Tag: environmentalism

New Push for ‘Green Collar’ Jobs

  • A solar panel installation training program run by Grid Alternatives. (Photo by Kristi Coale)

A new employment program is tying the need low-income people have for
good-paying work to the imperative of meeting the nation’s growing energy
demands. The “green jobs” movement trains out-of-work people and former
blue-collar workers to install solar, wind and other alternative energy
systems at homes and businesses. Kristi Coale reports what started as a
local program might soon be coming to the rest of the nation:

Transcript

A new employment program is tying the need low-income people have for
good-paying work to the imperative of meeting the nation’s growing energy
demands. The “green jobs” movement trains out-of-work people and former
blue-collar workers to install solar, wind and other alternative energy
systems at homes and businesses. Kristi Coale reports what started as a
local program might soon be coming to the rest of the nation:


It’s a sweltering, sunny day – one when people are encouraged to reduce
their energy use. And so it’s fitting that a small group of young adults is
busily installing solar panels on the roof of a house.


People honk their car horns as they drive past this house. Solar power is
supported here in California. The workers on the rooftop stop to cheer, clap,
and pump their fists in response. The atmosphere here is electric. And that’s
to be expected because these young trainees, like Andre Collins, are the
embodiment of a vision, one that takes low-income people, often people of
color, and trains them to work in the fast-growing alternative energy
industry.


“They’re green jobs, because they’re healthy and right for the people and the
environment and they’re green also because they’re taking the people who
would otherwise be poor and putting green in their pockets.”



Andre Collins is one of 15 people who are completing a 9-week training
program in solar panel installation. This program is run by Grid Alternatives,
a non-profit that installs solar in low-income communities. Grid uses
volunteers recruited by local youth employment and job training
organizations. This installation is a graduation of sorts and so these trainees
are thinking about the job market.


“I’m just proud to be a part of this, and I can’t wait to make money.”


Some non-profits are stepping up to make training programs like this
possible. So are cities. The city council in Oakland, California approved a
quarter of a million dollars for such a program, a sum that’s possible thanks
to a settlement between energy companies and the State of California. Six
years ago, when rolling blackouts hit California, companies such as Enron
raised their rates. While Enron and others didn’t admit to any wrongdoing,
they gave the state one billion dollars. Some of that money is being used to
train lower-income people in what’s come to be known as green jobs…
installing solar panels and tankless hot water heaters, converting vegetable
oil to fuel.


Renewable energy industries are worth big money, already 40 billion dollars
a year worldwide. These new industries hold the promise of putting tens of
thousands of people to work in the U.S. Van Jones is president of the Ella
Baker Center for Human Rights. He says support for green jobs is redefining
the environmental movement:


“…A social uplift environmentalism that is less about the Birkenstocks and
the tofu, though that stuff is all beautiful. It’s more about the hard hat, the
lunch bucket, more of a working class, we-can-do-it environmentalism I
think is the next step in the environmental revolution.”


Jones is leading that revolution in cities like his hometown of Oakland,
which has fallen on hard times. Jones says what’s missing in struggling blue-
collar cities like Oakland are good-paying, skilled labor jobs, jobs that used
to come through unions.


“And it’s time to really rebuild the labor movement with we think the new
face of working class America which is more Latino, more black, more
Asian and also with a new consciousness around doing things in a more
ecologically smart way.”



Oakland is the first city to declare a green jobs corps. But there could be
many more. Cities across the country might get a chance to start their own
programs, thanks to pending federal legislation:


“This bill will allow for three million workers here to be able to enjoy this
kind of training and advancement.”


That’s California Congresswoman Hilda Solis describing a bill she’s
authored in a YouTube video. The Green Jobs Act of 2007 proposes to
dedicate a half a billion dollars to train people to do green collar work. This
fall, the U.S. Senate will take up Solis’ bill. Many believe creating green jobs
will not only revitalize the economy and the environment, but also reinsert
something that has long been missing from these communities: hope.


For the Environment Report, I’m Kristi Coale.

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Looking Back on the “Slick of ’76”

  • Officials placed containment booms around the barge. Most of them failed to prevent the oil from floating downriver, contaminating dozens of miles of pristine shoreline. (Courtesy of the NY State Dept. of Conservation)

30 years ago, an oil barge ran aground in the St. Lawrence River. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of thick crude oil coated the shoreline of northern New York state. The accident remains one of the largest inland oil spills in the United States. It’s a reminder that freighters haul millions of gallons of toxic liquids across the Great Lakes. And many people worry about another spill. The GLRC’s David Sommerstein talked to witnesses of the 1976 spill:

Transcript

30 years ago, an oil barge ran aground in the St. Lawrence River. Hundreds
of thousands of gallons of thick crude oil coated the shoreline of northern New
York State. The accident remains one of the largest inland oil spills in the
United States. It’s a reminder that freighters haul millions of gallons of toxic
liquids across the Great Lakes. And many people worry about another spill.
The GLRC’s David Sommerstein talked to witnesses of the 1976 spill:


It was really foggy that morning. Bob Smith awoke to two sounds:


“You could hear the anchor chains going down, and next thing we know
there was a young Coast Guard guy knocking on the front door.”


