Two separate initiatives formed this week could unlock more than $1.6 billion in private investment for energy efficiency projects around the U.S.

Yesterday at the Clinton Global Initiative, two of the largest U.S. pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTERS announced that they would invest $1 billion toward energy efficiency projects. This follows a June announcement at the Clinton Global Initiative, where the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers announced a similar goal that has already resulted in over $150 million in investment.

In making the announcement yesterday afternoon, former president Bill Clinton explained, “this is a huge deal.”

A huge deal indeed, considering the economic returns that energy efficiency projects bring. According to analysis from the University of Massachussetts, energy efficiency retrofits can create more than 17 jobs per million dollars invested. That’s compared to around 5 jobs created per million dollars invested in oil and gas.

“This is a very strong commitment and shows amazing progress on these issues,” explained Bracken Hendricks, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), one of the organizations that helped pull together the agreement.

Efficiency projects have already helped create thousands of jobs. In the three month period from April to June 2011, the federal weatherization assistance program created under the stimulus program has created 14,800 jobs, according to the DOE.

And another major program unveiled this week could double those figures.

Read more

ThinkProgress Green is reporting live from the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City.

At a Clinton Global Initiative press conference discussing how labor leaders are investing in the green economy, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) noted that the Earth Policy Institute has found that investment in energy retrofits creates more than seven times as many jobs as investment in coal-fired power plants. He then described that Americans have the choice between the “fuels from hell” — dirty, risky fossil fuels and nuclear fuel — and clean power from renewable energy and energy efficiency:

You can go back to the old economy and the fuels from hell, the coal economy and nuclear, or you can get into the renewable economy and actually create more jobs, reduce your costs, and begin to focus on the global perspective and be more competitive with smart infrastructure and 21st century infrastructure.

Watch it:

In an interview with ThinkProgress Green, Newsom said that nature has offered us the chance to use “fuels from heaven” like solar and wind. He believes that states must lead the way to solve the practical and political challenges of investment in a clean energy economy, because of the stagnation at the federal level.

ThinkProgress Green is reporting live from the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City.

America’s labor unions are banding together to accomplish what Wall Street bankers and multinational corporations have chosen to ignore and Republicans have fought to prevent — putting people back to work rebuilding the United States. A billion-dollar collaboration between unions and public pension funds is spearheading a nationwide effort to invest in energy efficient infrastructure projects, labor leaders announced today at the start of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting.

With his initial announcement of the unions’ accomplishments, Bill Clinton praised their willingness to seize an opportunity the nation’s bankers have ignored — figuring out innovative ways to make money by putting more people back to work, instead of increasing profits by laying off employees. “They are America’s employment banks,” Clinton said of the union-pension fund partnership. “This is a huge deal.”

Watch it:

This summer, at CGI’s first meeting dedicated exclusively to challenges within the United States, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers established the goal of using union pension funds to invest in American infrastructure, particularly energy efficiency projects, with the goal of creating good, long term jobs for American workers:

This commitment, made by the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and developed in collaboration with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and Center for American Progress (CAP), encourages union pension fund managers and trustees to invest up to $10 billion in assets of working families into energy efficient infrastructure as an opportunity for America to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, develop new industries, enhance our global competitiveness, and reduce the threat of climate change.

In less than three months, these unions have made great strides. The AFL-CIO and AFT are now working with many other employee unions, including SEIU, AFSCME, NEA and the Firefighters. In California, the public pension funds CalPERS (public employees) and CalSTERS (teachers) have already pledged $1.1 billion for specific green infrastructure investment projects. Moreover, CalPERS hopes to expand its $800 million investment in California green infrastructure to a $4 billion nationwide effort.

AFL-CIO has surged past their initial $20 million commitment for energy retrofit projects, as the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT) has funded a $134 million dollar energy efficiency and asbestos removal project in New York City. The union has committed several hundred million dollars towards projects around the nation, working with Fannie Mae and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to renovate homes and businesses.

This project represents not just an investment in cleaner infrastructure, but also a smarter workforce, with a deep commitment to worker training.

Pres. Clinton:  If we change the way we produce and consume energy to fight global warming in the right way we will open up a whole new explosive era of American economic opportunity by saving the planet for our grandchildren. The idea that this is bad for us is nuts. We just have to do it in a smart way.  And [Sec. Chu] has determined to figure out what the smart ways are.

By Bracken Hendricks and Lisbeth Kaufman

At the Clinton Global Initiative America summit on Thursday, Secretary of the Department of Energy, Steven Chu and Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley announced 14 new partners in the Better Building Challenge (BBC) a major step in enhancing energy efficiency of the U.S.  The announcement was the result of months of work, during which the Center for American Progress and CGI helped broker public-private partnerships committing to major energy efficiency pledges.

