Opening remarks at Green Economy panel of Clearwater's Indian Point Technical Briefing, April 25, 2011, Desmond Fish Library, Garrison, NY:

Good afternoon.  I have the honor of being your guide out of the scary stuff and into the hopeful
aspect of the challenge before us, the path of action that can make the Hudson
River Corridor a safer and more secure place, and the economic opportunities that
could be created by means of a clean energy economy.  Shortly I’ll introduce a couple of expert speakers, and a
hands-on panel of innovators, to brief you in more detail. First, let me set
the stage. 

One growth area for green jobs, today, is in the world of think
tanks making sense of the opportunities and building scenarios to move us
forward.  Because this advance work
has been done, we have a foundation to build on in terms of possibilities,  as three examples show:

•   Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, in Scientific American (2009) laid out a
global scenario for meeting the planet’s energy needs entirely with efficiency
and renewables by 2030.  They
calculated global demand, and then charted a pathway for meeting it entirely
with wind, water and sunlight in all their forms, including geothermal and
renewably charged hydrogen fuel cells for transportation and industry. It can
be done, but it won’t be done by baby steps. They’re talking about 3,800,000 wind
turbines; 900 hydro plants; 490,000 tidal turbines, 5,350 geothermal plants;
1.7 billion (with a “b”) solar collectors and 100,000 solar power plants of
various types.  This would be a
transformation of the built environment and the economy - the kind of great
goal that occasionally brings people together. On the good days.

•   McKinsey
and Company (2008) mapped out pathways to a more modest, but still important
goal, stabilizing atmospheric CO₂ at 450 ppm by 2030.  They believe this  can be done using existing and
nearly-commercial technologies for energy efficiency and renewable power, with
a net zero cost when paybacks are factored in. In McKinsey’s scenario, 40% of
the carbon footprint reduction comes through energy-efficiency.

•   My
favorite:  a team of psychologists,
led by the University of Michigan, added to the possibilities  by going beyond the pure supply and
demand dynamics, to consider the role of a very adaptive, under-utilized
resource:  human choices.  In a 2010 paper called “The Behavioral
Wedge,” they identified 35 simple household behaviors that are under-utilized,
low- cost or no cost, and if scaled up could cut residential energy use on the
order of 20%.  These are things
like turning off un-used appliances, 
line drying clothing in good weather and using public or people-powered
transportation more often.

Taken together, these represent a broad and rich set of
possibilities to choose among. 

 

Right now, with unemployment in our region still over 8%, it is
hard to see a bright future in green or any other color.  But here are a few numbers about jobs
and job growth:

•   The
solar industry nationally employs over 93,000 people, with jobs in all 50
states and half of companies surveyed in 2010 predicting job growth in the
coming year. Solar generating capacity has grown 342% last year, so renewable
generation exceeds  nuclear now!

•   The
U.S. wind industry employs an estimated 85,000 people, even though it is a tiny
slice of the current energy supply.

•   Energy
efficiency, a $3 trillion + industry, drove something like 300,000 new jobs in
2010 through federal and state policies and initiatives.

 

The opportunities are not only for the hard-hats you see in the
newspaper climbing on rooftops or assembling wind turbines high above the
ground.  The talent pipeline for
the green economy goes from simple labor, administration and customer service
jobs up through skilled trades in assembly and maintenance, to include
significant numbers of mechanical, chemical, civil and environmental engineers,
architects and landscape architects, and professionals in management,
marketing, finance, law, information technology, communications, human
resources. 

 

Good news:  a great
deal is being done, in New York and the Hudson Valley, to advance these kinds
of agendas. A few examples:

•   We
have active professional and trade associations including the American
Institute of Architects with its own road map to a low-carbon built
environment, US Green Building Council, Building Performance Contractors
Association, solar and wind associations, and many more, training and
supporting the building trades to cut energy waste and scale up the use of
renewables.

•   Green
Jobs, Green New York is a statewide program bringing free energy assessments,
and free money for upgrades, to homeowners, tenants and small businesses with
the goals of weatherizing a million homes and creating 14,000 jobs.

•   SHV’s
Ten Percent Challenge, piloted in Red Hook and Warwick, is scaling up to build
markets for energy efficiency and renewables.

•   The
Solar Energy Consortium is a Valley-based technology commercialization group
with a wide web of university connections, conducting demonstration projects in
promising new areas like solar thermal greenhouses, and helping area companies
get financing.

•   The
department of engineering at SUNY New Paltz is working to become a center of
excellence in power generation.

•   Five
SUNY community colleges of the Mid-Hudson region have created a consortium to
coordinate and market clean energy and energy-efficiency training, and are
working on a concept called “stackable certificates” so that people who train
in these trades can build up credentials toward credit in degree programs.

 

These are some tasty ingredients, but they are not yet stirred
into a soup that’s ready to serve. 
Communities and regions that are capable of rapid, coordinated change,
have one distinguishing feature: 
organization, and the capacity to work together with good channels of
communication, trust, and agreements on the general path forward.  Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute
for Energy and Environmental Research, Washington DC, puts forward a plausible
national scenario for the transformation, through a “clean dozen”  policy incentives for clean and safe
energy systems, in his 2007 analysis, Carbon Free, Nuclear Free.  Makhijani sounds an important strategic
note on the first essential steps of commitment and organization:

 

“The achievement of a zero-CO₂
economy without nuclear power will require

unprecedented foresight and
coordination in policies from the local to the national, across all sectors of
the energy system.  Much of the
ferment at the state and local level, as well as some of the proposals in
Congress, are already pointed in the right direction.  But a clear long-term goal is necessary to provide overall
policy coherence and establish a yardstick against which progress can be
measured.” 

 

The goal-setting, itself, matters.
He adds, “Even the process of the United States setting a goal of a zero-CO₂,
nuclear-free economy and taking initial firm steps towards it will transform
global energy politics in the immediate future and establish the United States
as a country that leads by example, rather than one that preaches temperance
from a barstool.” 

 

Right now, at the federal level,
we are a little bit stuck.  But
often, what unsticks national policy has been the concerted will of states,
cities, towns, villages, regions, that show the way forward. The technologies
are diverse, and the deployment of them must obviously be designed to protect
the lands and waters and vistas and communities of the Hudson Valley.  So I want to end this introduction by
touching on the diversity of means to the ends of a low-carbon, clean and safe
- sustainable - energy economy. 
Around the country:

•  Lane County, Illinois, outside
Chicago, figured out an energy-efficiency strategy by bringing together
stakeholders in the utilities, universities, companies and communities to frame
an action plan for both policy and industry, then created a consortium to guide
that work.

•  On a larger scale, civic and
political leaders around the Great Lakes, from several states, were brought
together by the Garfield Foundation to figure out how to wean the region from
dependency on coal-fired electricity, and they came up with a multi-year
partnership among foundations and NGOs to implement and fund a joint strategy.

•  Out in Fort Collins, Colorado, a
partnership called Fort-ZED - Fort Collins Zero Energy District - is being
developed by a business consortium, the Department of Energy, guided by
university researchers who are tying it all together.

•  And close to home, the Northern
Westchester Energy Action Consortium has emerged to link 14 towns and villages
as an inter-municipal organization, which has partnered with NYSERDA to raise
$3 million from the Department of Energy to market energy-efficiency tools and
financing.

 

Each of these is a different
structural model to support ongoing collaboration.  In each of these cases, the work is multi-year and complex.
In each case, measurable progress is being made. Their traction comes with
organization of stakeholders, in a way that plays to everyone’s strengths and
creates incentives for doing the right thing and turning it into business as usual.