Breakthrough: Go To Them: New Energy Jobs and the Populism We Need

By Keith Brower Brown, Breakthrough Generation

The effort to pass a sensible climate and energy policy is not working. I don't just mean we're not getting the right content in legislation--whether it's trading or taxing or new investment. I want to face facts: right now there isn't serious political support, or even interest, for an "energy bill" with climate change solutions at its heart. Not from most Democrats in Congress, and not from the vast majority of Americans, whose support is desperately needed by us climate and clean energy advocates.

This can be our crucial moment--a point of deep popular unrest over energy hikes and economic decline. In the self-righteous furor of "drill here, now" and in the sparring over loafers and houses, we see a political establishment desperate to connect with a distrustful electorate. At this sudden crossroads, both we and the defenders of the fossil economy have an incredible opportunity to define the way ahead. So now, we can't spend one more day still trying to convince 41% of America to come to our 10% side. We have to go to them, and meet them where they're at.

I think we have one shot; our legislative solution cannot be a "clean energy bill" or a "climate change bill" which require good economic times to stay afloat. It must be a "new jobs bill", which--to work at all--requires sweeping change of the energy foundations of our economy.

And what do most Americans say they want, now? Cheap energy and a healthy economy have been the top political demands of the year.

This is a godsend! Isn't it amazing good fortune that with a new energy jobs bill, we can give most people exactly the kind of answer they're asking for? Populism--a strategy that embraces the terms and opinions of the majority--can provide the solutions to this economic, energy, and climate dilemma.

Our Flag

Right now, no major politician has a plan to solve problems at the heart of the US economic crisis--the collapse and exile of manufacturing, the dissolution of its steady union careers, and our treacherous dependence on unstable supplies of foreign oil.

But we have that plan; a new energy economy. With 10 million new energy jobs.

This plan means real dignifying livelihoods, accessible to the most disadvantaged communities. It means a nation that knows what to expect from its future, free of the knee-weak uncertainty of foreign fossil dependence. It means streets from the small towns to the inner cities coming to life again, with the boisterous hum of new industry and a blooming middle class. It means a stronger America, once again rising in the world.

10 million new energy jobs. Savor that. It has to be our rallying flag, because it will be most vigorously waved by the people we have always had the worst time "convincing". These are the laid-off steelworkers and the three-job moms, the folks who never had direct reason to connect with the climate's plight. Though billions for research and deployment are surely the only way to deliver the new energy economy and the climate solutions we need, we must be careful to remember that government research investment is not a flag--only the ground on which a flag stands. New energy jobs is a flag, and if we want a good energy policy, this flag has to be ours.

A Deeper Commitment

This plan is more than just framing: it demands that we become jobs advocates first and climate activists second. Across the environmental movement, consensus is building behind the framing of a "new energy economy", with websites of the Sierra Club, NRDC and the DNC all extolling the jobs virtues of such a plan.

But these frames still lack potency--they feel like footnotes to campaigns trying to convince the electorate against drilling, or for cap-and-trade. In our campaigns, we must stop trying to convince others, and start telling them that they're already right, and that we're fighting together for the only plan that will work. We must lay claim to a simple, hard rhetoric that forces conservatives into a defensive role, as deniers of the potential of American hands and American wind. And we will have to painfully let go of any parts of our plan that don't resonate deeply, quickly, with the very people who need this plan most.

The elegance of this plan, though, is that we can't compromise in the wrong way; this plan binds pocketbook and climate as inseparable. Because the only thing that will make these jobs possible is a transformational energy policy. This means serious RDD&D, along with massive support for engineering education and job training programs. These latter programs are succeeding in the Bronx and Chicago and Oakland, and not just as skill factories--but as community-run schools that become the base for powerful local political organizing, environmental education, and social justice work.

Once this new energy bill is passed, the jobs will be here, and span an astounding number of sectors: careers in manufacturing the windmills and windows, in rebuilding and maintaining our energy infrastructure, in localizing food and goods production, in remaking our transportation and shipping networks, and in making our workplaces and cities and homes drastically more efficient. And these will be career-path jobs, true livelihoods which pay well and cannot be outsourced.

The Blue-Dog Open Door

This dream can happen right now, because it's most of the country's dream already. A plan for 10 million new energy jobs will become the call of the Walmart workers of Virginia and New Mexico, of the industrial ghost towns of Ohio and Michigan, of union truck drivers on strike. And these voices will carry in the crucial votes of their moderate "Blue Dog" Democrat representatives, and shape the policy of a certain half-Kenyan presidential candidate who needs these swing states to win.

These moderate Democrats are populists, and know they only succeed by meeting people where they're at. They will see that a new energy jobs plan is an incredible way to build and unify the party. There's no other way to achieve our goals than to have moderate Democrats--maybe half of the party--vote in "the new energy jobs plan" as the best way to serve their constituents' economic demands. So, here's looking at you, B.O., Harry Reid, and Rahm Emanuel--a new energy economy we need, want, and can do.

Best of all, there's nobody to convince. We're already on their side.

