by Adam James, Jorge Madrid, and Bracken Hendricks

A lot of bogus numbers are flying around about green jobs these days.  It’s time to set the record straight:  Clean energy is a bright spot in the economic recovery, already creating large numbers of high quality U.S. jobs in emerging industries.  Cleantech (primarily clean energy) has seen “torrid growth” from 2003 to 2010, 8.3% per year — almost double the growth rate of the  overall economy during that time.

What began as a concerted smear campaign, started by a small number of conservative pundits to score political points during an election year, has unfortunately picked up steam in mainstream news outlets. Recently, the New York Times distorted the record on clean energy jobs and missed the real news story.  In this post, we take these arguments head on and set the record straight on green jobs.

Reality:  Critics are actively and unethically smearing a crucial American industry

Earlier this month, President Obama visited a Johnson Controls plant in Holland, Michigan that is being brought on line with the help of Recovery Act funds, to manufacture advanced batteries in the U.S.A. for state of the art electric vehicles. In order to encourage development of three separate next-generation facilities for researching and producing batteries for clean cars, the government issued a $299 million grant to Johnson Controls.

In the first quarter of this year, this project had already created 148 jobs on a path to hiring 3,000 workers.  According to the website www.recovery.gov:

“In preparation for building a new plant we have created positions necessary to manage the plant, manage the plant launch, and specify plant layout and required equipment, strategic sourcing, and to put plant system infrastructure in place. We have created positions necessary to hire plant staff and provide the on-boarding and technical training for new employees.”

However, a frenzy of conservative news outlets used the opportunity to claim that the jobs created at the plant cost federal taxpayers $2 million per person. (By simply dividing $299 million by 148 jobs outlined in the recovery.gov report, you conveniently get $2.02 million per job.)

That number is absolutely wrong and purposefully misleading.

The original article, whose headline boldly read “OBAMA VISTS CORPORATION WHERE HIS STIMULUS CREATED ‘GREEN’ JOBS AT $2 MILLION PER JOB” quietly admits further down in the article that this price is true only “if no more jobs are added.” Not surprisingly, the headline was not circulated with this critical disclaimer.

The article also failed to mention that development is less than 50% complete, less than one third of the funds have been spent, and further expansion will create thousands of jobs in the coming years. According to Johnson Controls, around 3,000 jobs will be created in the construction and operation of three separate facilities built with the $299 million grant.

That means the federal government is actually creating one job with every $100,000 spent on the project – not $2 million as this misleading coverage asserts. This investment in jobs actually compares very favorably to job creation from other types of energy projects.  According to U.S. Government statistics, the “price” of job creation is $145,000 per job for coal projects, over $193,000 per job in the oil and gas industry favored by conservative commentators, and a whopping $238,000 per job created from nuclear energy, or more than twice the cost per job when compared to energy efficiency. 

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Some folks in the media and denier-sphere have tried to downplay the severity of Hurricane Irene.  That’s probably because they don’t live in my home town of Middletown, New York, one of the many Hudson Valley & Catskills towns devastated by Irene.  Where I grew up, this was the storm of the century.

Above is a screen capture from the website of the Middletown Times Herald Record, the paper my father ran for some 3 decades starting in the late 1950s.  The paper now does video reporting, and I’ll repost their amazing coverage of the super-storm below.  That story notes that “emergency personnel”  in the area have labeled Irene, “the most devastating weather event ever to hit the region.”

First, though, meteorologist and hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters has the big picture in his post, “Irene’s 1-in-100 Year Rains Trigger Deadly Flooding“:

Hurricane Irene is gone, but the huge hurricane’s torrential rains have unleashed one of the Northeast’s greatest flood disasters. Videos of rampaging rivers in Vermont, New York State, New Jersey, and surrounding states attest to the extreme nature of the great deluge Hurricane Irene brought. Numerous rivers and creeks throughout the Northeast crested above their highest flood stages on record over the past 24 hours. The previous records were mostly set during some of the great hurricanes of 50 – 60 years ago–Hazel of 1954, Connie and Diane of 1955, and Donna of 1960. Vermont, where 3 – 7 inches of rain fell in just twelve hours, was particularly hard-hit. Otter Creek in Rutland, Vermont crested at 17.21 feet, 3.81′ above its previous record, and more than 9 feet above flood stage. In northern New Jersey and Southeast New York, where soils were already saturated from the region’s wettest August on record even before Irene arrived, record flooding was the norm. According to imagery from metstat.com, Irene’s rains were a 1-in-100 year event for portions of six states.

