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By David Foster
Executive Director, BlueGreen Alliance

On the eve of California’s landmark, first ever cap-and-trade auction, voters in three Western states were asked some key questions: Should polluters be held financially accountable for their climate pollution emissions? And if so, how should the resulting funds be spent?

The results of this new poll show significant support for putting a price on carbon pollution, as well as funding clean energy and innovative infrastructure. The poll was made public at Greenbuild 2012 in San Francisco, the world’s largest conference and expo dedicated to green building, and was conducted by Lake Research Partners on behalf of the BlueGreen Alliance, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Ceres, and the U.S. Green Building Council.

According to the poll, 56 percent of voters in Washington, Oregon and California favor a proposal to “reduce climate pollution and invest in clean energy by charging large companies for the pollution they create that contributes to climate change.” Only 20 percent oppose it, while 24 percent are undecided. This is the basic idea behind the cap-and-trade system that California just launched.

Cap-and-trade is a market-based approach that controls carbon dioxide emissions by giving an economic incentive to reduce them. This system sets a limit — or cap — on the amount of carbon that can be emitted, and then sells allowances to those that wish to exceed the cap, which generates revenue for — in this case — the state of California. The revenue from California’s system will be used to spur clean energy growth, creating good jobs making the state more energy efficient and moving it to cleaner, renewable energy. Although cap-and-trade is just starting up in California it has been successful, raising $290 million in the first auction, and it’s clear there is support in Western states for the idea that those creating the pollution should help move America to cleaner energy sources.

Additionally, voters were overwhelmingly in favor of updating America’s innovative infrastructure, with 71 percent in favor of clean fuels, electric vehicles, bus rapid transit and commuter rail. Innovative infrastructure is vital to the U.S. moving forward on cleaner energy sources. Voters clearly understand that without electric vehicle charging stations, electric vehicles won’t be as viable. Additionally, making sure transit options are available is also important in the minds of voters.

Voters said they support these efforts because they believe we have a responsibility for future generations and that investments in clean energy and infrastructure can provide good middle class jobs that won’t be outsourced to other countries.

Looking at this graph from the poll, it’s clear there is tremendous support for clean energy and innovation infrastructure investments.

The clean economy and the infrastructure to power it are going to be at the forefront of economic growth long into our future. Seeing that people recognize that, as well as the economic opportunity growing clean energy and innovative infrastructure will provide, is heartening. Moving America to clean energy is a priority for voters and a necessity to address the growing climate crisis. By putting a price on carbon, we can provide an incentive to companies to cut global warming pollution and raise the funds to invest in cleaner energy, better transit, and jobs that can’t be outsourced.

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David Foster, a former USW District Director, is the Executive Director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a national partnership of labor unions and environmental organizations dedicated to expanding the number and quality of jobs in the clean energy economy. Launched by the United Steelworkers and Sierra Club in 2006, the BlueGreen Alliance now unites 10 major U.S. labor unions and four of America’s largest environmental organizations — with more than 14 million members and supporters — in pursuit of good jobs, a clean environment and a green economy. Visit us at www.bluegreenalliance.org.      

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This has been reposted from The Huffington Post.

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

By now, in these last remaining days before the election of 2012, we have learned enough about the beliefs of the Republican presidential candidate to see them as a worldview all its own — a kind of creed that explains Mitt Romney. Those who say he has no principles are selling him short.

Despite its contradictions and ellipses, Romneyism has an internal coherence. It is different from conservatism, because it does not intend to conserve or protect any particular institutions or values. It is also distinct from Republicanism, in that it is not rooted in traditional small-town American values, nationalism, or states’ rights.

The ten guiding principles of Romneyism are:

1. Corporations are the basic units of society. Corporations are people, and the overriding purpose of an economy is to maximize corporate profits. When profits are maximized, the economy grows fastest. This growth benefits everyone in the form greater output, better products and services, and higher share prices.

