By Sabrina Eaton

Wind power advocates from Ohio and across the country blew through Washington on Tuesday with a job creation message for Congress.

Up to 274,000 new green energy jobs could be created in the United States if the federal government begins requiring utilities to produce a portion of their electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar and biomass, they say.

"The renewable energy standard, as we call it, has three main points: jobs, jobs and jobs," said John Grabner of Bedford Heights-based Cardinal Fastener, whose company makes dumbbell-sized bolts that hold together wind turbines.

Wind power advocates predict job losses if the government follows the suggestion of Democrats including Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and suspends an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act program that funds wind and solar projects until "Buy American" provisions are inserted.

Brown, along with groups like the Ohio Cast Metals Association, say more than $1 billion from the government program has paid foreign manufacturers to put wind turbines in the United States rather than subsidizing U.S. turbine makers.

But members of the American Wind Energy Association said not enough turbine parts are made in the U.S. to meet demands, and temporarily halting the program would cost U.S. jobs by scaring off American companies that seek stable demand before they decide whether to produce wind turbine parts.

"The discussion of it has already had a chilling effect," said the wind group's CEO, Denise Bode.

Members of the trade group say setting a nationwide renewable electricity standard would be the best way to create a steady demand for green energy and create jobs. Twenty nine states, including Ohio, have already set targets for renewable energy production.  Legislation passed in 2008 requires that Ohio utilities provide at least 25 percent of their retail electricity supply from alternative energy resources by 2025. Half the renewable energy facilities must be located in Ohio.

Energy legislation passed by the House of Representatives last year calls for a 20 percent nationwide renewable standard by 2020, while a bill that passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee calls for a 15 percent standard by 2021.

Electric utility sentiment on such legislation varies by region, with opposition being strongest in parts of the southeast and northwest that feel they've got lower solar and wind power potential than the rest of the country, says Jim Owen of the Edison Electric Institute power industry trade group. His group doesn't back any particular renewable energy target.

Brown backs the idea of a renewable energy standard but wants to read the language in any bill that comes before the Senate before committing his support, said his spokeswoman Meghan Dubyak.

Brown has had "lots of positive feedback" on his "Buy American" proposal from manufacturers who want to supply the clean energy industry, said Dubyak, adding that he discussed the issue on Tuesday with Grabner, who presented him with a giant bolt that will be displayed in the senator's front office.

By Charles Krakoff

The Economist has just launched a new online debate on the proposition that “creating green jobs is a sensible aspiration for governments.” Van Jones, President Obama’s former special adviser on green jobs, argues in favor; Andrew P. Morriss, a Professor of Law and Business at the University of Illinois law school, presents the counter-argument. The real debate over green jobs programs is whether they really create new jobs or simply divert jobs from existing industries to new ones, and whether the social and economic benefits of creating these jobs outweigh the cost. Here is my contribution to the debate:

There are so many flaws in the interventionist argument it’s hard to know where to begin. It should by now be apparent that governments do not and cannot create jobs in the private sector. The only jobs likely to be created by massive government green jobs programs would be in the government agencies charged with implementing and regulating those programs. Van Jones cites Silicon Valley as an example, but apart from the U.S. government creating the initial version of the Internet for defense purposes and providing grants to universities, the entire IT and Internet boom was almost exclusively the result of private initiative.

Governments essentially have two choices: they can create a hugely expensive bureaucratic and regulatory system (corporate fuel economy regulations for car companies are a clear example) in which smart lawyers and accountants will immediately find loopholes, or they can use a much simpler set of incentives that will prove more effective and cost much less to administer.

A carbon tax, for example, by reducing the cost disadvantages of alternative energy sources, would provide a clear incentive for investors and innovators to come up with new, green technologies, which might in turn create hundreds of thousands or millions of “green” jobs. Accompany the carbon tax with abolition of most of the regulations and subsidies that favor some technologies (coal, oil, corn ethanol) over others,and the market can do most of the rest.

By Celia Hatton

China is Cashing in its Emerging Energy Sector - What Solutions Will Help the U.S. Catch Up?

CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton reports wind turbines that can be seen slicing the sky above rural Minnesota were manufactured more than 6,000 miles away by a Chinese company. They're helping to power the nearby town of Pipestone.

