Apollo Weekly Update, 11/13/08: President-elect and New Principles

On August 4, 2008, Barack Obama formally unveiled a clean energy strategy to wean America from foreign oil and to begin solving climate change. His New Energy For America plan is a ten-year, $150 billion initiative that not coincidentally is the same title of our own 2004 study and entirely consistent with the goals of The New Apollo Program, which we rolled out in six states last month. All three plans call for scaling up the tools and practices of a clean energy economy, and charting a new development strategy for the United States.

Obama owned the clean energy message during the campaign. His victory is a powerful demonstration of the economic transformation most Americans expect and want his administration to lead.

We all know how hard the transition will be. But the new president’s work on clean energy will be helped by two new and powerful market forces that the Obama campaign helped to crystallize.

The first is the influence and relationship of the American economy with fossil fuel. Until very recently, one of the underlying principles of the American economy was that the more fossil fuel we used, the wealthier we became. That is no longer the case, not is it likely to be ever again. The more fossil fuel we use the more impoverished and endangered we are.

The second is a profound change in the relationship between environmental and economic principles. Since the early 1960s environmentalists have helped the nation understand how economic principles affect the environment. Economic development produces wealth. It also produces pollution and toxins and ill-advised construction that threatens species, babies, wild lands, and communities.

The Obama campaign, working on the idea that the Apollo Alliance elevated to national prominence since its founding more than four years ago, turned that nearly 50-year-old frame around. Look at the potential, he essentially argued, when environmental principles are applied to the economy. Energy efficiency, conservation, rapid transit, clean vehicles, biofuels, wind, and solar represent the most important new growth sectors in the nation, capable not only of fixing the economy and healing the environment, but also of producing millions of family-supporting jobs.

“We simply cannot pretend that we can drill our way out of this problem,” he said in August. “We need a much bolder and much bigger set of solutions. We have to make a serious, nationwide commitment to developing new sources of energy and we have to do it right away.”

The question, in the face of soaring budget deficits and financial crisis, is can he deliver? The answer, if you pay attention to our Web site, is that America’s clean energy economy already is unfolding. Twenty-nine states have enacted renewable energy standards to compel development of wind, solar, and other alternative energy sources in the utility industry. Clean energy production and development is a $25 billion-a-year industry, and the fastest growing industrial sector in the country. Clean energy is responsible for an estimated 500,000 new jobs since 2004, according to figures from states, investment analysts, and the wind, solar, geothermal, and other clean energy trade associations.

What’s needed from the federal government, say executives and elected leaders is the same thing that The New Apollo Program advocates and that President-elect Obama says he will act on quickly: A big, focused investment program to scale up the clean energy tools and technology that already exist.

Millions of family-supporting jobs are possible. Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers of America and an Apollo Alliance board member, is fond of telling audiences that it takes 26 tons of sheet steel and 19,000 parts to make and install a wind turbine generator.

Along with Obama’s victory, another place where America’s clean energy transition has made its presence known is in political campaigns. More than 70 percent of the transit measures on ballots across the country were approved, including the $10 billion bond for a regional high speed rail network in California. My colleague Heidi Pickman is documenting clean energy’s influence in election victories on the Apollo blog. If you know of clean energy electoral successes please email her.

We know you are intensely interested. When we asked last week what President Obama should do first, so many of you responded that we published your dispatches in two Apollo Feedback posts here and here.

The Apollo Alliance is in the thick of the national work to accelerate the clean energy, good jobs economy. We anticipate some big announcements over the next few weeks as the new administration and a new Congress start to put in place the clean energy, good jobs investments and policies that Americans last week overwhelmingly said they support.