Green Stimulus

By Kathleen Rogers

A massive stimulus package of nearly $600 billion holds promise for the economy, and could mean more federal spending on infrastructure and energy efficiency projects. An estimated $400 billion in that bill will repair lots of bridges and roads, but what will they all lead to? Nothing -- unless we first start building bridges and roads between our economic, climate, and education concerns, and start appreciating the way they’re all connected.

New policy and stimulus needs to take into account that we’re not just trying to save our economy with roads, bridges, and buildings: We’re trying to save ourselves.

Few other national topics are as timely as a discussion of how to build a new green economy nationwide. During his campaign Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs. It is this way of thinking that should shape our country’s future.

One way we can stimulate the economy while going green is to create new, personal carbon savings accounts. These would be tax-free, interest-bearing green energy savings accounts that could be leveraged to help weatherize or green-up one’s home or sold to companies that need carbon credits. It would encourage energy efficiency while allowing a personal stake in emissions reductions.

At a time when we are poised to make our greatest infrastructure investment since the Great Depression, we need to make sure we do it right. Congress seems focused on shovel-ready jobs to its own detriment. We need to ensure this bailout is green, that the bridges and roads lead us to the future -- instead of another dead-end.

Putting together a new green energy program for the U.S. and other countries will require thousands of green jobs in solar, wind, and other renewable sources of energy.

One plan is based on the fact that investing in energy efficient buildings would go a long way to create jobs and help the economy. The so-called Architecture 2030 plan recommends an investment of $171.72 billion over two years combining a housing mortgage buy-down and an accelerated-depreciation program for commercial buildings with energy efficiency. This plan could create over 3 million jobs in the building sector and over 4 million indirect jobs plus an additional 350,000 jobs from consumer spending.

The retrofitting and construction of green schools -- the largest construction sector in the United States -- will do the same. Between 2006 and 2008, we spent $80 billion on school construction. If we build those buildings green, they cost less than 2 percent more to construct; however, they pay for themselves in a few years. Consequently, municipalities with major school systems are increasingly looking at “green building” and renovation as they work to update school facilities and save the district money in utility bills. A green school can save a school enough money to hire two additional teachers -- all while preventing 585,000 lbs of CO2 from hitting the atmosphere.

Which, at the end of the day, helps solve a bigger problem: The economy is in a crisis, but the impacts of climate change are far greater in the long run. Fortunately though, there’s no need to sacrifice one for the other.

Green jobs are in danger of disappearing from the stimulus package, to be replaced with shovel-ready jobs, such as President-elect Obama’s recently announced plans to create thousands of jobs by “weatherizing” houses. While weatherizing houses is important, it is a short-term project for employment. It is not the same as creating lasting high-tech work or building infrastructure. Green jobs, however, are solid, necessary jobs which have a long-term future. What we need now is a firm commitment to include in the stimulus package funds for “green” infrastructure and jobs -- the real way to revitalize the economy and look toward the future.

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi has touted other projects like investments in new energy technologies and energy-efficient buildings. We need to hold her and the rest of the Congressional leadership to those promises, demanding that they take bold measures to resolve the economic crisis holistically -- by taking into account the challenges of the climate crisis, the health of our children, and the needs of our workforce, which is waiting for green American jobs that can’t be exported.

Our government must begin the shift towards a global economy driven by massive job creation from the growth of green technology, construction, transportation, and renewable energy. While the road to a green economy might be long, we need to use this opportunity to build it.
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Rogers is the president of Earth Day Network.
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Copyright (C) 2008 by the American Forum. 12/08

Revitalizing Our Communities and the Environment

By Susan Estep and Bethanie Walder

After all those fights over “jobs versus the environment,” people have finally realized that the color of money and the color of environmental protection are on and the same: green.

The emerging green economy is all the rage in political and media circles, and especially in discussions about how to fix the ailing economy while also fixing some of our energy/climate problems. But this new economy, at least as currently envisioned, is quite urban, and energy focused. What about rural America? What about forests, rivers, grasslands, and deserts that need restoration, and the economic benefits of that?

We’ve spent more than a century extracting resources from our public lands and it’s time to invest some resources back into these special places. In addition to putting rural people back to work healing the land, expanding the green economy to include restoration of our natural environment will also restore clean drinking water, hunting/fishing opportunities, rural property values and other outdoor recreational access.

People who live in rural communities can already clearly understand the connection between restoring a century-old building for a new use and reclaiming an old mine site or road in order to have clean, clear drinking water. It’s these types of activities that make up a restoration economy.

Revitalizing community assets and reclaiming natural resource assets bring benefits to workers, communities, wildlife, wildlands and water quality. The restoration economy is about creating high-wage, high-skill jobs for the environment, and getting rural communities past the old resource extraction, "jobs versus the environment" debate.

Three primary things will help create a restoration economy:

• Rebuilding community infrastructure helps maintain vital, vibrant, welcoming communities. A well-maintained rural downtown can prompt private residents to also invest in upgrading or maintaining their private property, thus improving the overall conditions of the community.

• Investing in projects to restore degraded agricultural lands and provide more opportunities for local farming can ensure access to high-quality, lower-cost, safe, local food that does not destroy the very land that supports that food production.

• Restoring natural areas -- forests, deserts, grasslands, watersheds -- is an investment that will provide jobs while also ensuring that our public lands are as resilient as possible to the unknown impacts of climate change. Reclaiming unneeded logging roads, for example, provides high-wage, high-skill jobs to excavator and bulldozer operators -- the same people who helped build those roads. And reclaiming roads also restores clean drinking water, excellent wildlife habitat, and plentiful fisheries for residents and tourists alike.

Investing in restoration makes sense during this difficult economic downturn. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps to put Americans back to work and rebuild local economies. As Congress discusses new economic stimulus, they should consider packages that provide jobs to people, instead of just sending them one-time “stimulus checks” to spend at big box stores. An economy built on long-lasting, well-paying jobs can be sustainable. Any future stimulus should focus on creating new “green-collar” jobs that restore our natural environment (making it more resilient to the impacts of climate change); rebuild local, sustainable, community agriculture; and retrofit buildings to be more energy efficient and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Current discussions about green jobs, however, tend to focus almost exclusively on energy/climate connections.

But in natural areas, restoration is happening on the ground: In March, we stood atop a bluff, with about 500 other people, watching enormous excavators remove the Milltown Dam. As the excavator operators opened a bypass channel, we watched the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers run free for the first time in 100 years. The temporary channel turned into a massive river as what remained in the reservoir emptied and the dam became irrelevant to these rivers. But the Milltown Dam remains extremely relevant to the communities that surround it -- as hundreds of workers have found fulltime, albeit temporary, employment on this $100 million restoration project. The multi-year project will leave Missoula and the surrounding communities with more jobs and a stronger economy, clean water (100 years of toxic mining waste were stuck behind the unstable dam and are now being removed from the site), and restored rivers that will dramatically increase property and amenity values in the area.

It would be great to hear elected officials bring restoration into the green jobs discussion. It’s already happening, just at a limited scale. It’s time to invest in urban and rural green jobs alike and put people to work restoring and revitalizing our communities and our environment.
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Estep is a member of the Women Donors Network. Walder is executive director of Wildlands CPR, a national organization working to restore healthy watersheds and rural jobs by building a strong restoration economy.
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Copyright (C) 2008 by the American Forum. 9/08