The Better Buildings Challenge is one of the smart ways to ignite this explosion. Part of the Better Buildings Initiative to cut commercial buildings energy use 20% by 2020, the Better Buildings Challenge is rallying CEOs, University Presidents and local government leaders, to commit their organizations to becoming leaders in energy efficiency.

The Administration’s announcement on Thursday unveiled the first 14 of these energy efficiency leaders, who together are pledging more than $500 million and 260 million square feet of buildings and facilities enrolled for energy efficiency improvements.  These include private company giants like Best Buy, which has dedicated more than 55 million square feet of retail space to retrofits for energy efficiency, and Lend Lease, which has pledged 40,000 high performance, efficiency homes for military families.

Read more

For the second year in a row, the Wonk Room is covering the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

President Bill Clinton believes the “number one thing” to restore the American economy is clean, efficient energy. In a blogger roundtable at the beginning of his Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, Clinton told us his “favorite ideas” for making the green economy a political and economic reality:

One: Federal loan guarantees for building energy efficiency retrofits

Two: Renewable energy initiatives in economically depressed cities

Three: Green jobs programs for poor Americans

Clinton, relaxed and slim, held court with a dazzling mastery of policy details, wit, and storytelling. Citing a Center for American Progress report on the promise of energy efficiency, Clinton described his desire for the federal government to kickstart private financing of energy retrofits, much as the Clinton Foundation had done for the Empire State Building:

The Center for American Progress says we can get half the way home to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2010 by efficiency alone. Unemployment in construction is 25 percent. We can’t go out and build new houses. And there are very few office buildings that need to be built. So what I think we should do is to have a lot more Empire State Buildings. We should retrofit every public school, every college and university building every hospital, every auditorium in this country, and every office building unencumbered by debt.

Clinton believes the reason that this investment hasn’t already happened is that “spooked” banks don’t want to make loans that could collapse. His solution is to establish a federal loan guarantee program, which he believes could create one million jobs with only $15 billion in federal investment:

Give them a federal guarantee like the SBA guarantee, and you only have to set aside $1 for every $10 you loan. Still very conservative, because we know the historic failure rate is one percent, not ten percent. It might not cost the taxpayers anything.

Here’s the multiple: every billion-dollar investment in retrofits gives you 7000 jobs. Homes 8000. Wind energy 3300 if you build and assemble the windmills where you put them up. Solar 1900, coal 870, nuclear a little over 900. This is not close. If you want to put America back to work, give a loan guarantee, get banks start making loans.

Set aside $15 billion for guarantees, you get $150 billion in bank lending, you get a million jobs.

His other policy ideas are about making the clean energy economy real for the American people, rich and poor:

My second candidate: pick places that are both distressed and full of potential for energy independence. My number one candidate is Nevada, where the sun shine and the wind blows. And you’ve got all those real expensive hotels there with roofs that could be filled with solar panels. And you have all the hills around that could be filled with windmills.

I would say take a few places like that and go straight out and make them energy independent and document how many jobs have been created, and then everybody will want to do that.

My third candidate is prove it works for poor people. One of our best commitments is designed to provide after school jobs and summer jobs for poor kids in Harlem, upper Manhattan Washington heights by paying them to go in and retrofit a lot of these old buildings, whitewashing the black roofs.

If you did those three things so that every day you were proving over and over again to all the naysayers that it was good economics to build a clean energy future, you can build a consensus necessary to do what has to be done. You could beat the special interest groups.

He admitted that the key problem with this vision is that it requires a change from how the energy sector traditionally makes money:

If you make a deal for a nuclear power plant or a coal-fired power plant and you knowingly deprive all these jobs increase greenhouse gas emissions or you increase other risk or you increase huge costs — with nuclear, it’s always more expensive — the only real reason they do it is because they’ve always done it that way, and it is so much simpler. If you’re running the utility, there’s one contractor that’s going to build that plant, there’s one supplier of the fuel, and then you go to one PUC and they give you permission to make the ratepayers pay for it at a profit. It’s simple because it’s centralized.

The new energy economy is more decentralized, but it’s less expensive, more job intensive, and parenthetically will save the planet.

“That’s what I think we have to do,” Clinton concluded. “You’ve got to prove this is good economics. And it is! The number one thing we could do for America is change the way we produce and consume energy.”

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our sixth post.

On the final day of the Clinton Global Initiative, the Wonk Room caught up with Ira Magaziner, the senior advisor for policy development in the Clinton White House and now the chairman of the William J. Clinton Foundation’s Climate Initiative. We discussed the Clinton Climate Initiative‘s approach to the challenge of global warming, including its work to advance energy efficiency projects in the world’s cities from the Empire State Building to Lagos, Nigeria. Magaziner also directly addressed why critics argue that advocacy of clean energy is a socialistic economy killer, citing Adam Smith’s recognition of the need for governmental action to address market externalities. As we neared the conclusion of the interview, Magaziner tied all the threads of the conversation together into one impressive discourse on building a clean-energy economy.