2. Workers are a means to the goal of maximizing corporate profits. If workers do not contribute to that goal, they should be fired. If they cannot then find other work that helps maximize profits in another company, their wages must be too high, and they must therefore accept steadily lower wages until they find a job.

3. All factors of production — capital, physical plant and equipment, workers — are fungible and should be treated the same. Any that fail to deliver high competitive returns should be replaced or discarded. This keeps an economy efficient. Fairness is and should be irrelevant.

4. Pollution, unsafe products, unsafe working conditions, financial fraud, and other negative side effects of the pursuit of profits are the price society pays for profit-driven growth. They should not be used as excuses to constrain the pursuit of profits through regulation. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

At the turn of the 20^th Century, smoke meant jobs. When noxious fumes spewed from factory stacks, workers brought home paychecks. Industries hired. The future was bright as molten iron flowing from a blast furnace.

In industrial Pittsburgh’s heyday, the smoke was so dense streetlights remained lit at noon. White collar workers changed soot-covered shirts mid-day. The region’s residents suffered high rates of asthma and emphysema. In 1948, an inversion trapped industrial pollution in a small town south of Pittsburgh, killing 20.

Smoke also meant death and disease.

Now, however, good-paying industrial jobs need not exact untimely death from workers and their families. In fact, it’s the opposite. Development of clean renewable energy generators – the likes of wind turbines, solar cells, biomass – would create family-supporting industrial jobs in America and would reinforce traditional manufacturing jobs in the U.S., including those in steel mills, solar cell fabrication plants and wind turbine factories, such as those built by Gamesa in Pennsylvania.

Labor unions and environmental groups are pressing for passage of policies like a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and comprehensive climate change legislation that would promote transition to a clean energy economy.

To prod lawmakers to act, the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of those labor unions and enviromentalists, conducted a three-week, 17-state, 30-city barnstorm during August in an energy-efficient, American-made, carbon-neutral bus. At events in each city, BlueGreen activists told attendees, “The Job’s Not Done,” and urged them to tell their U.S. Senators it’s not a choice between clean air and jobs. The choice is leaving a legacy of environmental hell or bequeathing climate unchanged.

In an 1868 edition of  The Atlantic Monthly, writer James Parton described with awe the atmosphere created by industrial Pittsburgh’s iron and glass works, its foundries and its coke ovens:

“On the evening of this dark day, we were conducted to the edge of the abyss, and looked over the iron railing upon the most striking spectacle we ever beheld. The entire space lying between the hills was filled with blackest smoke, from out of which the hidden chimneys sent forth tongues of flame, while from the depths of the abyss came up the noise of hundreds of steam-hammers. There would be moments when no flames were visible; but soon the wind would force the smoky curtains aside, and the whole black expanse would be dimly lighted with dull wreaths of fire. It is an unprofitable business, view-hunting; but if any one would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara, he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg, and looking over into–hell with the lid taken off.”

Beautiful as he found it, Parton added this:

“The first feeling of the stranger is one of compassion for the people who are compelled to live in such an atmosphere. When hard pressed, a son of Pittsburg will not deny that the smoke has its inconveniences.”

Pittsburgh took measures to clean its air. Smoke no longer turns the city’s days to night. But the town, like every other, still suffers the effect of pollution. It is the greenhouse gas pollution causing global climate change, which is associated with extreme weather events like the Katrina hurricane that killed 1,800 five years ago, floods this summer that killed 1,600 in Pakistan and 1,100 in China and unprecedented heat and uncontrolled wildfires that killed thousands this year in Russia.

Even former Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce concede climate change is real. They’re just towing the usual Republican party line of “no” to anything proposed by Democrats or the Environmental Protection Agency to correct it. The Chamber, for example says it supports strong action on climate change, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but it opposed legislation that would cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Chamber, at one point, called for the EPA to hold “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” to debate whether climate change is man-made.

The Chamber’s position prompted high-profile members to quit, including Apple and public-utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon.