"The wind is blowing nearly all the time," said Pipestone resident Elmer Stoltenberg. "We should take advantage of that."

In New Jersey, one Rutgers University campus gets 10 percent of its energy from 7,000 solar panels also made by a Chinese company.

China has a dirty reputation as the world's factory, but its emerging green energy sector is threatening to leave the United States in its dust.

The overall environmental report card is not pretty for either country. China is the world's top producer of greenhouse gases. The United States is a close second, followed by Russia, India and Japan.

China burns mountains of coal -- the dirtiest form of energy -- for 70 percent of its power. The nation consumes 2-and-a-half billion tons each year. Twenty-three percent of America's energy also comes from coal, using 1.2 billion tons annually.

The U.S. population is less than a quarter of the size of China's, but Americans consume almost 6 times more energy per person than the Chinese -- though that's changing.

China also guzzles almost 8 million barrels of oil daily, or 8 percent of the world’s total, while Americans burn through 19-and-a-half million barrels, or 21 percent.

America’s oil use has been declining since 2007, while China’s getting thirstier. Oil consumption there is rising 5 percent a year.

Modern lifestyles are also on the rise in China, demanding vast amounts of electricity. That's why Chinese authorities are hungry for renewable energy to keep China's people satisfied and the economy humming.

CBS Reports: Where America Stands

Chinese leaders are investing heavily in green sectors like wind and solar, and that's where experts say China scores an "A."

In his State of the Union address this year, President Barack Obama said, "The nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation."

The Problem:
Like it or not, China's the country cashing in on the green revolution.

That's a problem for America, according to Kenneth Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

"We're going to have to end up using those technologies on a very large scale," Lieberthal said. "The question is whether we are producing them - or whether we have to end up buying them from the Chinese or others because we didn't get our act together."

Extended Interview with Peggy Liu

China has become the number one exporter of solar panels, supplying 29 percent of the world's $13.7 billion market, while the U.S. trails at 6 percent.

Chinese manufacturers also dominate the market in eco-products: from electric bikes and solar hot water heaters to mass-produced electric cars. In a few years, China's also expected to become the top exporter of wind turbines, and a major user of them too. There are more than 12,000 wind turbines stretching across China.

China’s turbines generate just over 12,000 megawatts of energy, vs. more than 25,000 megawatts in America. But it's catching up fast: its wind capacity has doubled annually since 2002.

Green Energy is the 21st Century

All this activity is putting food on the table for workers like 37-year-old Wang Meiqiu. Her hometown, the city of Baoding in China's central Hebei province, was once a decaying factory zone. But, with major state backing, it's being reborn into an unlikely eco-hub boasting 29,000 new jobs, including one for Wang.

"This is solving our unemployment problem," she said.

The U.S. faces a huge disadvantage in situations like this. The average factory worker in China costs a company 81 cents an hour to employ, compared to an average of $29.98 an hour for a worker in the United States. Even after taking China’s low cost of living into account, it’s a difference America can’t match.

The disparity brings down China’s prices. Chinese wind turbines, for instance, are often smaller and lower in quality than those made in other countries, but on average they cost 30 percent less.

Tim and Alana Nelson sell eco-products online from Washington state. They say competition from China has encouraged all solar panel companies to drop their prices - while quality’s improved.

Fire Mountain Solar

"You can put a Chinese panel next to an American one and unless you see the label, you can't tell the difference," Alana said.

China's also shepherding new research: cutting-edge Chinese technology traps the carbon dioxide released when burning coal. Costing $30 per ton of captured carbon, it’s cheaper than similar American and European technology costing $40-80 a ton.

The Solution:
So, what solution will allow the United States to catch up to China?

Many say in the short-term, America needs to encourage joint ventures with China, bringing renewable energy costs down for everyone.

In the long-term, experts say U.S. government polices should build on America's strengths: technological innovation and highly efficient manufacturing to compete with China’s unbeatable wages.

Ken Ames is the CEO of SeeSmart. His Vista, Calif., company makes cutting-edge LED light bulbs in Shenzhen, China. Ames says he'd relocate all his production stateside if he could break through Washington's red tape.

"There's going to have to be grants available - readily available - for companies like us that are going to bring the jobs, bring the technology," Ames said.

