Our guest blogger is Catherine Woodiwiss, a Special Assistant with the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

In a reflection of the Jewish community’s ongoing commitment to caring for the planet, 50 Jewish leaders from across denominations signed the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign to protect the environment in a ceremony in Manhattan on February 6, on the eve of Tu Bishvat, the Jewish festival of trees. The campaign’s declaration, titled the “Jewish Environment and Energy Imperative,” reads:

Out of concern for the wellbeing of all nations, and with a particular concern for the poorest among them as well as for future generations, our support for more sources of clean, renewable energy and for energy efficiency is a matter of justice. Enlightened stewardship is not only a religious and moral imperative; it is a strategy for security and survival.

The Covenant Campaign sets a bold vision for the Jewish environmental community. To support their commitment to cutting greenhouse-gas pollution by 14 percent in 2014, signatories pledge to support clean-technology innovation, encourage investment in Jewish environmental organizations, conduct energy audits, promote sustainability in their own communities, and advocate for the reduction by 83 percent of 2005 emission levels by 2050.

Led by the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, or COEJL, a network of nearly 30 national organizations and over 100 community groups, the campaign has brought together leaders from the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist movements in a unified effort to protect the environment.

“There’s a growing ecological consciousness in the Jewish community—a lot of concern about global warming, our energy policy, and energy security,” says Sybil Sanchez, COEJL’s director.

The declaration came on the eve of Tu Bishvat (or Tu B’Shevat), the Jewish festival of trees. The holiday, this year falling on February 7 and 8, traditionally involves a celebration of fruit trees and the coming of spring. Many communities observe the day by planting trees.

Over the years, environmental groups have elevated Tu Bishvat to something of a Jewish Earth Day, moving beyond planting trees to actions and advocacy that support the environment as a whole.

“Recently people are talking more and more not only about trees but about nature and the environment in connection with Tu Bishvat,” says Evonne Marzouk, founder of Canfei Nesharim, an Orthodox environmental-education organization. “‘What does it mean to appreciate trees today?’ The Jewish environmental community has both caused and responded to that.”

Though Tu Bishvat is the most overtly “green” festival, most Jewish holy days have an ecological undercurrent. “Each holiday is tied to the seasons; but [with Tu Bishvat] you can’t get more environmentally connected than trees and the land,” says Sanchez.

Tu Bishvat seders, or feasts, use symbols, through various fruits and wines, to represent the planet’s complex system that requires careful stewardship to maintain ecological balance and support life. A verse spoken at seders reads:

Look at My works! See how beautiful they are, how excellent! See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world, for if you do, there will be no one after you to repair it. (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:13)

Jewish environmental groups are redoubling efforts to put this charge into action as addressing climate change and carbon emissions becomes more urgent. Tu Bishvat, the springtime holiday, is seen as a symbolic season of renewal. This week Jewish leaders in New York and around the country called for renewal of the planet as well as the soul.

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS has released a new smear ad criticizing President Obama on the administration’s investment in the solar company Solyndra. The $500,000 ad is scheduled to run throughout the week, nationwide.

As President Obama said in his State of the Union address, his administration is committed to the promise of American clean energy, even though some companies may fail to others in the marketplace. 180,000 pages of documents from a Congressional investigation confirmed that the Department of Energy’s investment in the advanced technology of Solyndra was based on the merits.

The group, created by Karl Rove and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, launched their 35-second TV spot dishonestly painting “the Solyndra loan guarantee as a corrupt deal aimed at benefiting the president’s campaign donors,” the Hill reports:

“He gave his political backers billions – a big government fiasco- infused with politics at every level,” says a female narrator over the obligatory “SE7EN”-style, cut-and-paste imagery typical of super-PAC attack ads. “Laid off worker: forgotten. Typical Washington. Tell President Obama we need jobs not more inside deals.”

This is the second Crossroads GPS attack ad that uses Solyndra as a scapegoat for the clean economy.

Fossil-fueled conservatives are dead set on turning their imagined Solyndra scandal into a coordinated attack on the clean energy industry. The Crossroads GPS campaign is only the latest in a string of attack ads meant to play up the Solyndra bankruptcy as a potential liability for Obama in the coming election year. To date, Americans for Prosperity, the front group for the petrochemical billionaire Koch brothers, has spent over $8 million in battleground states — Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin — on two intentionally misleading ads taking aim at President Obama over Solyndra.

-Fatima Najiy

On Monday, the USA Today’s Gregory Korte promoted Republican attacks on President Obama’s green jobs training initiative, citing anti-clean-energy leader Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and a flawed report by the Department of Labor Inspector General. The report was debunked when it was released months ago for questionable methodology and improper metrics. Despite relentless attacks fueled by the fossil fuel industry, the clean energy economy employs 2.7 million Americans and is one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the economy.

Kate Gordon, the vice president of energy policy at the Center for American Progress, responded to the IG report and its promotion in the Wall Street Journal last October. Her response is just as valid today.

The President promised that if America would take strong actions to move the economy from a volatile, fossil fuel-driven path to a low-carbon energy path – actions including passing an economy-wide cap and trade program, implementing a national renewable energy standard, and investing $15 billion/year over ten years – we could create five million jobs in the clean energy sector. The problem? We haven’t passed any of those critical policies, meaning that carbon still doesn’t have a price, and so low-carbon technologies are competing on a playing field heavily skewed toward “cheap” and dirty resources.

Oh, and by the way, ten years hasn’t passed yet.

The Inspector General report identifies only those workers that have already been fully trained, not those who are currently going through training programs or who are about to enter into programs funded by the DOL grants. The proper question to ask is how much of the funding for this program has been obligated, not how much has already been spent, and then how many workers will be trained through all the programs receiving funds.

It is also important to remember that nearly 40 percent of those trained through these programs were incumbent workers, meaning workers who already had jobs but who were receiving additional training to become more skilled, and therefore more valuable in the labor market. Looking at placements alone ignores those critical workers.

Finally and most important, the report ignores a central fact that must be mentioned whenever we talk about any job training program: We are in a severe economic slowdown and 14 million people are still out of work! If there were jobs to be had, perhaps these trained individuals could be hired to fill them.

Let’s not forget that 8,000 people did find jobs as a result of the green job training programs. That’s 8,000 people who did not have a job before they were trained. As the Chief Economist of the American Petroleum Institute said in the Washington Post, “Anybody dismissing any kind of a job is silly.”

The bottom line is that we haven’t done the work, as a country, to pass the policies and programs that will put us on a focused path toward cleaner electricity and fuels. Until we commit to that path, clean energy businesses will continue to face major market uncertainty; workers will continue to try and fail to find good jobs in the green economy; and our country will continue to fall behind in the global clean energy race.