Why Obama's Green Jobs Plan Might Work
http://www.truthout.org/010509O
Some states - including Michigan - already see renewable energy as
their future: It's the only sector that appears to be making room for
more employees despite the recession.
Hemlock, Michigan - While Detroit's automakers struggle to
rebuild
their sputtering operations, the key to jump-starting Michigan's
economy may lie 80 miles northwest of the Motor City.
This is the home of Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. It makes a
material crucial for constructing photovoltaic panels. And that has
turned this snow-covered hamlet into an unlikely hotbed for solar
energy.
On Dec. 15, the same week that General Motors Corp. and Chrysler
begged $17.4 billion from taxpayers to stave off collapse, Hemlock
announced a $3-billion expansion that could create hundreds of jobs.
It's a rare piece of good news for this battered Rust Belt state,
whose 9.6% unemployment rate is the nation's highest.
In contrast to Detroit iron, Hemlock's quartz-based
polycrystalline silicon is in such demand that workers in white
smocks
and protective gear toil around the clock to get it to customers
around the globe.
Hemlock has been deluged with applications from idle factory
hands
such as former autoworker Don Sloboda. The 50-year-old Saginaw
resident has been retraining at a local community college for what he
hopes is the region's new engine of job growth.
"It looks like the future to me," Sloboda said.
Whether clean energy can pull Michigan out of the ditch remains
to
be seen. But the push is on to retool America with so-called green-
collar industries.
President-elect Barack Obama wants to spend $150 billion over the
next decade to promote energy from the sun, wind and other renewable
sources as well as energy conservation. Plans include raising vehicle
fuel-economy standards and subsidizing consumer purchases of plug-in
hybrids. Obama wants to weatherize 1 million homes annually and
upgrade the nation's creaky electrical grid. His team has talked of
providing tax credits and loan guarantees to clean-energy companies.
His goals: create 5 million new jobs repowering America over 10
years; assert U.S. leadership on global climate change; and wean the
U.S. from its dependence on imported petroleum.
"Breaking our oil addiction ... is going to take nothing less
than
the complete transformation of our economy," Obama said during a
campaign stop in Michigan's capital, Lansing, last year.
Americans have heard it before. Every president since Richard
Nixon has touted energy independence, yet the goal remains elusive.
The U.S. imported less than a third of its crude around the time of
the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Today foreigners feed nearly 60% of the
nation's petroleum habit.
Skeptics fear that the president-elect's Green New Deal will do
little but waste taxpayers' money. The government squandered billions
on the Jimmy Carter-era synthetic-fuels program, a failed effort to
create vehicle fuel from coal.
Corn-based ethanol - the latest recipient of fat subsidies - is
loathed by many environmentalists, who say it is an inefficient fuel
that gobbles precious cropland and helps to drive up food prices.
Better to let the market decide, not the state, said Donald
Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason
University in Virginia.
"The history of government picking winners in the U.S. is not
that
grand," he said. "People instinctively love the idea of green
jobs. ... But there is a lot of mass stupidity out there."
Renewable-energy proponents such as former California Treasurer
Phil Angelides say stupidity would be to stick with current U.S.
energy policy, which has turbocharged global warming, super-sized the
trade deficit and propped up oil-rich regimes hostile to American
interests.
Angelides heads the Apollo Alliance, a coalition promoting clean
industries as a means of rebuilding U.S. manufacturing and lessening
the nation's dependence on foreign oil.
"It's the best path to recovery and the best chance of creating
jobs that can't be outsourced," he said.
Although Angelides' organization takes its name from the space
program that put Americans on the moon, creating green jobs isn't
rocket science, said Oakland activist Van Jones, author of "The Green
Collar Economy."
Jones said Obama's proposal to weatherize homes would pay for
itself through energy savings while putting legions of unemployed
construction workers back on the job. A $100-billion investment in a
green recovery could create 2 million jobs within two years, a good
chunk of them in retrofitting, according to a recent University of
Massachusetts study.