The Coast Guard guy had driven up, asking around for a missing barge.
Smith remembered the anchor chains echoing across the water that woke
him up. He went outside to look.


(Sound of walking outside)


Thirty years later, Smith lives amidst cozy cottages on manicured lawns in
the heart of the touristy Thousand Islands.


“Just right about straight out there. See where that boat’s coming up there
now?”


That’s where a barge carrying oil from Venezuela had dropped anchor after
running aground. That morning Smith watched crude as thick as mud drift
out of sight downriver:


“If you’re born and raised here on the river, you don’t like to see anything go
in the river that doesn’t belong there.”


The Coast Guard placed booms in the water, but the oil quickly spilled over.
It carried 50 miles downstream. It oozed as far as 15 feet into the river’s
marshes. Tom Brown was the point man for New York’s Department of
Environmental Conservation. He says the spill couldn’t have come at a
worse time for wildlife:


“All the young fish, waterfowl, shorebirds, furbearers, were coming off the
nests and were being born.”


Thousands of birds and fish suffocated in black goo. As images of
devastation flashed on national TV, the spill killed the tourism season, too.
It was a summer with no swimming, no fishing, no dipping your feet in the
water at sunset. Really, it was a summer with no river.


(Sound of river at Chalk’s dock)


30 years later, everyone still remembers the acrid smell:


“When I woke up in the middle of the night and I could smell oil, I was
afraid I had an oil leak in my house.”


Dwayne Chalk’s family has owned a marina on the St. Lawrence for
generations. Chalk points to a black stripe of oil on his docks, still there
three decades later, and he’s still bitter:


“The Seaway has done this area, well, I shouldn’t say that, it hasn’t done any
good. To me it hasn’t.”


The St. Lawrence Seaway opened the ports of the Great Lakes to Atlantic
Ocean freighters carrying cargoes of steel, ore, and liquid chemicals. It
generates billions of dollars a year in commerce, but it’s also brought
pollution and invasive species.


Anthropologist John Omohundro studied the social effects of the 1976 oil
spill. He says it helped awaken environmentalism in the Great Lakes:


“The spill actually raised people’s consciousness that the river could be a
problem in a number of areas, not just oil.”


Groups like Save the River and Great Lakes United began lobbying for
cleaner water and safer navigation in the years after the spill:


“If a vessel carrying oil or oil products were in that same type of ship today,
it would not be allowed in.”


Albert Jacquez is the outgoing administrator for the US side of the St. Lawrence
Seaway. The 1976 barge had one hull and gushed oil when it hit the rocks.
Today’s barges are mostly double-hulled and use computerized navigation.
Jacquez says a lot has changed to prevent spills:


“The ships themselves are different, the regulations that they have to follow are
different, and the inspections are different. Now does that guarantee? Well,
there are no guarantees, period.”


So if there is a spill, the government requires response plans for every part of
the Great Lakes. Ralph Kring leads training simulations of those plans for
the Coast Guard in Buffalo. Still, he says the real thing is different:


“You really can’t control the weather and the currents and all that. It’s definitely going to be a
challenge, especially when you’re dealing with a real live incident where
everyone’s trying to move as fast as they can and also as efficient as they
can.”


Critics question the ability to get responders to remote areas in time. They
also worry about spills in icy conditions and chemical spills that oil booms
wouldn’t contain.


(Sound of river water)


Back on the St. Lawrence River, Dwayne Chalk says the oil spill of 1976
has taught him it’s not if, it’s when, the next big spill occurs:


“You think about it all the time. Everytime a ship comes up through here,
you think what’s going to happen if that ship hits something.”


Chalk and everyone else who relies on the Great Lakes hope they’ll never
have to find out.


For the GLRC, I’m David Sommerstein.

Related Links

Republicans Push Green Platform

Some republicans are fighting to restore the issues of
conservation and environmental protection to the party’s platform. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… some party
members say republican leadership has too often abandoned
environmentalism:

Transcript

Some republicans are fighting to restore the issues of conservation and
environmental protection to the party’s platform. Some party members say republican
leadership has too often abandoned environmentalism. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


Republicans often note with pride that it was a republican president –
Theodore Roosevelt – who championed conservation and preservation. Teddy
Roosevelt pushed for laws to protect Yellowstone Park and to conserve timber
resources.


During this year’s race for president, the top two republican candidates
often invoke the name of Theodore Roosevelt. Here’s John McCain at a news
conference in New Hampshire.


