This post is based on remarks by the author at EcoAmerica's "Change of Atmosphere" conference, October 4, 2011.
Economic Stagnation. Recession. According to Paul Krugman and George Soros, we face now perhaps even Depression.
Hard Times is the American story, now and for the next several years at least. How we find the way back to jobs and growth is the only question. And we have the answer, because changing the energy system is the way back to economic growth. According to some economists, it's perhaps the ONLY way back. The only new engine of growth, as there is no great new wave of technology, pharmaceuticals, housing, consumer spending and certainly no credit bubble on the horizon.
Saving the climate is the path out of the economic mess. The great waves of growth set off by the intercontinental railroads, the interstate highways, the internet, production for WWII -- energy transformation is the next wave.
This should be our message for these hard times.
Here are some examples of how to talk about this.
As Bill Clinton so eloquently explains, deploying armies of workers to insulate every building in America will bring immediate and guaranteed cash flow at high rates of return from the energy savings. Better returns for bank and other capital than the stock market by far. It will put 1.5 million Americans back to work right away. And it will keep saving money for decades. Why aren't we doing this? Who is in the way?
In California today, solar energy is now beating -- that's right, beating -- the price of new natural gas power plants. It's far cheaper than new nuclear, and now competitive with filthy coal. Solar's price has dropped 70% in only three years, and like cell phones and dvd players, will drop more as demand soars till in just a few years it will be competitive in the rest of the nation.
Like with cell phones, you can now get solar on your roof even in New Jersey and Maryland for free when you sign a contract. No cost to you. With immediate utility bill reductions, and a guaranteed level price for 20 years. It sounds too good to be true, but it's a fact. Believe me people are attracted to prices that can never go up and power that can't run out. Shouldn't we tell people?
Solar creates 7 times the jobs per dollar as fossil fuel investments. Building a smart grid with fuel-free renewable power sources will mean more affordable electric bills, with zero price volatility. Isn't it time we told people, and seized the economic high ground?
Driving an electric car already costs no more than the equivalent of 75 cents a gallon or less. Now there's a great bumper sticker -- I PAY 75 CENTS A GALLON. In time, car batteries will also get cheaper and store power from the grid.
Energy transformation -- and along the way preserving civilization from burning up -- is the way back to sound growth. Not only to jobs, but to prosperity.
This is a winning message, and it's the truth. It is also a message that will cross the political divide we face, where so many Republicans oppose climate action. It will attract business and split Republicans, which is essential. How will they look standing in the way of economic growth as the recession or worse continues to smolder?
Meanwhile, to continue the narrative, energy business as usual will cause accelerating economic decline as we keep sending ever greater sums out of the country for oil rather than using the money to employ our own people. Energy business as usual will guarantee higher fuel prices as world demand grows -- why don't we tell people? Instead the environmentalists are branded as the folks who will raise energy costs. This is truly upside down.
Storms, fires, floods and droughts will also get increasingly costly, along with the price of food, not to mention the vast sums that will be needed for insurance losses, or to build sea walls and levies in Miami, New York and along the Potomac and the Mississippi as water levels rise. Or the massive cost of trying to save irrigation for agriculture in California's Central Valley as San Francisco Bay rises to saltify the Sacramento and San Joaquin river deltas, making crops ungrowable. Are sea walls productive investments? What rate of return do they create?
We need to stop allowing ourselves to be depicted as the forces that will hurt the economy by the greedy and ignorant few who will cripple it. Enough.
We know from cognitive science that people learn best from moral metaphors and stories. Meanwhile, everything in human affairs can be found in the stories of Shakespeare. Talk about a dramatic moral narrative! Here's today's production. The greedy CEOs of less than a dozen unpopular oil and coal companies -- and their agents in Washington and the media -- are blocking America's recovery to jobs and a prosperous future. So greedy -- like one of Shakespeare's tragic characters -- that they would literally bring down the Kingdom and everyone else along with them. Only this time the Kingdom is the whole planet.
For those of us in this room, who know the urgent and harrowing science of what the climate will soon bring, the story is literally Peabody Coal, Exxon, Koch Industries, Halliburton, Chevron, BP, Massie coal and a few others versus the survival of civilization. It's a tiny few, paralyzing democracy and polluting the media with propaganda. This is a dramatic story indeed, accurate, and hopefully not the final act.
What great Shakespearean characters are the oil and coal CEOs who would be Shylock while the world burns. It is time to feature them -- by name -- as the villains in the story. Every story needs heroes and villains. We have both. CEO Rex Tillerson of Exxon is pulling the strings for John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, in order to protect the biggest profits ever made by any company in history. He is as un-American as Rush Limbaugh, standing in the way of recovery and American jobs. They are in the way of restoring the American Dream.
So our message should be prosperity, jobs and economic recovery from energy modernization. Our target audience should be business and those honest Republicans not on oil and coal's payroll. Our narrative is that both the economy and the climate can be saved but for the corruption of a tiny few. Will they get away with it? Stay tuned.
David Fenton is the CEO of FENTON, the public-interest communications firm in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and soon London.