Analysts say the Obama administration is committed to clean energy, investing $80 billion in stimulus funding in hopes of fostering $150 billion in new projects. However, many argue the U.S. lacks Beijing's unified political will.

New political initiatives, coupled with old-fashioned American ingenuity, could help the U.S. embrace what Chinese entrepreneurs already know:

It’s possible to get rich by going green. A move that just might make the planet healthier too.

By Kimberly Hanna

Mesalands Community College’s North American Wind Research and Training Center (NAWRTC) recently received condition monitoring hardware and software, valued at approximately $30,000 from SKF Group. SKF is one of the leading global suppliers of condition monitoring services including the SKF @ptitude Asset Management System, which will allow NAWRTC to monitor and record data trends to understand the health and reliability of the College’s 1.5 megawatt wind turbine.

The SKF @ptitude Asset Management System consists of hardware and software to monitor vibration data that will assist NAWRTC in predicting possible failures. The College will also be able to perform preventative and proactive maintenance in advance, in order to reduce unnecessary downtime.

There are 1,800 of these systems installed world-wide. According to Greg Ziegler, Business Development Manager, On Line Systems at SKF, Mesalands Community College will be the first institution for wind in North America to receive a software donation from SKF.

“Our SKF @ptitude System software is used globally to provide remote monitoring and asset health to wind turbine owners, operators and equipment manufacturers,” Ziegler said. “And it’s important for the students at NAWRTC to be exposed to this intelligent type of equipment that is widely utilized in the industry. These students and the technology are vital to the industry’s success.”

Ziegler and two other representatives of the SKF team installed the new hardware inside the nacelle of the turbine.

Wind energy student, Max Stoltz, 23, from Fort Worth, TX was able to monitor the installation of the equipment and learn about the many capabilities of the software and hardware.

“I think it’s good experience to be able to learn from other companies in the industry, and I welcome the opportunity to familiarize myself with the components of the turbine,” Stoltz said.

Many machines with rotating parts are utilizing software and hardware similar to the SKF @ptitude System to monitor sound vibration data. This system is very common in more mature industries.

“This donation will assist the College in acquiring sophisticated data to continue to develop the research portion of the North American Wind Research and Training Center,” Dr. Phillip O. Barry, President of Mesalands Community College said. “We are also appreciative of this donation to enhance the training experience of our students.”

# # #

About SKF Group
SKF is a leading global supplier in the areas of bearings, seals, mechatronics, services and lubrication systems. The Group’s service offer includes technical support, maintenance services, engineering consultancy and training. SKF is represented in more than 130 countries and has 15,000 distributor locations worldwide. The Group’s annual sales 2009 were SEK 56,227 million. The number of employees was 41, 172. For more information regarding SKF Condition Monitoring equipment contact Gregory J. Ziegler at Greg.Ziegler@SKF.COM. 

About NAWRTC
Mesalands Community College’s North American Wind Research and Training Center (NAWRTC) in Tucumcari, New Mexico, provides both a 1.5 megawatt turbine in a new facility for applied research in collaboration  with Sandia National Laboratories of Albuquerque, New Mexico, as well as associate degree training for wind energy technicians. Additional information about Mesalands Community College and NAWRTC can be obtained at 911 South Tenth Street in Tucumcari, or at (575) 461-4413, ext. 156 or on the Web at www.mesalands.edu/wind

By Colleen Debaise

For start-ups that harness the energy of the sun, 2010 looks to be a promising year.

In The Wall Street Journal's first survey of venture-backed clean-technology companies, three solar-power firms came out on top: Solyndra Inc. of Fremont, Calif.; Suniva Inc. of Norcross, Ga.; and eSolar Inc. of Pasadena, Calif. The rankings, announced Thursday at the Journal's ECO:Nomics Executive Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., seek to identify those green companies that have the capital, executive experience and investor know-how to succeed in an increasingly crowded field. (See the full list below.)

Other notables on the Top 10 Cleantech list include two eco-friendly car makers— Fisker Automotive Inc. of Irvine, Calif., and Tesla Motors Inc. of San Carlos, Calif.—and New York's RecycleBank LLC., which provides rewards programs to motivate people to recycle.