“Teddy Roosevelt was the guy responsible for the national park
system in America… ”


And George W. Bush in a speech found on his website.


“The legacy of Theodore Roosevelt is an America that has made
significant progress in protecting our environment… ”


But, some in the Republican Party say the party’s leadership has neglected
that legacy, among them is Theodore Roosevelt – the fourth. Roosevelt says
it’s impossible to know exactly what his great grandfather would have
thought about his name being bandied about by today’s politician.


“On the one hand, I think he’d be very proud because he clearly
has become a symbol for enlightened, progressive environmental leadershipand he’d be

very proud of that. On the other hand, he believed very clearly
in the idea of being forthright and one of the things that you will see
today in the Congressional leadership and sometimes in Washington, people
who are anything but environmentalists trying to clothe themselves in a
cloak of green and he’d be the first one stripping that false cloak off
them.”


Roosevelt is a republican and active in supporting environmentalism. He is
the chairman of the league of conservation voters. Each year the group
issues scorecards that track politician’s votes on the environment.
Roosevelt says he knows republican politicians who fight for the
environment. But he says too often republican leadership – particularly
Congressional leadership – fails to support sound environmental laws.


“And as a Republican, what just drives me stark raving mad is
when we pursue dumb politics that gets you unelected and bad public policy
at the same time. There’s just no justification for that.”


Roosevelt is not alone. Other republicans make the same complaint. In fact,
in 1995, a new group was formed, calling itself Republicans for Environmental
Protection. It’s grown to three thousand members in forty-seven states. Martha Marks
is the group’s president.


“We believe that the Republican Party has just made up its mind that
this is just not an issue that Republicans care about or should care about
and they’re willing to cede that to the Democrats. We think that’s an
absolutely idiotic position to take given the fact that something like
eighty-percent of the American people routinely say they consider themselves
environmentalists.”


Marks says she’s not sure how the conservative wing of the Republican Party
came to take what she considers to be anti-environmental positions. She says
environmental protection and careful use of natural resources is more
conservative than what she calls squandering for short-term profit.


“We believe that conservation is conservative. It is fundamentally
conservative to be a conservationist. It is not conservative to squander our
resources.”


But one political observer says getting the conservative members of the
Republican leadership to completely redefine their environmental positions
might be asking too much. Alan Lichtman is a professor of history at
American University and the author of books about presidential politics.


“To the extent the Republicans might want to debate the environment, it would have more to do, I

think, with the broader picture of
how we go about enforcing environmentalism. That is, do we rely on the
regulatory approach or do we move more toward a compact with business,
cooperation, and voluntary compliance. And they might want to take on the
broader issue of the economic impact.”


But the group Republicans for Environmental Protection wants to push the
debate further. In 1996, the group was too new and too small to affect any
changes in the national convention party platform. Marks says this time
around the group has met with several staffers and leaders from the
Republican National Committee. Marks says the group has more political clout
now…


“They definitely know we’re out here. They actually wish we would
sit down and shut up. But we are not doing so and we are going to be very
insistent.”


In recent years, the group has been recruiting like-minded republicans,
including people in other conservation organizations, such as Theodore
Roosevelt the fourth.

Roosevelt says he has some political advice for the candidates who are
campaigning across the country. He says the candidates invoking his
great-grandfather’s name should follow a similar path.


“Move toward the center and recognize that this is an issue that
is important to eighty-percent of the American people and do so in a way that
reflects a strong commitment and support clean air, support clean water,
work on having a good public lands policy.”


Roosevelt says his fellow republicans should remember when Richard Nixon won
in a landslide in 1972, he had supported the legislation for clean air and
water. The environmental protection was established during his
administration. Roosevelt says it’s not that Nixon was an environmentalist…
but he was a wise politician.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

REPUBLICANS PUSH GREEN PLATFORM (Shorter Version)

A movement inside the Republican Party is working to make the
G-O-P more green. One group is hoping to influence the party’s platform
at this year’s convention. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester
Graham reports:

Transcript

A movement inside the Republican Party is working to make the GOP more
green. One group is hoping to influence the party’s platform at this year’s
convention. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports…


The group, republicans for environmental protection says the party has ceded
the issue of environmental protection to the democrats and it wants to
change that. Martha marks is the group’s president


“We think that’s an absolutely idiotic position to take given the
fact that something like 80-percent of the American people routinely say
they consider themselves environmentalists.”


Marks says that’s bad politics… On top of bad policy…


“There is a use-it-all-up, squander it for the short-term profit and
let the future take care of itself as it can. We think that’s a
fundamentally non-conservative position; it’s an idiotic position. And we’re
trying to return our party to a more basic, bedrock conservative position
which we think is pro-conservation”


Marks says the group is working with the GOP national committee. It hopes
to unveil a more environmentally friendly platform at this year’s republican
convention.