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Climate Progress

Top 10 Reasons Why Green Jobs Are Vital to Our Economy

By Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 7, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Why is Climate Progress focusing so much on green jobs? As many of readers have noticed, there is a coordinated effort among right-wing politicians and the press to challenge the notion that green jobs are growing fast and that they’re necessary. With Obama set to make a major speech on jobs tomorrow night, we’re working overtime to combat many of the myths.

By Christina C. DiPasquale and Kate Gordon, Center for American Progress

Green jobs are integral to any effort to jumpstart our economy and reduce as rapidly as possible our 9.1 percent unemployment that rate. The rapid growth of green jobs will boost demand in our economy by reducing unemployment, make America more competitive in the global economy, and protect our public health—all of which will result in greater economic productivity and long-term economic prosperity. Here are the top 10 reasons why this is the case today and into the future:

1. There are already 2.7 million jobs across the clean economy. Clean energy is already proving to be larger job creation engine than the heavily subsidized fossil-fuels sector, putting Americans back to work in a lackluster economy.

2. Across a range of clean energy projects, including renewable energy, transit, and energy efficiency, for every million dollars spent, 16.7 green jobs are created. That is over three times the 5.3 jobs per million dollars that are created from the same spending on fossil-fuel industries.

3. The clean energy sector is growing at a rate of 8.3 percent. Solar thermal energy expanded by 18.4 percent annually from 2003 to 2010, along with solar photovoltaic power by 10.7 percent, and biofuels by 8.9 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the U.S. wind energy industry saw 35 percent average annual growth over the past five years, accounting for 35 percent of new U.S. power capacity in that period, according to the 2010 U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report. As a whole, the clean energy sector’s average growth rate of 8.3 percent annually during this period was nearly double the growth rate of the overall economy during that time.

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Alyssa

Kal Penn Takes The United Nations

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 7, 2011 at 5:22 pm

I’ve been mildly curious as to what Kal Penn was going to do with himself after he left the White House other than continuing to cash large checks for playing an amiable stoner, and now we know! He’s just sold a single-camera workplace comedy where the workplace is the United Nations to NBC. This should be reasonably exciting for a couple reasons. First, NBC has the workplace comedy thing down pat, and with Parks & Recreation, has experience with workplaces that also happen to be bureaucracies.

Second, the United Nations is deeply marginal in popular culture. It’s periodically shadowy or dangerous, as in the Left Behind books and movies or The Art of War (Wesley Snipes has worked for a surprising number of government or quasi-governmental agencies on film); scandal-ridden, as it will be in the upcoming Rachel Weisz human rights vehicle The Whistleblower; or marginal and ineffective, as in Armando Iannucci scabrous black comedy In the Loop. But unlike, say, the NYPD or the FBI, we don’t have a pop culture trope about how the UN is supposed to function despite the fact that, for all the criticisms leveled at it, it’s a reasonably important gatekeeper in world affairs and thus should probably play a more significant role in our security-oriented popular culture.

And finally, there is a real virtue to people who have actual knowledge about how government works imparting that knowledge to people who make our popular entertainment, or in Penn’s case, being someone who has worked in both government and entertainment and thus has a sense of what might translate in both directions. I’m not saying our pop culture needs to be spinach, but having drama with real roots can eliminate plausibility problems, convey accurate background information in situations where it’s important not to dramatically mislead the audience, and make it possible to land punches of social criticism and satire harder and with much greater accuracy. Complaining about the UN as a world government is both misleading and not particularly illuminating. Poking the institution where it needs tweaking and showing off the breadth and complexity of its work and internal politics is well worth doing and much more interesting.

NEWS FLASH

Texas Applies For Health Reform Waiver That Benefits Insurers | A key consumer benefit of President Obama’s health care reform law is the Medical Loss Ratio — a requirement that insurers spend 80 to 85 percent of premium dollars on health care, rather than administrative spending, and reimburse their customers if they fail to meet that standard. Now Texas, under Gov. Rick Perry (R), is seeking an exemption from that requirement. According to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, Texas has requested an adjustment of the MLR standard to 71 percent, 74 percent, and 77 percent for 2011, 2012, and 2013, respectively. States can apply for a waiver if they can demonstrate that insurers really will leave the state if they are forced to comply with the rate. If Perry’s request is granted, it may be a financial coup for insurers’ profits, but a blow for Texas consumers who already have to pay insurance premiums that are higher than the national average. Texas has the highest uninsurance rate in the nation.

By Marie Diamond on Sep 7, 2011 at 5:15 pm

Economy

New Report Finds High School Textbooks Ignore Or Distort The Role Of Labor Unions In American History

By Zaid Jilani on Sep 7, 2011 at 4:55 pm

Labor's role in defeating Apartheid is one of the stories not being told in American textbooks.

On Monday, America celebrated Labor Day, which is set aside to honor American laborers and their unions. Yet a new report from the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) Albert Shanker Institute titled “American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story is Distorted in High School History Textbooks” finds that America’s high school students are not being properly taught about the contributions of organized labor to American history.