"You can employ a lot of people very quickly with off-the-shelf
technology like caulk guns," said Jones, founder of Green for All, an
economic development group. "This isn't George Jetson stuff."
No one knows precisely how many green jobs exist in the U.S.
economy. Estimates range from less than 1 million workers to nearly
four times that. What's clear is that clean industries have been
growing rapidly without a lot of help from Uncle Sam.
Worldwide, investors poured a record $117.2 billion into
alternative energy in 2007, according to London research firm New
Energy Finance. The costs of wind and solar power are dropping fast.
But the industry slowed in late 2008 as the U.S. financial system
imploded. Plunging oil prices and frozen credit markets have derailed
a number of renewable-energy projects. Some advocates say U.S.
government support is needed to keep the sector moving forward.
That strategy has worked for Germany and Japan: Neither is
blessed
with abundant sunshine, yet these nations boast more rooftop solar
arrays than anyplace else, thanks largely to government subsidies.
That has created vibrant domestic markets for solar power and tens of
thousands of jobs. Asian and European solar module makers dominate
the
industry.
The irony, say American solar executives, is that the U.S. was an
early innovator. Bell Labs introduced the world's first photovoltaic
device in the 1950s. NASA's space work advanced the field.
The U.S. "created this technology, but we didn't value it because
[fossil fuel] energy was so cheap," said Ron Kenedi, an American who
is vice president of the U.S. solar operations of Japan's Sharp
Corp.,
a major manufacturer of solar cells.
"We need to reclaim our birthright."
Many state and local governments aren't waiting for Washington.
Tough state mandates to cut greenhouse gases and boost the use of
renewable energy have turned California into the nation's hottest
market for solar energy. Installers such as SolarCity of Foster City
continue to hire even as the rest of California's economy stalls.
Pennsylvania used incentives to lure Spanish wind-turbine maker
Gamesa Technology Corp. to set up shop in an old steel facility. The
company now employs more than 1,000 workers in the state, most of
them
unionized.
New Mexico is diversifying its mineral-based economy with green
technology. Germany's Schott Solar is building a $100-million plant
near Albuquerque and the state is grooming wind power technicians at
Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, one of only a few such
programs in the country.
Trained wind workers are in such demand that General Electric
Co.,
a maker of turbines, has promised to hire every Mesalands graduate
for
the next three years.
Michigan has started its own Green Jobs Initiative to retrain
displaced factory workers for careers in renewable energy.
"If we can bend sheet metal for car fenders, we can bend it for
windmills," said Ken Horn, a Republican state representative from
hard-
hit Saginaw.
A tavern owner, Horn said his regulars had been buzzing about
green energy - a sign that the industry was no longer considered
fringe or radical.
Michigan's brightest renewable stars are in solar. United Solar
Ovonic, a major producer of thin-film photovoltaics, operates three
manufacturing facilities in Michigan and has two more under
construction in the state.
Hemlock Semiconductor is a joint venture of two Japanese firms
and
Midland, Mich.-based Dow Corning Corp., which owns a majority stake.
It is expanding its rural campus not far from Saginaw and
building
a plant in Tennessee to produce more polycrystalline silicon - a
semiconductor that allows solar cells to convert sunlight into
electricity.
The exacting chemical process begins with the mining of quartz
and
ends with huge, gray, U-shaped bars of polycrystalline silicon
wheeled
to an assembly line at Hemlock's Michigan plant, where they're broken
into small chunks for shipment.
Most of the product is sent to Asia and Europe, where solar
manufacturers turn it into the familiar panels seen on rooftops.
Hemlock employs 1,400 full-time and contract workers in Michigan and
expects to add 500 more in the next few years. The plant operates 24
hours a day, 365 days a week, never stopping, even in a recent
blizzard.
Snow and ice couldn't keep Rich Steudemann from sliding into work
on a recent morning. A mechanical engineer with more than two decades
in the auto industry, Steudemann jumped at the chance to join Hemlock
last fall as a quality-control expert.
"This is like the era of Henry Ford," said Steudemann, 45. "This
industry is just starting to take off."
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