Here’s the video from my home town newspaper:

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Republican Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann recently claimed she could get gas prices below $2 per gallon.  Aside from an attempt to cause a severe economic recession and thus a dramatic drop in global oil demand, most experts agree that goal is a completely unrealistic goal.

But we now have more clarity on the Bachmann plan: Drill for oil in the Everglades.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Bachmann said she would be willing to drill for oil in the Everglades, a 4,000 square mile series of sensitive wetlands off the coast of Florida that acts as a major watershed for the state.

“The United States needs to be less dependent on foreign sources of energy and more dependent on American resourcefulness. Whether that is in the Everglades or whether that is in the Eastern Gulf region or whether that is in North Dakota, we need to go where the energy is.”

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Galileo faces the Roman Inquisition who, without evidence, demand he recant his statements on heliocentrism.

by John Atcheson

James Lawrence Powell’s The Inquisition of Climate Science is a straightforward, thorough and well-researched account of the assault on climate science.

The book is scholarly, yet entertaining, as a quick review of the titles in the Table of Contents reveals.  Among the best are:  “Toxic Tanks” (think tanks), “An Industry to Trust” (in which he contrasts the oil and gas companies’ and Insurance companies’ positions on global warming), “Climategate: Much Ado About Nothing” (in which he drives yet another wooden stake in the heart of this travesty and dispatches other “gates”).

Powell’s account is – pardon the pun – intelligently designed to thoroughly debunk the baseless dogma and diatribes coming out of the denier community.

The structure of the book is iterative, much like science itself. Just as a scientific observation proceeds from an initial hypothesis to a theory supported by empirical evidence and a body of replicable research, Powell’s organization educates his reader on how science works, even as he increases the specificity and sophistication of his discussion.

He first establishes the difference between skeptics and deniers, explaining that skepticism is at the core of science, but noting that when mounting evidence causes so-called “skeptics” to cling ever more desperately to their pre-ordained positions, they forfeit the title and move into the camp of deniers.

He provides a careful explanation of what science is and how it works.  He summarizes his initial exploration of this topic in another of his aptly titled Chapters, “Science and Potemkin Science,” with the following quote:

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Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Paul Krugman had a terrific column in the New York Times Sunday, “Republicans Against Science.”  He discusses not just the anti-science nature of the GOP  as it applies to global warming, but their anti-knowledge approach as it applies to economic theory.

Here’s more:

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Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (R), as part of her economic agenda, has promised Americans that if she were elected president, she would turn the economy around in just one fiscal quarter. One benefit of doing so, she claims, is that gas prices would again fall to $2 a gallon, a plan dismissed by fellow candidate Jon Huntsman (R) as a not from “the real world.” This weekend, however, Bachmann said one of the ways she would reduce gas prices is by drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades, one of the nation’s most endangered ecosystems:

BACHMANN: The United States needs to be less dependent on foreign sources of energy and more dependent upon American resourcefulness. Whether that is in the Everglades, or whether that is in the eastern Gulf region, or whether that’s in North Dakota, we need to go where the energy is. Of course it needs to be done responsibly. If we can’t responsibly access energy in the Everglades then we shouldn’t do it.

Watch it, via the Associated Press:

Among those who apparently don’t think drilling in the Everglades can be done responsibly is Bachmann’s primary opponent and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R). In 2007, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson (R) floated the possibility of drilling in the Everglades during his short-lived presidential campaign. Romney running for president then as he is now, said he would not support such a plan:

“You’re kidding?” said Romney, who also was campaigning in Florida. “Let’s take that off the table. We’re not going to drill in the Everglades. There are certain places in America that are national treasures and the Everglades is one of those.”

Former President George W. Bush also opposed Everglades drilling. In 2002, at Bush’s behest, the government repurchased $120 million of gas and oil drilling rights on nearly 400,000 acres of federally protected land to prevent drilling in the Everglades. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s brother, also opposed the drilling plans.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, expanded offshore drilling would have little impact on gas prices, reducing the price of a gallon of gasoline only three cents over the next two decades. Drilling in the Everglades, then, amounts to jeopardizing the degradation of one of America’s most unique environmental treasures to save a few cents off a gallon of gas.

