It's Not Easy Being Green

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman on a mission.  With a brazen effort to seize the moment and hit the ground running, she unveiled a proposal for a Green New Deal - a Roosevelt-style economic policy that emphasizes the creation of jobs and the implementation of policies to benefit the environment and fight climate change while putting people to work.

Her proposal, which she put out with climate hawk and congressional veteran Edward Markey, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, would incentivize the creation of jobs to help the poor, underemployed and unemployed - jobs to expand renewable energy, get the United States on track to depend entirely on a 100% renewable, zero-emission energy grid, encourage the development of electric cars and high-speed passenger rail, and promote sustainable farming.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants America to do what other countries have been doing for quite some time now.

Let's get something straight.  This Green New Deal proposal is not going to become law in this Congress, so long as the Republicans, who still control the Senate and the Presidency, scoff at anything that cuts into the profitable businesses of refining oil and selling SUVs.  Even if there is a Democratic sweep in the 2020 elections, we might still have to deal with moderate Democrats who laugh off the idea of going all-renewable and call it a "green dream" (to cop a phrase from Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey proposal).  But it does do something Republicans detest - it gets an issue they don't want to talk about in the public discourse.  Ocasio-Cortez is betting on the Green New Deal  to galvanize progressive, millennial and minority voters to become more politically active and demand change to our insane energy and transportation policies, which gave us electric-power plants belching carbon into the sky and an unsustainable overreliance on cars.  Not to mention the incentivization of mechanized farming based on petrochemical fertilizers.  The idea is to get enough voters riled up to the point where they make Washington pursue a path to a cleaner and greener economy.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for awhile (*cough cough*, high-speed rail, *cough cough*), and the political realities of the present make the Green New Deal a heavy lift.  But it's not impossible to get it done; it's just difficult.  Here are a few other things that were heavy lifts - health care reform, civil rights legislation, old-age pensions, women's suffrage . . . I could go on.  I won't, because we have to start getting the Green New Deal off the ground.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect person to instigate it.  This is not unlike the idea of putting a man on the moon within ten years, which, you'll remember, happened.  Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's plan happens to envision a ten-year transition to an all-renewable energy grid. And Ocasio-Cortez is firing up voters and inspiring the American people to find their can-do spirit and get this thing done.

With a little luck, we can make this whole damn thing work out. A little push, please.  ;-)    

A Colorful Scandal

President Obama tried to promote "green energy" with a federal loan to a solar panel manufacturer in California to show that jobs in companies like this one were the wave of the future. The failure of Solyndra, Inc., the company in question, turned colors in Washington from green to red as if they were traffic signals or autumn leaves; Obama and his staffers are red-faced with embarrassment, and congressional Republicans are red-faced with anger.

Republicans in the House of Representatives are investigating to see if maybe the $528 million loan to Solyndra was rushed and approved before it was given a chance for a thorough review. The White House had touted the program as a model for kickstatting the renewable energy industry, but Solyndra went bankrupt and laid off over a thousand workers. The FBI then found that Solyndra spent over two million dollars lobbying in Washington regarding many of the provisions in the loan program just before White House officials sought the approval of said loan.

The GOP is trying to see if the Obama administration at least tried to protect taxpayers from getting shafted, and even if they don't find anything to suggest that taxpayers weren't adequately shielded, this is going to be a real black eye for "green jobs." The mainstream media are most likely going to tout this as a failure of Obama's renewable energy policy and crookedness in the solar panel business while forever downplaying the crimes of the oil and gas industries.

With pundits laughing at the idea of "green jobs" and the American renewable energy industry in disarray, it's time Obama gave up on his promotion of "green" energy. Selling such an idea to Americans is like trying to get them to eat muesli for breakfast or bike to work.

Energy Crisis

When Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid announced that the energy bill passed last year - that's right, last year - by the House wouldn't be put up for a vote before August, and likely not for the rest of the year in the face of Republican opposition, it signaled a blow to Democratic hopes of stemming their losses in the midterm congressional elections in November. Why should liberals break their necks trying to get out the vote for Democrats if a clean energy bill has no better chance of becoming law in a Democratic Congress than in a Republican Congress? But the most disastrous result this surrender is the fact that, after 37 years, America still has no coherent energy policy and still has no commitment to lessening our dependence on foreign energy sources, particularly oil.

The Republicans are actually on the winning side of this issue. You can show people all the pictures of oil-coated brown pelicans from Louisiana there are, and you can have interminable Northeast heat waves like the one we have right now last all the way into October, but Americans are likely unwilling to pay a little more for electricity generated by wind and solar power and use less of it, at least in the short term, for long term gain. Coal is dirty and messy, and extracting it has become even more dangerous and environmentally unfriendly these days, but if it produces more cheap electricity, hey, what's so bad about that? Also, despite corporate average fuel economy standards that have already been placed on the auto industry, the abundance of oil - including any domestic oil we produce, which gets sold on the international market rather than reduce our dependence on the Middle East - will mean that many Americans will continue to buy large SUVs. Subsidized gasoline is as American as apple pie, and probably cheaper. Electric cars like the Chevrolet Volt are going to be expensive - again, in the short term - and the government hasn't given General Motors enough incentives to enable them to produce the car for less money and pass the savings on to the consumer. The bottom line is that Americans can't think long term. They never could. Only now, with the planet's ecosystem sagging under the weight of human activity, that's become more apparent.

The benefits of clean energy - and the possibly reduced use of energy that would allow us to be less dependent on technology and lead less stressful and more productive lives - don't register with a culture used to being forever plugged in at a cheap price. I'm guilty of that too. I've been on a personal computer typing this out, haven't I? I use a good deal of electricity, possibly generated by a coal-fired power station, writing on this blog. But I'm willing to adapt to the changes that a clean energy law would demand, if only it could pass. Besides, any conversion to wind and solar power would be gradual, not overnight, as it has historically taken time for Americans to embrace change. Other countries, particularly European countries, are already leading the way on clean energy, and their collective quality of life, already superior to ours, is bound to be more so.

We're not going to have rolling blackouts like the ones Britain had in the seventies or California had in 2001 if we make the transition to renewable sources now. But we'll probably have something more severe than that if we wait to make the transition until fossil fuels become more scarce and the planet is more polluted - that is, after it's too late.

Regress

Congress, the late Nipsey Russell once said, is the opposite of progress. Last night, however, the House of Representatives stunned everyone by actually making progress on a contentious environmental issue - global warming. The clean energy bill passed by the House passed narrowly - by five votes - making investments in clean energy production more of a reality. The bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act but sometimes called the Waxman-Markey Act (after its sponsors), requires carbon pollutants to be reduced by 17 percent by 2020, and up to 80 percent by 2050. Other provisions include a requirement for new use of renewable energy by utilities and energy efficiency incentives for homes and buildings.

Republicans and oil companies fought this bill diligently, and only eight Republicans voted for it. Tellingly, three of those Republican votes came from my own state of New Jersey. Sadly, my congressman's vote was not among them.

Bob Etheridge voted for it. :-) ;-)

The bill now goes to the Senate, where chances of passage seemed dim but get a boost from the House vote. This news is a big win for President Obama, who hopes at least to put America on a wiser, more efficient path when it comes to energy usage, and do more to combat climate change.