Edward Flattau: Solar Scapegoat
The best part: if you have any children, nieces or nephews you wouldn't be adding CO2 to the atmosphere and leaving them to deal with nightmarish global warming.
What I will do is keep buying survival supplies from Costco and growing my own food. Aloha from Kauai.
The low interest rate energy efficiency lending program should be made available to all levels of government and private property owners with the energy savings being used to repay the loans. Most energy efficiency retrofits have very short payback periods. Getting the most bang for the buck would include making the loans available for LED ligthing, geothermal heating and cooling, energy star appliances, vampire energy prevention devices, insulation, thermal windows and weatherization.
$4 trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury for this lending program would have the economy zooming within a year, do more than any other climate change legislation offered to date, flood the goverment coffers with payroll and sales tax revenue, dramatically reduce air and water pollution, reduce health insurance costs and give people control over their energy destinies.
People don't need level electric rates for the next 20 years on a solar lease. They need to increase their savings and income from being energy efficient and clean energy producing entrepreneurs, which my plan offers..
Dave, what good is an Electric car when all the affordable models have a 40mph limitation, as well as such a short range between charges? I couldn't even use one to commute.
Dave, I live in a Condo. There is this little thing called a "Homeowners Association" that doesn't allow rooftop installations - sorry, babe, no solar here (not to mention who is going to shovel all the snow off the panels in the winter??)
Dave - maybe it makes sense where YOU live, but, ya know, not everyone can live in a gated community in a sunshine state.
CEO - FAIL
In the mean time, the corrupt policies of the Oil companies and their party the Republicans, are guaranteeing that America will not play a part in the industries that drive the industrial world into the future. My guess is that a large part of the Solar cost reductions quoted in the article come from China, and not from America.
It's not too late to get America into a good position to supply a large part of the new markets. It is not long off before it will be though.
The Republican agenda has been to impoverish the vast majority of Americans in order to enrich the top 1% or so. They've succeeded spectacularly. Whilst many American companies are enjoying record profits, the rest of the country moves backwards. Missing the Green technology boom will embed this situation, where the old industrial moguls are still reaping massive payoffs from Government redistribution. At the same time, America's economy will be of little relevance to the rest of the world, who will see it as out of date, old fashioned, and dirty enough to attract tariffs on it's exports.
The real problem is the idea that our economy is sustainable. It's not. Free trade with communist China needs to end. You can't have markets and free trade with communist. Secondly, globalization is a disaster. The Earth is totally overpopulated. The oceans are dying. And yet we keep increasing our population?! We need to drastically scale back immigration. End all work visas too.
Only by scaling back our population can we expect to survive.
The willingness of Government to do this kind of thing, then helps generate confidence in the other parts of a green energy industry - ie. in generating power without burning fossil fuels and emitting vast amounts of CO2.
These things then feed into new export markets, because the imperative of climate is a worldwide phenomena.
Yes, you may need to look again at Globalization. But even if you stop free trade with China, they will outcompete America in export markets for things like green energy production. In fact, that industry alone would lead to the US having a massive trade deficit with China - if the US doesn't develop their own industry.
BTW: The move to green technology is a move to sustainability. Many other vast changes have to be made to make the economy fully stable, and not reliant on constant economic growth.
The banks lack of lending is at least one of the major reasons for business not getting going properly again.
Only the banks who are members of the FDIC be bailed out, and no other institutions who are not members should NOT be bailed out for their reckless in handling their funds. Another factor is the housing industry which is holding back our recovery that is being abated by the banks; plus, foreclosurs are not helping the situation at all.
The economy and the recovery is stalled due to the banks, and exactly like the first Depression. It is going to take awhile before we can get out from bloody mess, just be lucky if we do not get ourselves into another war--like with North Korea.
I have friend here in New England who have Solar Panels on their roof..works fine, not sure why we need the Government to do this?..they got a deal through the bank and got the panels...not a dime of Fed Money..and still had all the same effects on the economy..
Like most ideas, the initial form is faulty. Sustainable energy and constant growth are like two polar opposites. From the article, “Saving the climate is the path out of the economic mess.” So save the climate but plunder the natural resources which are necessary for humans to continue living? What good to us is a planet if we will lack vital resources to continue living on it?
And there is another problem. Humanity continually wants to receive more. That coupled with finite natural resources is a terrible combination. The only way then to restructure economies away from continual growth and towards sustainability is for the media to act in the opposite form from how it presently acts.
Just as the media has supported our desire to receive more pleasure in the form of “objects,” it can change to support our continued desire to receive in the new form of ever increasing “human interaction.” Our desire for pleasure can not be cut off. It must simply be used in a different form, from the form of "pleasure from objects" to “pleasure from increased connection amongst people.”
I believe that the requirements to generate energy differently will drive economic growth for some time. In doing that, it could at least save us from the most dangerous environmental disaster we face.
We would then need to focus on everything from zero growth societies - birth control - end of consumerism, and everything else.
Given that it's almost impossible to get people on board when you tell them the good story about growth, it seems to make no sense pushing an agenda that will have no chance of being implemented until a vast change in attitudes is achieved.