Ohio EPA Proposes Pollution Limits on Fracking

Companies drilling for oil and natural gas in shale formations in Ohio might soon face air pollution limits on new wells.

The practice of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in pursuit of gas can require multiple wells on a single site, creating a concentration of equipment that can leak hazardous airborne compounds, The Columbus Dispatch reported. That’s causing concern about the pollutants the drilling operations might release, and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has proposed requiring oil and gas drillers to get permits that would set pollution limits.

“This is no longer the individual little well you see out in farm fields,” Ohio EPA spokesman Mike Settles said. “This is a sizable operation with pieces of equipment that need to be covered by an air permit.”

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Joining such distinguished public policy thinkers as Pat Robertson and birther evangelist Joseph Farah in seeing divine political interference in natural disasters, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said yesterday that Hurricane Irene was a message from God. Speaking Sarasota, Florida, Bachmann suggested God used the hurricane and last week’s earthquake to tell politicians to cut spending, the St. Petersburg Times reports:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

It’s ironic that God would use a hurricane to send a memo about cutting government spending, considering that the damage it causes it likely going to increase government spending. Meanwhile, religious leaders from disparate faith organizations have come out against further spending cuts on services for the poor.

Conservative radio host Glenn Beck also saw a prophetic communiqué in the back-to-back disasters, even calling the hurricane — which has killed at least 25 people and likely caused tens of billions in damage — a “blessing” because it will remind people to store more food:

How many warnings do you think you’re going to get, and how many warnings do you deserve? This hurricane that is coming thorough the East Coast, for anyone who’s in the East Coast and has been listening to me say ‘Food storage!’ ‘Be prepared!’ […] If you’ve waited, this hurricane is a blessing. It is a blessing. It is God reminding you — as was the earthquake last week — it’s God reminding you you’re not in control.

The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Tenety points out that Beck’s fascination with storing canned goods may stem from his religion. “Beck, one of Mormonism’s most famous converts, is actually touting one of the unique aspects of the Latter-day Saint faith: food storage,” she notes, citing Section 78 of the Doctrine and Covenants revelation which includes the commandment to “organize and establish a storehouse.”

With all the stories about China dominating the solar photovoltaics (PV) manufacturing sector, you might not think that America is a net exporter of solar products. But it is — to the tune of $1.8 billion. That’s a $1 billion increase over net exports documented in the solar sector last year.

In fact, a report released this morning from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association found that the U.S. has a $247 million trade surplus with China.

U.S. imports in 2010 were estimated at $1.4 billion, while exports were estimated to be between $1.7 billion – $2.0 billion based on the availability of data for capital equipment sales. This made the U.S. a net exporter of solar goods to China by $247 million to $539 million. Imports came predominantly from modules ($1.2 billion), while exports were driven by capital equipment ($708 million to $1 billion) and polysilicon ($873 million).

Solar isn’t just about the module. When looking at polysilicon production, equipment for manufacturing lines, power electronics, solar hot water tanks, and any number of other domestically-produced products, the U.S. actually offers a good-sized contribution to the global market.

The 2011 Solar Energy Trade Assessment is a follow up from last year’s report, which found U.S. net exports in 2009 were worth $723 million.

The $1 billion surge in net exports came during a year when the U.S. solar market grew by over 100%. Due to the successful Treasury Grant Program and Loan Guarantee Program that made it easier for developers and manufacturers to finance facilities, the solar sector grew faster than ever before.

And all that solar — particularly solar PV — brings immense value to the domestic economy.

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Ray Anderson — one of the great leaders of the sustainability movement and a personal friend — died earlier this month.  Interface, the carpet manufacturing company he founded and later turned into one of the world’s flagship green companies, is holding a memorial service this morning.  You can watch it here:  http://rayandersonmemorial.visioncast.tv (more details below).

I knew Ray for almost two decades and followed his journey toward sustainability closely.  He was the genuine article, the epitome of a sustainable visionary corporate CEO.

He was also one of the classiest and kindest people I knew, a man of great heart and spirit.  He was the kind of person whose warmth and energy lit up a room, whose wit and wisdom changed people’s minds about what was possible.

He walked the talk.  Indeed, he created the path that made it possible for others to walk what he talked about.  Here he is at TED, speaking “on the business logic of sustainability” and how he switched from “plunderer of the Earth” to a “recovering plunderer” to “America’s greenest CEO”:

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