I'm tattooed and I'm already convinced.
At the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas Wednesday, former President Bill Clinton
told a major truth with a bit of his trademark humor:
He pointed to all the construction workers he met in California working on building the 392-megawatt Ivanpah solar project—people of “all races” with some of the “best tattoos” he’d ever seen. Those construction workers are the people who are going to make the difference in moving the clean energy industry forward, said Clinton.
“Think about the tattoos. You win the tattoo vote, we’ll have the damnedest environmental policy you ever saw.”
These days, of course, it's not just longshoreman, construction workers and sailors who wear tattoos. A few have made it into formerly staid board rooms and to offices on Capitol Hill. Lula Davis, the former floor manager of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, sported more than one tattoo.
But Clinton's message is clear. Which is that a lot of Americans who would immediately and directly benefit from a focus on clean, green energy aren't getting the message. In fact, they have been getting the wrong message. A bullshit message. It's not—as the propagandists for fossil fuels have managed with their buckets of cash to convince so many—some pie-in-the-sky impossible dream.
Renewable energy, not including long-standing hydroelectric facilities, is already generating more than 4 percent of the nation's electricity. A decade ago, it was generating less than half a percent. In Iowa, it's nearly 20 percent. Fifteen years ago in that state, it was zero percent. Four other states are now generating at least 10 percent of their electricity with wind power.
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Building this new infrastructure, this clean and green energy infrastructure, has already created tens of thousand of jobs. In Iowa alone, 7,000. It promises to create hundreds of thousands more. Not just construction and maintenance jobs. Manufacturing jobs. High-tech jobs. Marketing jobs. Teaching jobs.
That's a good thing all round. Clean, green energy means good jobs built upon a sustainable foundation of renewable resources that don't pump more carbon into our over-burdened atmosphere.
As scientists who have lost their shyness about global warming have been telling us in this year of record heat and widespread drought, climate change is already upon us. It's too late for action that will stop all its effects, but we can—we must—adopt a whole range of technologies and public policies that reduce the impacts and keep things from getting as bad as they will get if we continue on the same, unswerving, self-immolating path.
At peak construction, the world's largest concentrating solar power facility at Ivanpah will provide paychecks for 1,600 unionized construction workers and on-site support staff. When it's up and running, it will convert sunlight and water into steam to drive turbines that generate electricity, some of which is already spoken for in a contract with a California utility. The idea isn't new, but the technology is state-of-the-art.
And it got that way, in part, because of the production tax credit. Thanks to congressional gridlock that credit, which should have been renewed months ago, expires Dec. 31.
Herman Trabish at GreenTechMedia caught Leo Gerard during a break in the action at the summit. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers International, has posted many essays here at Daily Kos discussing the need for a focus on rejuvenating our infrastructure. He was, Trabish points out, on friendly terms with the voting bloc Clinton encountered at Ivanpah long before visible tattoos were trendy. And he's angry:
“I’m angry at the Republican Party. I’m angry specifically at Mitt Romney. They’ve managed to ignore, for some very narrow self-interest, what’s good for the country.”
The Obama administration and the Democrats, Gerard said, “were moving in the right direction on renewable energy standards and a renewable energy future. The President was talking about an all-in energy strategy. Then, the Republicans stopped the renewable energy standard. And they stopped incentives.”
Gerard was thinking about November. “This election is going to be very important, because,” he said, “one thing I have learned is that R&D investment follows manufacturing. When you see the Chinese and others going full-bore on renewable energy, you know that is where the R&D investment is going. It’s like we’ve been stopped dead in our tracks.”
China, in fact,
has just upped its 2015 commitment to solar power installations by 40 percent.
Gerard continued, pointing to the blockade House Republicans have placed in the way of the production tax credit that benefits all renewable projects but has been especially valuable for wind. Because the credit expires in December and many would-be investors fear it won't be extended, they are not putting their money into new projects at the moment:
“To the best of my knowledge, there is no meaningful order for wind turbines for 2013,” Gerard said, his anger rising. “We represented a thousand workers at Gamesa. They’re laid off—all but a skeleton crew. That was a blooming industry. And we were working with a group that wants to develop wind on the Great Lakes, helping them to develop a domestic supply chain. That’s stalled.”
Not every Republican opposes the tax credit renewal, which was first enacted during the administration of George H.W. Bush in 1992. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, for instance, pushed hard and successfully last week to get a one-year extension included in legislation the Senate Finance Committee he sits on sent to the whole Senate. Another supporter, Republican Rep. Tom Latham of Iowa's 4th District, went so far as to talk privately and apparently pointedly with Mitt Romney about the tax credit. The presumptive GOP nominee has spoken against renewing it since November 2011. Latham, however, is clearly a minority among House Republicans, which means the credit's chances of being renewed this year are dicey.
The tax credit renewal is a hanging-on-by-the-fingernails kind of thing. As needed as it is, it's only one small piece of the real need: a comprehensive energy policy that actively weans the U.S. off fossil fuels, and quickly. What it really means is a U.S. industrial policy.
For Bill Clinton, making progress on clean, green energy will require cutting through the fog of climate-change denialism in Washington, plus a lot of cooperation:
“The great winners of the world are the cooperators. Why is this important? Because cooperation gets lousy news coverage and people don’t know about it. We have to both think large and have a bias for action even if it’s small.”
Clinton also touted bipartisanship in the matter.
On that, Gerard had a far different take. He said Republicans have been sincere:
They have been sincere in holding the country up for ransom and trying to stop any progress, just so they can say, ‘See, the President didn’t deliver.’ They say the President hasn't worked in a bipartisan way. But you can’t work in a bipartisan way with somebody who wants to stick a knife in your back every time you open your mouth.”
The immediate way around that GOP blockade of the tax credit renewal is to persuade a few fence-straddling congresspeople. They'll be home for the next four weeks, most of them campaigning throughout their districts. They shouldn't get away from a single one without being questioned on why they oppose the extension of the credit.
But extracting America from its myopic overall energy policy will require at lot more than moving a few in Congress to change their minds. It's voters that matter. And let's face it, energy policy for most people is a glazed-eyes discussion.
It's not just persuading that part of the voting population that has traditionally sported tattoos, although that demographic, white and male, is an important one to deliver the story about good jobs. The message has to reach everyone who has been saturated with the bogus tales of the fossil fuel industry with its drillbabydrill, digbabydig philosophy. Like all persuasion, the most effective is face-to-face, one-on-one with the persuader doing as much listening as talking. What's most persuasive is being able to point to success stories. We have plenty of those now. We should tell them over and over again.