The Shanker Institute report surveyed four high school textbooks — The American Vision, American History, The Americans, and American Anthem — published by major publishers that make up a “significant” portion of the American textbook market and found serious deficiencies in the coverage of labor unions. Here are some highlights from the report:

- The Role Of Unions In Winning Broad Social Protections Is Overlooked: The textbooks surveyed failed to record the history of American unions using their political clout to win social protections for all Americans. This overlooked advocacy includes activism on behalf of the “Progressive Era and New Deal reforms, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.”

- The Role Of American Labor In Battling Human Rights Abuses Abroad Is Ignored: The report notes that the textbooks surveyed failed to mention the “the important role that the American labor movement played in support of the establishment of free and democratic trade unions in post-war Western Europe.” They also ignored the role that unions played in allying with the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa or “numerous other efforts to support free and democratic unions as a bulwark against totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.”

- Labor’s Role In Winning Civil Rights Is Ignored: One of the major omissions of these textbooks is overlooking the role that unions played in the civil rights movement. The contributions of labor leaders to these movements are ignored, and the labor advocacy conducted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is barely covered. There is no mention in any of the textbooks, for example, that AFL-CIO president George Meany paid $160,000 in 1963 for bail to release King and 2,000 other civil rights demonstrators from jail.

- Anti-Union Behavior By Employers Is Glossed Over: The report finds that the textbooks largely ignore the “history of aggressive and at times violent anti-union behavior by employers.” These abuses are “neither addressed as a significant legal problem nor is it analyzed as a serious denial of First Amendment rights.” For example, The Americans praises Andrew Carnegie’s and John D. Rockefeller’s business successes but fails to note their anti-union behavior.

- Major Strikes Are Misrepresented: Historic strikes are “treated as costly failures, as violent, as lacking public support and backfiring against unions.” The “role [of the employer] in provoking strikes through prolonged, unrelenting worker abuse, and employers’ attempts to suppress strikes, often through illegal and violent means, are glossed over.” For example, American Anthem praises Reagan’s firing of PATCO workers, calling it “decisive.”

The report concludes with a set of recommendations for text book publishers. Included among these is including sections on unionism past the 1960′s, which is very lightly covered, and presenting unionism as a basic right.

Climate Progress

Al Gore: Obama Bowed to Pressure from Polluters

By Joe Romm on Sep 7, 2011 at 4:48 pm

Former Vice President Al Gore in his home office in Nashville, TN. (Time magazine)Far more people care about clean air for their kids than profits for polluters.  So far more people are pissed off with Obama for his buck-stops-somewhere-else decision to do less on ozone pollution than George W. Bush proposed.

Joining the large and growing ranks of the pissed is our Nobel prize-winning former vice president.  Gore writes on his blog today:

On Friday afternoon, as brave and committed activists continued their non-violent civil disobedience outside the White House in protest of the tar sands pipeline that would lead to a massive increase in global warming pollution, President Obama ordered the EPA to abandon its pursuit of new curbs on emissions that worsens disease-causing smog in US cities. Earlier this year, the EPA’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, wrote that the levels of pollution now permitted — put in place by the Bush-Cheney administration– are “not legally defensible.” Those very same rules have now been embraced by the Obama White House.

Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution—even though economists have shown that the US economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology. The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma, and the continued degradation of our air quality.

Nothing good can be said about this decision other than by the likes of the Chamber of Commerce.

Related Post:

 

NEWS FLASH

Iraqi LGBTs Face Unfair Treatment And Violence | A new report from the United Nations Commission for Human Rights suggests that members of Iraq’s LGBT community are still facing violence, particularly because “homosexuality is largely taboo in Iraq and seen as incompatible with the country’s culture and religion.” One report documents the police kidnapping of six people (three men, one woman, and two transgender people) who were arrested and allegedly tortured.

Yglesias

Carsharing Reduces Car Ownership

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 7, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Automobiles are useful tools in a range of circumstances. Consequently, in a high income society if the only way to gain access to one is to purchase one, many people will purchase an automobile. By the same token it should come as no surprise that car sharing services like ZipCar reduce automobile ownership.

Given the level of interest in these services from green types and urbanists, I’m left a bit puzzled by the general lack of interest in the original car sharing service — the taxicab. Cabs and Zipcars are different, but operate according to a similar logic. Owning a car is expensive, but operating a car is cheap. So when people own cars, they tend to drive them a lot. And in both the case of the cab and the Zipcar, the availability of a non-ownership method of gaining access to an automobile reduces the market demand for car ownership. By removing the near-zero marginal cost of operating a car, however, substituting cabs and Zipcars for private automobiles reduces total driving. What’s more, since cabs and Zipcars are “shared” by a large community of users they take up less space, freeing up precious urban land for non-parking uses.

