Clean Energy Victories last Tuesday

[irishbobcat]

Clean Energy Victories last Tuesday


November 11, 2008



Keith Schneider, Communications Director of the Apollo Alliance reports the results in the in a number of state races and ballot initiatives on Tuesday confirm with unmistakable clarity that the country – coast to coast – is prepared to help the new president pursue an economic development strategy based on clean energy, good jobs, and environmental sustainability. 

In California, despite a grinding budget deficit and rising unemployment, voters approved a $10 billion bond to begin building a 220-mile-per-hour high-speed rail network linking cities in southern and northern regions with the Central Valley.  Los Angeles voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase to expand the city's subway.

Missouri voters approved Proposition C that requires the state's biggest utilities to obtain 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2021, the 27th state to enact a renewable energy standard.

Representative Tom Udall, the son of Stewart Udall, Interior Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, won a Senate seat in New Mexico. His cousin, Representative Mark Udall, the son of the late Representative and presidential candidate Mo Udall, won a Senate seat in Colorado. Both Udalls, members of what is arguably the greenest political family in the United States, are active supporters of clean energy and will likely be at the very head of the work on Capitol Hill to pass the Obama administration's clean energy agenda.
In Colorado, voters defeated ballot initiatives that were hostile to organized labor. The right to organize is intact in a state with a huge and growing clean energy job potential.
 
On the flip side, the League of Conservation Voters reported that seven of the 12 Capitol Hill lawmakers on its "Dirty Dozen" list were defeated.

A number of political observers noted that 65 percent of the new members of the House and all of the new members of the Senate come from states with strong renewable energy requirements.
Two of those new House members hail from Michigan, where the Apollo Alliance program staff is heading the week of November 17 to meet in Detroit with our state and local affiliates. This is Apollo's second visit in five weeks to Detroit, where we held a town hall event in October with Senator Debbie Stabenow in support of The New Apollo Program.

The state that largely invented the drive through economy of the 20th century – it built the cars, the traffic lights, the first concrete roads, the first mall, the first cul-de-sacs, the first freeways, just to name a few – is picking up the pace to catch up to the clean energy and good jobs economy of the 21st century. Detroit's new mayor, Ken Cockrel Jr., has expressed interest in designing a clean energy, green-collar development strategy, similar to the one that Apollo helped Newark design this year.
 
The state passed a renewable energy standard in September and a week before the election Governor Jennifer M. Granholm named Skip Pruss, a well-respected attorney and environmental expert, to head the Department of Energy, Labor, and Economic Growth. The agency's top priority: Invest in clean energy manufacturing and new green-collar Michigan jobs. The Apollo Alliance is working with DELEG on Michigan's green-collar jobs initiative.
 
Despite these advances, we all know how hard this clean energy, good jobs economic transition will be. The new president's most important job in our view, and in the view of millions of Americans who voted for him, is to accelerate clean energy development and put people to work. Rail transit, as our new article on the Web site reports, is a good place to start.


However, here in Ohio, We re-elected Charlie Wilson to Congress who believes clean green energy is removing and digging up green grass and mountaintops to get to more dirty coal. And so it goes in the Buckeye state.
Thinking Green,
Dennis Spisak
www.votespisak.org/thinkgreen/