WASHINGTON-- If climate change could be blamed on a gigantic alien spaceship orbiting our planet, then we might band together to save ourselves.
That's how Ron Ruggiero sees it. I sat next to Ruggiero on a flight from Chicago last Tuesday. We struck up a conversation in which I learned he is the Portland field director for the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of environmentalists, labor organizations and business groups pushing for an aggressive national program to restructure the American economy around clean energy and green jobs.
Ruggiero was coming to the capital for the Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference, a gathering organized to pitch a green economy agenda to Congress. But, as the lights of Washington's Virginia suburbs came into view through the airplane window, Ruggiero did not seem especially optimistic that the nation's political leaders are ready to spring into action.
A sense of urgency is what motivated Ruggiero to leave a career with labor unions and join the Apollo Alliance. He became convinced that the effects of climate change will bring about economic collapse within just a few decades unless dramatic steps are taken now to curb harmful atmospheric emissions, convert human activities to more benign energy sources and create jobs in new, environmentally-friendly industries.
But Ruggiero knows that the idea of life-as-we-know-it coming to an end is, for most people, an abstract and far-fetched concept. That's why he thinks it would be much easier to get folks aroused if climate change could be blamed on an alien spacecraft hovering above. After all, that's the way it works in movies like "Independence Day" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Creatures from space show up, threaten to destroy the planet and, in response, all of humanity bands together to defeat the bad guys.
In a more realistic screenplay, though, it would go differently: Efforts to meet the threat would get swallowed up by a ponderous political process and then put on hold until the next election or the end of the world, whichever came first.
Could we be living that scenario right now?
The stimulus package currently being debated in the Senate includes $148.3 billion for clean energy and green collar jobs. That sounds like a lot of money, but the total cost of the plan is nearly $900 billion, of which close to $300 billion is tax cuts. Arguably, both the near-term economic recovery and the long-term viability of our society would be better served if the money for tax cuts instead went to an all-out effort to build a green economy for America.
That, of course, will not happen. Republicans want more tax cuts, not less, and, in the House/Senate conference committee that hammers out the final version of the stimulus bill, it will be a struggle just to preserve as much funding as possible for alternative energy projects, research and development and jobs in the emerging green sector.
If that money is protected, it will be a mere down payment on a big investment. Seattle-area Congressman Jay Inslee compares it to buying the first rocket for the Apollo space program of the 1960s. You have to start somewhere, but, as he notes, one rocket will not get you to the moon.
The good news is that the country now has a president who takes climate change seriously and sees green energy as an economic plus rather than a threat to the American Dream. Still, shifting the world's entire economic infrastructure to new sources of energy will not be a cheap endeavor. Estimates run as high as $45 trillion over the next few decades. Inslee, who has become a leader on Capitol Hill on the issue of climate change and alternative energy, says a steady stream of revenue is necessary to keep the transformation moving and the best chance for that will be establishment of a cap and trade system that will charge industries for the right to send CO2 into the atmosphere.
Full story: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/399113_horsey8.html
