperity.
To do this, we must:
Ensure equal opportunity by providing pathways out of poverty and into green-collar career tracks for underserved Americans.
Provide a level playing field for energy-intensive industries so carbon regulation does not
inadvertently drive jobs and pollution offshore to countries with weaker environmental and labor standards.
Ensure regional equity for the parts of America most dependent on extracting and using fossil fuels and therefore most likely to suffer worker, community, and industrial dislocations in a new energy economy.
Respect the dignity of work by ensuring that we maintain America’s long held commitment to
prevailing wage standards and strong labor protections whenever federal dollars are invested in the new energy economy.
In the spirit of the American frontier, the future we envision is one not of limited horizons, but of expanding possibilities. The solutions we propose will not only curb global warming and make our country and the world more secure, they also will create vast new industries,
unimaginable new business opportunities, and millions of good jobs.
The New Apollo Program provides a blueprint for the new economy. It is an ambitious program, and America is up to the challenge. As the newly elected president and Congress take office in 2009, Americans have an extraordinary opportunity to embrace bold action and take charge of our destiny. The New Apollo Program can launch our nation to a more prosperous, secure future.
Let’s get started.
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