Apollo Weekly Update, 10/31/08: Hope Made Real and Visible

Happy Halloween. Maybe it is a little scary out there. More so than at any time in recent history the United States nervously waits at the junction where grievance and hope meet. On Tuesday, America decides that it wants to head in the direction of hope.  

The Apollo Alliance and the clean energy, good jobs economy we are working so hard to help build represents hope made real and visible. As Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides wrote this week on our blog and in an op-ed we are circulating across the nation: “Clean energy isn’t a mirage. It’s the fastest growing industrial sector in the United States. It is already generating $25 billion a year in sales and revenue, is growing at 30 percent a year.”

He added: “Imagine the growth in jobs, technology, equipment, suppliers, and productivity if the United States actually treated the development of clean energy as a national economic priority. And consider just as seriously the remarkable benefits to America’s security, environment, economic stability, and communities that would be realized by keeping at home the nearly $400 billion that we send each year to foreign nations, many hostile to our interests, to import their oil. It’s time for America to quit bailing and to start building.”

As the Apollo Alliance has noted on its Web site, in our public events, in reports, and in the just completed six-state roll out of The New Apollo Program, there is no time to spare. The old economy is sinking. A new one, gradually emerging, needs to dramatically gain speed and influence.

How certain of we of that point? This certain. On September 4, a Thursday, federal Transportation Secretary Mary Peters called the heads of every state transportation department to alert them to an unusual circumstance in the history of American mobility. The Highway Trust Fund was empty. Two days later, on Saturday, the Fed announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were close to collapse. The very next day, Sunday, the Fed announced a rescue plan for the two largest mortgage banks in the country.

Though Congress bailed out the mortgage banks and soon after passed a bill that partially filled the trust fund, the import of what occurred was not lost on the world’s credit and stock markets. It’s also coming into clearer focus for the country.

What happened was that the federal financial institutions that supported highway construction and suburban home development, arguably the central drivers of America’s prosperity over the last 60 years, were insolvent. America’s drive through economy – reflected in $4 gasoline, falling home values, record rates of foreclosure, a Minnesota bridge collapse – is nearing its economic and fiscal limits. The Highway Trust Fund itself, dependent on gas tax revenues, emptied because Americans responded to what was unfolding around them by spending so much less time behind the wheel.

Yet just as significant as the momentous events of early September in Washington is the question that followed. What’s next for America? And the answer to that is the resounding call for changing how America’s economy literally runs itself, the transition the Apollo Alliance anticipated when it was founded earlier this decade and which is now one of the salient choices in this election – whether America is ready to invest significant public resources in the environmentally and economically useful switch from fossil fuel to clean energy.

As Phil Angelides writes: “Our current economic crisis has reminded us once again that financial engineering and manipulation are not substitutes for long-term investment and job creation. People need jobs and relief from high energy costs. Our dependence on oil is putting the nation’s security at risk. Foreign competitors are moving rapidly to exploit the opportunities offered by clean energy. We can seize the opportunity to become the leader of a new global green economy. We’re Americans. Let’s do it.”

Please sign our Jobs, Baby, Jobs! Petition. And see you next week.