The New Apollo Program
The New Apollo Program Takes New Path to Reverse Rising Unemployment, Quell Runaway Energy Costs, Combat Climate Change
Broad national coalition calls for comprehensive plan to invest in clean energy and millions of good jobs
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WASHINGTON, Oct. 1, 2008 – The Apollo Alliance today introduced a comprehensive national economic strategy, founded on the principles of clean energy and good jobs, to chart a promising path to new prosperity through an American landscape buffeted by high energy prices, stagnant wages, widespread foreclosures, institutional collapses, and dangerously warming temperatures.
The carefully constructed plan, The New Apollo Program: An Economic Strategy for American Prosperity, was prepared over the last year by a coalition of experts from business, labor, the environmental, and social justice communities. The title was inspired by the Apollo space program, in which the United States embraced a similarly ambitious national purpose to surmount a formidable technological challenge within a decade. The plan calls for investing $500 billion over the next ten years on specific steps for generating clean power, improving energy conservation and efficiency, cutting energy bills, restoring America’s technological and industrial preeminence, and creating 5 million high-quality jobs.
The New Apollo Program, said its authors, puts substance behind the call for energy independence voiced by both major presidential campaigns. This month, a group of prominent policy makers is helping the Apollo Alliance introduce the new economic development strategy to the nation in town hall events in eight states.
“We can launch our nation’s economic recovery, keep jobs here in America and, at the same time, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and make our nation more secure,” said Phil Angelides, the Apollo Alliance’s chairman, former California treasurer, who helped prepare the strategy.
Genesis of The New Apollo Program
The Apollo Alliance is a nationwide coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders. Since its founding in 2004, the Alliance has worked to catalyze a clean energy revolution in America to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, cut the carbon emissions that are destabilizing the climate, and expand opportunities for American businesses and workers.
In 2004, the Alliance published New Energy For America, the first substantive analysis of economic and environmental conditions to recognize that the nation’s energy, climate, national security, and economic crises had a common source: how America developed and used fossil fuels.
The Alliance was the first to also identify these crises as the new century’s most promising market opportunity. Solving them meant establishing a new economic foundation in the United States based on energy efficiency, conservation, developing and using clean and renewable energy, and producing millions of green-collar jobs.
Five Key Steps
The New Apollo Program, which advances those ideas and serves as the implementation strategy for the 2004 report, includes five principal initiatives:
- REBUILD AMERICA CLEAN AND GREEN: Produce 25 percent of the nation’s power from renewable sources and upgrade the energy efficiency of buildings by at least 30 percent by 2025, modernize the power grid, and improve transit systems.
- MAKE IT IN AMERICA: Retool American factories to build renewable energy systems and high-efficiency, alternative-fuel vehicles.
- RESTORE AMERICA’S TECHNOLOGICAL LEADERSHIP: Double national investment in clean energy research and development.
- TAP THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: Invest in green-collar job training initiatives – including job readiness and service programs, union apprenticeships, and community and technical college courses – to provide better jobs and the workforce needed to build the clean energy future.
- REINVEST IN AMERICA: Establish a “cap and invest” program to reduce carbon emissions and reinvest resources to build the new clean energy economy.
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“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.”
