National Clean Energy Project Part 12/16

Leaders from the public and private sectors met in Washington, DC on February 23rd to discuss ideas to reform U.S. energy policy, and pave the wave for our economic future part 12/16.

National Clean Energy Project Part 12/16 Mr. Wirth: Andy Stern has thought deeply about the issues of justice and how the opportunities of this new economy deal and relate to an American workforce that’s certainly threatened or under pressure today as perhaps never before, Andy, thank you for being with us. Andrew Stern: Thank you. And as an organization that’s somewhat of a latecomer to this, I just want to say, to have all these people who were out there before this was popular, who got challenged about the science or their integrity, it really is an honor to be here. And for Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi and President Obama, to sort of see this now all come together with this opportunity, we owe all of you an incredible debt of gratitude. Let me just say that for all of us in this room, I think we do appreciate, and I think it’s said up on the sign, that this is a huge opportunity to not only create jobs we desperately need right now but really to think about building a new economy. And I would say we’re not quite yet there with the American people understanding the opportunities that are here. So I think, first of all, we just need to be thoughtful that we have, at times, oversold things. I think we oversold high-tech jobs. We oversold trade as kind of the answer. And I think what it means is that if we really want to maximize the opportunity here, we have to think about how we’re going to create American jobs and how we’re going to benefit this country very specifically. And so for that, I think it’s very simple. We need a plan. And we need to appreciate, particularly when we get to weatherization and retrofitting and some of the lower-end parts of this job creation, you know, what John Podesta and another study at CAP showed, that when you look at procurement in the federal government, and Vice President Gore and President Clinton tried to deal with this when they were in office, 80% of the jobs that are provided from our current procurement are low-wage jobs. 20% one of every five jobs, are poverty jobs provided by procurement from the federal government. Most of them have virtually no significant healthcare benefits and so good intentions are not enough here. We have to be intentional. And so, just for me, there are three things we need to think about for the legislators. You know, one is, as we do in defense contracting, how do we consider these really investments in critical industries so that we guarantee there’s a certain amount of domestic base of production and a domestic workforce? And I’m not simply trying to be protectionist, but I do think we understand what a critical industry is. And what is more critical than our own energy security here? Two is we need to build on the green jobs act and all the issues about hiring and training and workforce development. But we have to be thoughtful of not accepting sort of anecdotal, one-off solutions as something we can do on scale. And I think we have a tremendous obligation and responsibility right now with all the money that Congress has appropriated to really be serious about, you know, not highlighting one thing here and another thing there but building, as Lee Scott knows, a system, you know, that actually creates the good jobs, the training, the career advancement we need. And three is I think we’re going to have to set some meaningful standards so they are good jobs, whether it’s what Maryland does about living wages, whether it’s what we do about prevailing wages in Davis-Bacon or predetermined wages or project-labor agreements or community benefits. If we are not purposeful and intentional, the idea that these will be good jobs, particularly in certain parts of this job creation, is not necessarily going to be true. And we cannot afford to sell the American people something that turns out not to be true. This is the opportunity to create a new economy. It really is a chance to create the jobs that our kids and our grandkids can live the American dream. And I think we have the opportunity to do it. And I’m glad to be here. Mr. Wirth: Andy, thank you very much. Andy is our landlord at the U.N. Foundation and we are privileged to be in a gold LEED gold- standard building. And Rick Fedrizzi from the U.S. Building Council is here. Rick, do you want to give us your window on how rapidly the building stock is changing and how rapidly it can change? Rick Fedrizzi: Sure, thank you very much. It’s really a pleasure to be here with all of you. The U.S. Green Building Council really – part of the discussion that I’ve heard over and over again this morning really gets to the fact of, how do you take this big macro idea and get it into the hearts and soul of the American people so that they can understand it? And in our opinion, there really is no better way than get it right into their living rooms. People have to understand it. You have to get it into the schools. You have to get it into the places where we work. People need to know that there’s a connection between the world that we live in, what we use as far as energy and how it’s produced and where it’s produced. And I think when we talk about a future with a smart grid and we talk about a future where we have energy-efficient, green and smart buildings all connected together, what we’ve done there is we’ve produced a great story that will in fact translate down to the American people, when you start talking to the folks that can’t afford $5 more. But right now within their homes and in the world that they live in, they have embedded probably another 100 (dollars) to $200 a month in savings that doesn’t appear because their houses, their homes, their businesses, whatever it is, are inefficient. Right now, the McKenzie study that came out not too long ago says there’s about $160 billion just sitting on the table that we could grab by the year 2030 just by making the smallest improvements to the energy efficiency of these buildings. So I think we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. I think the communications of this whole opportunity is going to be paramount because when you talk about the grid, the average homeowner doesn’t get it, I’m not sure they care. What they care about is food on the table, sending their kids to college. And when they start to realize that it’s not just about them doing with less but maybe some intelligent decisions about how their homes are operated, constructed, weatherized and anything that has to do with improving that performance, puts food on their table. I think that’s one of the best messages we could sell. So that’s it, Tim. Just a very quick comment on what we have in front of us. Mr. Wirth: Thank you very much, Rick. And I want to ask Carl Pope and Rose McKinney-James the question that you asked to begin with. Do people understand the connection between the energy they use and the world in which they live? Carl and Rose. Carl? Carl Pope: People understand it a lot better than they did even 24 months ago. And people like Boone Pickens and Al Gore and Bill Clinton get a lot of the credit for that. I was really struck as I went around in 2006, when I went around campaigning, I could get an audience to talk about how green energy was a big part of the American economic future if I went to places like the Cleveland City Club. That was news. I mean, prior to 2006, those of us who talked about this issue were by and large relegated to the free-speech zone at national conventions. We weren’t really a part of the mainstream dialogue. And in 2006, you started getting this serious hearing. This fall, I went out and I went to northeastern Ohio. And I went door to door with canvassers for Working America in communities where steel jobs had gone away 20 years earlier. And I found that people at the door who had been waiting for 20 years for something to happen finally thought something was going to happen. And they thought the something that was going to happen was wind turbines on Lake Erie. And they said to me at the door, look, we get it. If it can be made in Shanghai, it will be. But you can’t harvest the wind on Lake Erie from Shanghai. I we’re going to make my house more efficient, we’re not going to do it in a back-room office in Bangalore. We’re going to do it in Canton, Ohio, where I live. I think the American people are now way, way ahead of where their leaders were a year ago but I think there is still a serious risk and Secretary Chu talking about it. It’s easy to talk about how government is bureaucratic, government slows things down, and government is inefficient. When we’re talking about connectivity, markets can be just as bad. They can sit forever, maneuvering for advantage. They can sit forever, arguing about standards. We can either build this new, connected, green-energy world the way we built the Interstate Highway System which I think is the right model. Or we can build it the way we built the railroads. Now, eventually, after the way we built the railroads, we’ve got a pretty big railroad system, but it took an awfully long time and it was very, very wasteful and inefficient. There was no plan. We didn’t plan the railroad system. I think we need to plan the new energy future.