Several companies on the list have benefited from the Department of Energy's largesse. Last year, No. 1 Solyndra secured a $535 million government loan on top of $286 million it raised in venture financing. The company also saw its revenues jump to $58.8 million for the first nine months of 2009 compared with $6 million for all of 2008. Solyndra filed in late December for a public offering and declined to comment, citing a quiet period.

A team from research firm VentureSource (owned by NewsCorp., which also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal) calculated the rankings, applying a set of financial criteria to some 350 U.S.-based venture-backed businesses in clean technology.

Companies that make everything from fuel-cell technologies to carbon-management software were analyzed according to four financial criteria: the track records of success for both a company's founders and management, and for the investors on its board; the amount of capital raised in the last three years, and the percentage change in a company's valuation in the 12 months ended Nov. 30. Dow Jones reporters and editors who cover the venture capital industry also provided their perspective and expertise beyond the numbers.

In early March, the Journal will publish its first ranking of venture-funded companies. The Next Big Thing: Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies will indicate the odds of success for U.S.-based companies valued at less than $1 billion.

Watch elevator pitches from clean-tech firms in The WSJ's ranking of the hottest venture-funded enterprises, including John W. Baumstark, chairman and CEO of Suniva, Cree Edwards, chairman and CEO of eMeter and Ron Gonen, CEO of RecycleBank here.

1.  SOLYNDRA INC.
Headquarters: Fremont, Calif.
Description: Provider of a photovoltaic system featuring proprietary cylindrical modules.
Founder: Christian Gronet
Investors: Argonaut Private Equity, Artis Capital Management, CMEA Ventures, GKFF Investment Company LLC, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Madrone Capital Partners, Masdar Clean Tech Fund, Redpoint Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, Undisclosed Venture Investor(s), US Department of Energy, Virgin Green Fund

2.  SUNIVA INC.
Headquarters: Norcross, Ga.
Description: Provider of solar cells and modules.
Founder: Ajeet Rohatgi
Investors: Advanced Equities, Apex Venture Partners, Cogentrix Energy,Goldman Sachs Group, H.I.G. Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Quercus Investments, TriplePoint Capital, Velocity Commercial Capital, Warburg Pincus

3.  eSOLAR INC.
Headquarters: Pasadena, Calif.
Description: Developer of modular solar power plants.
Founder: Bill Gross
Investors: ACME Group, Google, Idealab, Individual Investors,NRG Energy, Oak Investment Partners, Quercus Trust

4.  RECYCLEBANK LLC
Headquarters: New York
Description: Provider of incentive-based recycling services to communities.
Founder: Ron Gonen
Investors: Coca-cola Bottling Group, Generation Investment Management, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, RRE Ventures, Sigma Partners, Westly Group

5.  BOSTON-POWER INC.
Headquarters: Westborough, Mass.
Description: Provider of a portable lithium-ion battery technology platform.
Founder: Christina Lampe -Onnerud
Investors: Foundation Asset Management, Gabriel Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Oak Investment Partners, Venrock Associates

6.  FISKER AUTOMOTIVE INC.
Headquarters: Irvine, Calif.
Description: Developer of environmentally-friendly premium cars.
Founder: Henrik Fisker
Investors: Eco-Drive Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Palo Alto Investors, Qatar Investment Authority, Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies, US Department of Energy

7.  eMETER INC.
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
Description: Provider of energy information management solutions for utility mass market and commercial and industrial deployment.
Founders: Cree Edwards and Larsh Johnson
Investors: DBL Investors, Foundation Capital, Individual Investors, Sequoia Capital,Siemens AG

8.  SERIOUS MATERIALS INC.
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
Description: Provider of energy-efficient building materials.
Founder: Kevin Surace
Investors: Cheyenne Partners, EnerTech Capital, Foundation Capital, Mesirow Financial, Navitas Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Rustic Canyon Partners, Saints, Staenberg Venture Funds, VantagePoint Venture Partners

9.  SILVER SPRING NETWORKS INC.
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
Description: Provider of networking infrastructure and services for the smart grid.
Founder: Scott Lang (founding CEO)
Investors: Beaver Creek Fund, Edison Electric Institute, Foundation Capital, Google Ventures, JVB Properties, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Northgate Capital Group, Seneca Capital Management, Undisclosed Venture Investor(s)

10.  TESLA MOTORS INC.
Headquarters: San Carlos, Calif.
Description: Provider of energy-efficient electric sports cars.
Founders: Martin Eberhard, Elon Musk, JB Straubel, Marc Tarpenning, and Ian Wright
Investors: Aabar Investments, Capricorn Management, Compass Technology Group,Daimler AG, DBL Investors, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fjord Capital Partners, Individual Investors,JPMorgan Chase, Tao Group, Technology Partners, Undisclosed Venture Investor(s), US Department of Energy, Valor Equity Partners, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Westly Group.