Another big name company, Nike, resigned from the Chamber board of directors. It explained the defection:

“Nike believes that climate change is an urgent issue affecting the world today and that businesses and their representative associations need to take an active role to invest in sustainable business practices and innovative solutions to address the issue. It is not a time for debate but instead a time for action and we believe the Chamber’s recent petition sets back important work currently being undertaken by EPA on this issue.”

Like Nike, Senators should do what’s right – pass a Renewable Electricity Standard and a comprehensive climate change bill.

They need to stop thinking about their re-election and start thinking about their grandchildren.  They need to pass climate legislation that would support American jobs and avert hell.

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

The headline of my local paper today is Obama: Act on clean energy. (But a different headline online – do they do that just to mess up bloggers?)

In the speech the President paid homage to President Carter’s efforts to change America’s energy policies, saying:

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Outflanked

Then the President said we have been outflanked on the coming green manufacturing revolution by countries like China:

The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight. Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.

Cap And Trade Dead

In the Huffington Post today, Teryn Norris, Director of Americans for Energy Leadership writes that the President also signaled the death of cap and trade legislation:

Instead of using last night’s prime-time opportunity to push cap and trade … President Obama pressed the reset button on energy and climate policy, saying he was “happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party, as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels.” He made no mention of setting a price on carbon or establishing an emissions cap and trade system.

Others are trying to get things done on this front. Norris discusses the emerging Innovation Consensus:

The energy innovation consensus currently includes dozens of Nobel Laureates, Breakthrough Institute, Brookings Institution, National Commission on Energy Policy, Third Way, Association of American Universities, Clean Air Task Force, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, Google, and Americans for Energy Leadership, among others. The latest group to join is the American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC), made up of several of the nation’s top business leaders: Bill Gates, Jeff Immelt, John Doerr, Chad Holliday, Norm Augustine, Ursula Burns, and Tim Solso. Last week, these leaders released a new report, “A Business Plan for America’s Energy Future,” calling for major new federal investment in clean energy technology RD&D — at least $16 billion annually, more than triple the current level (see our news roundup).

Here is the problem. Action on energy requires direct government action and rejection of deficit hysteria to do it. But every single initiative of the Obama Presidency has been blocked by powerful interests, playing on the use of the filibuster on almost every major bill in the Senate. Health care reform was severely weakened by the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies. Financial reform has been severely weakened by the financial lobbies. Jobs measures and further stimulus have been blocked by a strategic lobbying campaign to make people think the Bush-created deficit must be cut first. Now cap and trade may have been killed by the oil and gas lobbies.

We are in a direct confrontation between the big corporations and We, the People over who will run things and control the resources of the United States, and We, the People are losing. There is time to turn it around, but only if we recognize this battle for what it is.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project and the “Virtual Summit on Fiscal and Economic Responsibility for People Who Did Not Wreck The Economy.” Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

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Johnson also is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Renewal of the California Dream.

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Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

Robert Kutner

By Robert Kutner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

Barack Obama may soon find that he is committing a big sin against one of the major premises of the reigning ideology. As part of his plan to restructure the auto industry, rebuild infrastructure, and create new green industries and jobs, he will be committing industrial policy. And this will create a head-on collision with one of the cherished dogmas of market fundamentalism — “free trade.”

This clash is long overdue. For several decades, American elites of both parties have been preaching the same gospel of free trade. Supposedly, if we just leave markets alone, different countries will produce and export what they naturally do best, and import products at which their partners excel. In the tidy and oversimplified textbook world, there is no room for questions about pollution, labor standards, product safety, financial engineering, or industrial policy.

But the real world doesn’t work like the Econ. 101 fable. In much of the rest of the world, governments help their industries develop.

However, in the hierarchy of America’s diplomatic priorities, countries like China that subsidize industries (and violate human rights) get a free pass. Other nations like Japan, that basically closed their borders to most imports for several decades while they became industrial powerhouses, got a seal of approval, too. Supposedly, what we lose in jobs and industries, we make up in cheap imports.

While other nations care about what they produce, the United States disdains having industrial policies, in order to set a good example. Indeed, we have been the principal architect of the World Trade Organization, which discourages government involvement in economic development as an illicit thumb on the free-trade scale.