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Keith Brower Brown is entering a third-year of undergraduate work, in Geography and Environmental Economics & Policy at UC Berkeley. He has worked as a research intern for Green For All and at UC's Transportation Sustainability Research Center. He organized for a campaign to stop the BP-Berkeley partnership, was an environmental educator in the Berkeley dorms, and received UC Berkeley's 2008 Lipson Essay Prize for Humanistic Values.

http://strategicthought-charles77.blogspot.com/2008/09/economic-and-energy-crisis-real-3-am.htmlEconomic and Energy crisis, the real 3 a.m. call for Obama and McCain. Lehman Brothers fails today. Falling values for homes continues to affect financial institutions all across the country. The real truth is that the crisis in the economy and the energy crisis are really one and the same. As the price of energy, and everything else has soared, this has a ripple effect throughout the entire economy. Gas cost more, so you have less to spend on other things and all the people that work in the stores that sold you those things now have a lower income. They therefore cannot afford to buy things, like houses, and on and on down the line. Plus the cost of everything that you have to buy goes up. Everything in every store you ever visited got there by truck. Any energy prices are causing the cost of driving a truck to go up. There is an underlying energy cost in virtually every single product that you buy, be it houses, electronics or food. Farmers had to buy gas to plow their fields, plant their seeds, harvest the crops, and transport the crops to market and on and on. The underlying economic problem in this country for quite some time is the very simple fact that we import more than we export. You can relate how this works to a household budget. Your imports are the amount that you spend your exports are the amount of income you earn and if you continuously spend more than you earn, you're not going to end up doing very well economically. For years, the biggest factor in our trade deficit has been the importation of oil. Decades ago when oil was cheaper, we decided to make a trade-off. That trade off was a willingness to spend money to import oil and produce less domestically, because it was dirty. The oil spills off the Gulf coasts and off the coast of California were an annoying problem for anyone who went to the beach. I am old enough to remember visiting the beach as a youngster, and at the steps of every hotel along the beach there was basically some rags in a bucket of kerosene or some similar solvent to clean your off the bottom of your feet so you wouldn't track oil back into the hotel. The technology has greatly advanced. Offshore wells now have shut off valves below the seafloor. They close automatically in an emergency to prevent large quantities of oil from leaking into the sea. As a side note, 80% of all the oil on the earth that�s ever been formed has already leaked to the surface. The amount of oil spilled into the ocean today by man is only a tiny fraction of natural leakage of oil. Oil is lighter than water or rock, and after enough rock builds up over the top of it, it gets squeezed and the pressure goes up. If there are any fissures or cracks in the rock, it rises to the surface. Bacteria consume it and it becomes part of the food chain. After all, crude oil is pure organic material; it only causes problems in high concentrations, like a major oil spill. There have been no major oil spills off the coasts as a result of offshore drilling in many years. And most importantly, the economics of our decision to import oil instead of producing it domestically has changed. At current world prices, and especially their peak price reached a few months ago, we are spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to import oil. The cost of the Iraq war is also an economic drain but the economic drain of the Iraq war is only about 20 or 30% of the economic drain of importing oil. In 1973, the Arab oil embargo caused a similar economic crisis in our country. Of course the obvious effects were the gas lines and the increased price of filling up your car at the pump. But our entire economy suffered greatly. Inflation soared and jobs were lost. Pretty much the same thing that we're experiencing right now. It was because of the ripple effects of energy prices, which is an underlying cost to produce virtually everything we eat or use in our daily lives. This is somewhat mitigated however, if the energy that we are paying increased prices for comes from inside the US. Because the net wealth stays inside our country, increased income from producers of oil is used to purchase goods, products and services that everyone else depends on for their income. If the money flows outside of the United States it is a net loss of wealth. Earlier this year, when the price of energy soared, that was the 3 a.m. wake-up call. It should have been easily foreseen by Obama and McCain and everyone else that the ripple effects of virtually doubling of energy prices would have throughout the economy. The fallout was going to be brutal and widespread. McCain reversed his earlier position, and the position of pretty much everyone else, and said it was time to open up the outer continental shelf, but not ANWR, for drilling. He made it part of the way but didn't really propose an all-out plan to increase production. Obama came out against offshore drilling. It's McCain that got a grade of �incomplete� and Obama, a grade of complete failure. The real solution to both the energy and related economic crisis is to become energy independent. Either Obama or McCain could have said the following statement and passed their 3 a.m. test: �We are in a national emergency. We must become energy independent. This emergency requires the concerted efforts of our most creative and hard-working people all across the country. We need to greatly increase our investments in alternative energy sources, especially carbon free sources, like nuclear, wind and solar. But we also must realize that the time has come to explore every resource we have available to us. We need to produce every additional alternative energy source we can produce, and we need to extract every last barrel of oil and cubic foot of natural gas on American soil that we can find in an environmentally sound way. And we need to do it very quickly. We are out of time.� The question of course is which candidate will figure this out, and will they figure it out before it's too late. Posted by: Charles Hill at September 16, 2008 10:15 PM

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