Watch it:

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION — PAST VS. THE FUTURE

MAGAZINER: Schumpeter — yet another capitalist economist — talked about creative destruction. Periodically, as new technologies develop and new needs arise, business systems and economic systems need to be remade — creatively destroyed and remade. We don’t need a buggy whip industry any more. We’ve got automobiles. And the buggy whip guys may not like it, but they ought to switch to making automobiles if they’re going to have a future.

What always happens in those periods of transformation is that some people oppose and some people see the future. We went from mainframe computers to minicomputers to PCs. And as we went through those transformations, different companies succeeded. DEC and Wang and companies that were the minicomputer companies didn’t understand the potential of the PC. So you had the Dells and others who developed them. In some cases, companies do make the transformation and they go with the future instead of the past.

We have a similar situation with clean energy and energy efficiency. You have some companies now, like GE, and there’s a bunch of others, who are saying, “I want to go with the future, and I’m going to invest in wind, I’m going to invest in solar. I’m going to invest in these things that I know are going to eventually be the future.” And you’ve got others who say, “I’m going to defend the past and stick with what I’ve got,” and fight Congress to prevent the future from coming.

BRINGING THE FUTURE FASTER

MAGAZINER: I think, in this case, in the case of clean energy, we have a public interest in bringing the future faster, because of global warming. We know that if we don’t bring the future faster with clean energy and with energy efficiency, that it’s going to have a tremendous economic and social cost. Therefore, we have to accelerate the process of that future coming.

That’s why government has to especially play a role in this revolution. I mean, it played a stimulative role in the Internet revolution, but in this revolution it has to play a much more active role. Because the negative consequences of not doing so are going to cause governments and people and economies tremendous unhappiness.

There have been so many reports written. The thousands of scientists in the International Panel on Climate Change established that the world is warming, they’ve established what the impacts can be, and there’s only now a few dissident scientists left. The overwhelming 99.9 percent opinion is very clear on this.

Economists like Nicholas Stern who have done serious work on this have said we can lose 5 to 10 percent of GDP in the next ten years, fifteen years if we don’t act, because of all the major dislocations. And if we spend one percent of our GDP to bring the transformation faster, we’ll save ten percent or 15 percent of our GDP. So there are enough studies out there.

THE CLINTON CLIMATE INITIATIVE

MAGAZINER: What we’re trying to do with the Clinton Climate Initiative is to make it real.

It’s very important that global leaders, the political leaders agree to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s very important they pass legislation to put a price on carbon — because it does have a price for society — to help speed the transformation.

What we’ve said, what we’re doing, is say, even after that’s done, what you’re going to still need projects that demonstrate in large scale how to do this, what the business models are what the government models should be, so that government money gets spent well, carbon credit money gets spent well, and ultimately businesses can move into this in an accelerated way to make this happen. And so that’s why we’ve focused on these projects.

We’ve worked on energy efficiency, clean energy, and the third area we’re working on is forests, preserving forests around the world. What we as a human race have been doing is at the same time we’re putting all this CO2 into the air — which is poisoning the atmosphere — we’re cutting down the forests — which are nature’s way of taking carbon dioxide out of the air. We’re making the problem worse on both ends.

So we have major projects that we’re doing in Indonesia, and Cambodia, Guyana — Africa and the tropical countries — to help preserve forests and create economic value in preserving forests.

So that’s what we’re up to and we’re trying to make our contribution. That’s going to require a lot of different groups working in a lot of different ways to make a contribution.

THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT

MAGAZINER: What we do is: we do these projects and can measure the direct impact, and say there’s this many millions of tons less of CO2 going into the air because of the projects we have done. And then we’re creating these models which we can spread to others, so that we can have a multiplier effect that multiplies the impact of what the direct projects we’re doing can accomplish.

That’s why when we show that we can do an integrated waste management project in Delhi — in a very complicated, large city that’s never had integrated waste management — what we did in Delhi is the first integrated waste management project in the whole of southern Asia. We showed that it can work, it’s actually returning a profit to the commercial developers, it’s saving the city money, and it’s working in terms of making Delhi a cleaner place.

And now there are ten other cities that are ready to do it. As soon as we finish the project in Lagos — Lagos, Nigeria is a place with 21 million people in that city, growing a million and a half people per year — and they had no waste system. We’re putting the first integrated waste system there. We’re now doing it in Dar Es Salaam and Tanzania. We have requests from a number of other African cities. So our goal is to create these models and then spread them, because that’s really where we’re going to get at the problem.