Now, with the crash of 2008, it is clear that the US economy was built on a financial mirage. Our reliance on asset bubbles – inflated stock and real estate prices – disguised the fact that we were not paying our way. Much of our prosperity was simply borrowed.

Having let so many industries and jobs just go offshore, we don’t make enough to pay for our imports. Instead, we have been relying on loans from foreign central banks to finance our trade imbalance.

Looking at this economic calamity, President-elect Obama has proposed several sensible policies. He wants the U.S. auto industry to reinvent itself, with government aid and government standards. He wants to incubate other domestic industries around the goal of clean energy. And he wants to spend serious money on all of this, to help avoid a depression. The only historical counterpart is the vast industrial mobilization of World War II, which finally cured the Great Depression.

But these ideas about government involvement in the economy violate the sacred dogma of free trade. If the Obama administration is serious about reviving American manufacturing industry, it is only a matter of time before a foreign government hauls the U.S. before the World Trade Organization and charges us with the crime of industrial policy.

To quote our beloved leader George W. Bush in a different context, bring it on. The current version of the W.T.O., designed by and for US multinational corporations to make it easier to outsource jobs and production, has not served the national interest. It is indeed time to use industrial policy to rebuild long neglected domestic industries; and if something has to give, let it be the W.T.O.

As a mark of the total intellectual muddle in how policymakers have thought about these issues, the fact is that we have several implicit industrial policies. For instance, American commercial leadership in aerospace is no naturally occurring phenomenon. It reflects trillions of dollars of subsidy from the Pentagon and from NASA. Likewise, U.S. dominance in pharmaceuticals is the result of government subsidy of basic research, favorable patent treatment, and the fact that the American consumer of prescription drugs is made to overpay, giving the industry exorbitant profits to plow back into research. Throwing $700 billion at America’s wounded banks is also an industrial policy

So if we can have implicit industrial policies for these industries, why not explicit policies to rebuild our auto industry, our steel industry, our machine tool industry, and the industries of the next century such as green energy and high-speed rail? And why not devise some clear standards for which industries deserve help, and why, and what they owe America in return?

The new administration is already a bit schizophrenic on the subject. On the one hand, President-elect Obama has been saying bold things about building the industries of the future. On the other hand, he just appointed as America’s top trade official Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, a man with no serious diplomatic experience and one whose main claim to fame on the trade issue is that he has been a big booster of NAFTA, a badly flawed deal that Obama has pledged to reopen.

Kirk’s appointment was meant to signal that Obama will not challenge the current orthodoxy on trade policy. It was cheered by the U.S. business establishment. What is truly bizarre is that Obama’s reported first choice for the job was California Congressman Xavier Becerra, a critic of NAFTA and other recent trade deals. Kirk will also vehemently disagree on trade and industry with Obama’s new labor secretary-designate, Rep. Hilda Solis, another NAFTA critic.

Maybe, like Lincoln, Obama has the genius to fuse this “team of rivals” into an effective administration; perhaps he will listen to the divergent advice and forge the best course. When the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin coined that phrase to describe Lincoln’s manner of governing, she was referring to the fact that Lincoln literally brought into his cabinet men who had been Lincoln’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. These were people of real stature and of fierce differences, representing a party that was badly fractured on the key issues of how to save the union and whether to free the slaves.

Obama has prided himself building bridges and transcending ideology. We are now beginning to see what that means in practice–a cabinet that represents people of thoroughly contradictory views, with some members who are public figures of real consequence and others who are surprisingly weak. This pattern puts all the more pressure on Obama himself to create coherence out of the stew.

Despite these gestures of broad inclusion, there is no escaping the fact that Obama must quickly make some difficult decisions about which path to follow. And one path precludes another. He can’t have both his industrial policies and his free trade.

Robert Kuttner’s new bestselling book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Policy and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Robert Kuttner’s new bestselling book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Policy and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Column first published on The Huffington Post