Both are excellent things, and it’s great to see Zipcar succeed in many cities. But people who cheer it on should also cheer taxis on. And in particular they should support relaxing regulatory curbs on the number of taxis allowed to operate in a given place (or oppose creating such curbs in a place like DC).

NEWS FLASH

Florida’s Rick Scott Asks Legislature To Accept Affordable Care Act Funds | Health care reform foe Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) — who has turned down almost every grant available through the Affordable Care Act — has asked the Joint Legislative Budget Commission to reconsider its rejection of a home visiting grant from the ACA, which, among other things, could be used to prevent child abuse. Scott initially approved the $3.4 million Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting grant, but the legislature “rejected it because the state is in litigation with the federal government over health care reform.” Interestingly, it gave back the money despite reducing funding for Healthy Families Florida — a program that provides home visitation services to both expecting parents and parents with newborn children in order to prevent future instances of abuse — by a staggering 43 percent. As a result, Healthy Families was forced to scale back, dropping services for 5,800 children in 3,500 high-risk families.

Alyssa

Sexual Assault And Gratuitousness In Popular Culture

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 7, 2011 at 4:08 pm

In light of some recent conversations we’ve been having, I broke out the question “What is the point at which depictions of domestic or sexual violence become gratuitous?” There’s no question that this is a personal question, one that’s particularly inflected by individuals’ experiences with sexual assault and domestic violence and their relationships with folks who have experiences sexual assault and domestic violence, but I got back a lot thoughtful answers from folks about where their lines lie. And I wanted to share some of them from Google Plus and elsewhere.

From Yashoda Sampath:

In lit, if it doesn’t drive a character or the story forward, then it’s gratuitous. Period. If it’s described in unnecessarily loving detail, it’s gratuitous. How do you judge whether it meets those conditions? It differs from person to person…That said, I think this has something to do with the real world. You will never run into aestheticized action violence in the real world, but you are very likely to encounter, be a victim of, or know someone who is a victim of sexual/domestic violence. Because being raped is a real fear, people are more disturbed by it than if their city was blown up, which is not a real fear for most in the Western world in spite of outlier attacks.

From Jason Kuznicki:

Depictions of sexual violence do have to meet a different standard. That’s because nonsexual violence often serves just as well to advance the plot as the author appears to have conceived it. In these cases, we should doubt whether specifically sexual violence is appropriate, particularly if the sexual component has no discernible relationship to the plot.

Why? To give an analogy, suppose it were a literary convention that no one, in whatever era, could ever be stabbed with a knife in fiction. It always, always — always — had to be a broken-off wine bottle.

This would be an incredibly stupid convention. Why would it exist? For no reason that I can imagine. But why does the convention exist that women get raped? Sexism, a reason I can definitely imagine. Unless the author is clearly interested in exploring the theme of sexism, a rape scene is likely to be gratuitous, or just a re-inscribing of a convention every bit as dumb as, but far more distasteful than, the wine-bottle stabbing bit.

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Health

Massachusetts Lawmaker Introduces Bill To Minimize Disparities In Health Care Prices

By Igor Volsky on Sep 7, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Earlier this year, Massachusetts released health data which found that insurance companies were paying some hospitals significantly more than others for providing similar care, even though the higher paid hospitals were not producing better outcomes. The cause of the cost disparities was difficult to determine, but a report by state Attorney General Martha Coakely argued that the difference may be partly attributed to provider market clout, which allows dominant (so-called “brand name”) providers who hold monopolies to charge more without necessarily offering better care.

Yesterday, House Minority Leader Ronald Mariano introduced a measure that he claims would address the problem and save the state up to $267 million. Under the bill “Massachusetts health insurers would be required to pay lower rates to some of the state’s most expensive health care providers, while boosting rates for some of the lowest-paid providers”:

Mariano, D-Quincy, said the bill would immediately address the price disparities. It would potentially impact the 20 percent of hospitals and physicians at the high end of the rate spectrum, along with the 20 percent at the lowest.

High-cost providers would not be allowed to renew contracts or enter into new ones with insurers unless their rates are lowered to below the 80th percentile of all health plan rates. Conversely, insurers would be prohibited from entering into or renewing contracts with the lowest-cost providers unless those rates are increased beyond the 20th percentile of all plans.

In a statement, Mariano added that the measure would compliment Gov. Deval Patrick’s (D) ongoing effort to control health spending by shifting the state from a fee-for-service payment system to one that rewards outcomes and better care coordination. “Changing the payment system will take several years but employers and consumers can’t wait that long,” he said. “If we expect the health care system to function properly and more efficiently, closing the gap between lower-paid providers and higher-cost providers needs to be a priority and we must start now.”

Indeed, eliminating price disparities that don’t result in better health outcomes could be a serious money saver — both for the state and individuals. But she state could even go a step further and create an authority that would negotiate set prices with all providers, thus undercutting hospital monopolies and ensuring that health dollars are spent delivering better health care rather than paying for some kind of business “brand.”

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