Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

October 31, 2008

Green Economy Rises Out of Financial Sector Ashes

The Sharp Electronics plant in Memphis, Tennessee produces enough photovoltaic panels each year to produce 64 megawatts of electricity – sufficient to power 14,000 homes. It is the Japanese company’s only solar panel manufacturing facility outside of its home country. The plant, formerly used for television manufacturing that was off-shored to Mexico in 2000, employs 450 workers, 190 of whom are unionized.

Rock Port, Missouri generates all of its own electricity for its 1,300 residents from the Loess Hills Wind Farm, which launched in April. Four 1.25-megawatt Suzlon turbines are expected to generate roughly 16 million kilowatt hours, some 3 million or 123 percent more than the city actually needs. The excess power is sold to the Missouri Joint Municipal Electricity Commission, making Rock Port’s meter run backwards.

The manufacturing wind also blows in Newton, Iowa. Trinity Structural Towers, a unit of Dallas-based Trinity Industries, is investing $21 million there to rework part of a former Maytag manufacturing plant to make wind turbine towers and employ 140. TPI Composites of Warren, Rhode Island is building a $56 million, 316,000-square-foot factory to manufacture wind turbines and should hire 500 workers by 2010.

Enough talk about Wall Street’s worrisome gyrations. There is good news on the economic horizon. Not all is doom and dismay. Take heart: The green economy is rising from the ashes of the financial sector’s greed and folly.

That’s green as in greenbacks combined with environmental awareness. The country is now discovering what California has known for decades: Green industries and policies generate jobs. Between 1977 and 2007, the Golden State’s energy efficiency policies generated close to 1.5 million jobs while eliminating fewer than 25,000 jobs, according to a new study by the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at the University of California at Berkeley.

Out of California also comes the Apollo Alliance, its name derived from the government/private-sector initiative launched by President John. F. Kennedy in 1961 that put American astronauts on the moon by 1969. Just like the space mission, the contemporary Apollo Program proposes a large investment of federal funding over a decade. The new mission: $50 billion annually for 10 years to jumpstart a national clean energy economy.

Among other goals, the program calls for doubling the tax-dollar investment in clean energy research and establishing a National Energy Innovation Fund to invest in the most promising new technologies to emerge from the expanded research. It also aims to create jobs through building mass transit and paying to update the power grid. More U.S.-based jobs would come through investing in Detroit to build high-efficiency vehicles and by updating the national roads and other infrastructure improvements. The program also aims to cut energy use at least 30 percent in new and existing buildings nationwide and by 20 percent in all existing power plants and industries by 2025.

It’s wildly ambitious and expensive, but the cost and risks of doing nothing are far greater. Instead of bailing out Wall Street failures, this $500 billion investment will return many times that amount in new jobs (an estimated 5 million) and national savings on energy costs.

Since the first oil shock of 1973, we as a nation have wasted 35 years we could have spent reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. We cannot make the same mistake again. The “drill here, drill now” policies of the Republican ticket will do absolutely nothing to reduce the inevitable long-term rise in the price of oil and natural gas. Nor can such outdated policies guarantee bountiful or even adequate fossil fuels exclusively for this country, since all oil and natural gas is sold on an international market regardless of its place of origin.

Once again, after three-and-a-half decades, we stand at a fork in the road. If we don’t take the branch marked clean energy efficiency this time, we might not have an economy or a country in another 35 years.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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