By Ken Schappelle

Curriculum is focused on climate change science, energy systems, carbon management and climate change policies.

The Johns Hopkins University today launched a master of science degree in energy policy and climate. Based at Johns Hopkins’ Washington, D.C. Center near Dupont Circle, the part-time graduate program addresses the challenges of climate change and sustainable energy systems.

“In a carbon-constrained environment, there is a need for people knowledgeable about energy systems, climate change science, carbon management, and climate change policies,” said Eileen McGurty, associate program chair of Johns Hopkins Environmental Studies Programs. “We’re looking to help prepare the next generation of interdisciplinary professionals to address this need.”

The energy policy and climate degree consists of nine graduate courses and one capstone project. The four required courses are science of climate change and its impact, climate change policy analysis, energy production technology, and carbon management and finance.

This program is rooted in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Oversight by the eminent faculty of this department sustains the academic integrity and excellence of the program. Courses are taught by distinguished instructors with valuable experience in the academic, public, and corporate sectors.

About the Environmental Studies Programs at Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Programs;

In addition to the master of science in energy policy and climate, The Johns Hopkins University offers a master of science in environmental sciences and policy (ES&P) that offers a broader curriculum related to all areas of environmental practice, and a graduate certificate in geographic information systems. Courses are offered at Johns Hopkins’ Washington, D.C. Center, at the Homewood campus in Baltimore, and online. 

By Thomas L. Friedman

The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems. Both are serial innovators. Both are now shepherding clean-tech start-ups that have the potential to be disruptive game changers. They don’t know from hunkering down. They just didn’t get the word.

As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house. Though our country may be flagging, it’s because of innovators like these that you should never — ever — write us off.

Let me introduce Vinod Khosla and K.R. Sridhar. Khosla, the co-founder of Sun, set out several years ago to fund energy start-ups. His favorite baby right now is a company called Calera, which was begun with the Stanford Professor Brent Constantz, who was studying how corals use CO2 to produce their calcium carbonate bones.

If you combine CO2 with seawater, or any kind of briny water, you produce CaCO3, calcium carbonate. That is not only the stuff of corals. It is also the same white, pasty goop that appears on your shower head from hard (calcium-rich) water. At its demonstration plant near Santa Cruz, Calif., Calera has developed a process that takes CO2 emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant and sprays seawater into it and naturally converts most of the CO2 into calcium carbonate, which is then spray-dried into cement or shaped into little pellets that can be used as concrete aggregates for building walls or highways — instead of letting the CO2 emissions go into the atmosphere and produce climate change.

If this can scale, it would eliminate the need for expensive carbon-sequestration facilities planned to be built alongside coal-fired power plants — and it might actually make the heretofore specious notion of “clean coal” a possibility.

In announcing in December an alliance to build more Calera plants, Ian Copeland, president of Bechtel Renewables and New Technology — a tough-minded engineering company — said: “The fundamental chemistry and physics of the Calera process are based on sound scientific principles and its core technology and equipment can be integrated with base power plants very effectively.”

A source says the huge Peabody coal company will announce an investment in Calera next week. “If this works,” said Khosla, “coal-fired power would become more than 100 percent clean. Not only would it not emit any CO2, but by producing clean water and cement as a byproduct it would also be taking all of the CO2 that goes into making those products out of the atmosphere.”

John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who financed Sun, once said of Khosla: “The best way to get Vinod to do something is to tell him it is impossible.”

Sridhar’s company, Bloom Energy, was featured last week on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Several months ago, though, Sridhar took me into the parking lot behind Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters and showed me the inside of one of his Bloom Boxes, the size of a small shipping container. Inside were stacks of solid oxide fuel cells, stored in cylinders, and all kinds of whiz-bang parts that I did not understand.

