ShareThisThe State of the Union, Clean Coal Ads, Green Jobs , Energy Efficiency and Van Jones.
Best quote of the week: In a discussion of building energy efficiency and building performance labeling, and making an analogy to the current requirement to provide miles per gallon information when selling a car, Van Jones proclaimed: “It’s criminal that we don’t provide Energy Performance Scores on all our buildings.”
Worst quote of the week: In online ads interrupting the State of the Union address: “Clean Coal.” Courtesy of the American Coalition of Clean Coal Electricity
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of joining Van Jones in a roundtable discussion preceding his lecture hosted by the University of Oregon on “The Next American Economy.” Van Jones is a leader in the clean energy economy and social justice movements, a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress, a senior policy advisor at Green For All, and is the author of the NYT bestseller The Green Collar Economy. What I enjoyed most about the conversation with Jones was his emphasis on Efficiency First, both as a policy approach, as well as a personal approach. In fact, he suggested that everyone should have a “house tune up,” just like we schedule our regular car tune ups. As a green building non-profit, EAI focuses specifically on energy efficiency, but as Jones points out, it should be a priority for everyone. Why exactly, you ask? What about renewables?
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Jones tells this story: a dollar spent improving the efficiency of grandma’s house provides a dollar in wages (providing income to a worker, and reducing the government’s unemployment expenses). It also reduces grandma’s energy bill (improving her quality of life (priceless), and disposable income), and reduces the need for energy generation, and cuts the associated carbon emissions, reducing climate change impacts and dirty pollutants. In turn this reduces health care costs by reducing asthma rates, among others, making little Timmy’s life better (also priceless). Jones makes a clear case that green jobs are good for the whole economy, and all the people affected by it.
The second point that I appreciated was Jones’ perspective on decent wages and training for those performing energy efficiency work. A union representative in the group expressed frustration about downward wage pressure, and cheaper labor competition. Jones emphasized the necessity for high quality work, wages and training – weatherization absolutely must be done well. The worst thing for energy efficiency is to have grandma discover, six months later, that her energy bills didn’t go down, or went down a fraction of what had been anticipated …. which, as geeky building science folks know, is a big problem without proper training for green jobs. It’s for this reason that Obama has already provided millions of dollars for green job training (for details of local opportunities in the green building sector, see my colleague Angela’s blog post here … and did you know that in 2007 Oregon led the nation with more clean energy jobs per capita than any other state?). After leaving Jones and the gathered group of clean economy players in Portland, I felt pretty good – yes, we have a lot of work in front of us, but I have confidence we are on the right track.
Later that evening I watched the President’s State of the Union address. I was pleased to hear him discuss the necessity for the United States to improve competitiveness and that he called out the clean energy economy as a prime opportunity for achieving this.
However (this is where the worst quote of the week comes in), as I watched the address online, it was interrupted by “clean coal” advertisements. Now, to be clear, there is no such thing as “clean coal.” Sure, there might be “cleaner coal,” but the baseline “dirty coal” is so dirty (in terms of pollutants that damage air and water quality and human health as well as the mass amount of pollutants that contribute to climate change) that an improvement on that baseline is quite meaningless.
Of course, a visit to the organization providing the ads mentions the “carbon capture and sequestration” technology as a key to clean coal. However, just last month Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback released a report noting that “combating global warming by pumping carbon dioxide into the ground for long-term storage – known as carbon sequestration – could trigger small earthquakes that might breach the storage system, allowing the gas back into the atmosphere.” Clearly there are sufficient technical barriers to call into question the feasibility of even this “cleaner coal” proposal.
Regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, the coal industry and their allies are trying to gut the Clean Air Act. What was disappointing was that last night the President missed a chance to reinforce the importance of the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Protection Agency, created by Richard Nixon, and responsible for administering the Clean Air Act, has saved more lives than any other non-defense agency of the U.S. government, and is now under a 3-pronged attack from the House of Representatives. As Jones says: “regulating poison and pollution just can’t be bad for the people of the United States.” Let’s hope this sentiment plays a role in decoding the (misleading) message of “clean coal” advocates.
Above all, let’s remember: Efficiency First offers a multitude of benefits for our economy, our businesses, our citizens and our environment.
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