What I did understand, though, was that Google was already getting part of its clean-energy from these fuel cells — and Wal-Mart, eBay, FedEx and Coca-Cola just announced that they are doing the same. Sridhar, Bloom’s co-founder and C.E.O., said his fuel cells, which can run on natural gas or biogas, can generate electricity at 8 to 10 cents a kilowatt hour, with today’s subsidies. “We know we can bring the price down further,” he said, “so Bloom power will be affordable in every energy-poor country” — Sridhar’s real dream.

Attention: These technologies still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable — and if you Google both, you will find studies saying they are and studies that are skeptical. All I know is this: If we put a simple price on carbon, these new technologies would have a chance to blossom and thousands more would come out of innovators’ garages. America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it.

Our politics has gotten so impossible lately, too many Americans have stopped dreaming. Not these two. They just never got the word. As Sridhar says: “We came to America for the American dream — to do good and to make good.”

By Alex Kaplun

U.S. EPA moves toward regulating greenhouse gases is drawing fire from conservatives who are hoping to slow the agency's efforts using many of the same political strategies that they used to stall climate legislation on Capitol Hill.

The agency has in recent weeks become a favorite target for conservative political candidates and commentators and tea party movement-linked blogs and rallies.

"Most believe that cap and trade is dead in the U.S. Senate, and when they hear that the EPA might do it on its own, they have a very strong reaction to it," said Phil Kerpen, policy director for a tea party organizer, Americans for Prosperity. "That taps into a lot of sentiment that a lot of grass roots has; I think it's already becoming a major issue with the grass roots, and it will become a bigger issue as the year goes along."

To be sure, EPA is no stranger to controversy, but it is rare to find an agency maneuvering to attract so much attention beyond regulated industry and the usual political trench battles in Washington. But activism on the right and a corresponding push from the left -- environmental groups have launched their own media campaigns to promote federal regulatory action on climate change -- show that EPA controversies have leapt over the Beltway.

Kerpen's Americans for Prosperity has been circulating a petition urging individuals to write members of Congress to express support for legislative measures aimed at blocking EPA action on greenhouse gases. The petition describes EPA as "an out-of-control bureaucracy attempting an unprecedented power-grab, seeking to regulate every aspect of our lives and take control of the U.S. economy."

"I think a lot of people are seeing that this is where the cap-and-trade fight is this year, and it seems like the bigger bills are stalled, and I don't think we'll see any legislative activity as we get closer to the election cycle," said Wayne Brough, vice president for research at FreedomWorks, which has an ongoing campaign against EPA.

The anti-EPA message is also being carried by prominent conservative politicians and commentators.

"In an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a national energy tax by circumventing the legislative process, the EPA (with the backing of the Obama Administration) is pushing emission regulations which will destroy jobs and further impact our already struggling economy," Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a prominent conservative voice, wrote in a blog post this week on townhall.com.

Similar comments have appeared on other popular conservative Web sites. And officials linked to the tea party movement said the issue is being raised at town hall events as more individuals learn about potential EPA regulatory action. A post on the Web site of the Tea Party Patriots, for example, calls for disbanding EPA and describes the agency as a "toxic political ideology funded by taxpayer dollars."

In Texas' Republican gubernatorial primary, Debra Medina -- a little-known figure supported by the Texas Tea Party -- gained traction with a message that EPA should be abolished or, at minimum, ignored.

"We begin to do that by telling the EPA, 'You have no authority here,'" Medina said at a rally late last month. "Get out of Texas energy. Get out of Texas agriculture. Get out of Texas manufacturing."

Medina finished third in the Republican primary this week, with 18 percent of the vote, but that showing in a field that featured the longest-sitting governor in state history and a sitting U.S. senator surprised political pundits. During the campaign, both Gov. Rick Perry (R), the ultimate winner of the primary, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who finished a distant second, also denounced EPA.

In Kentucky, U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul (R), the son of Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R), has repeatedly criticized EPA's authority on climate change and coal mining. "Their agenda is not pollution, it's capitalism," Rand Paul said in a recent debate. "These people do not like our way of life." Of proponents of action on climate change, he said, "We need to oppose them and rein in the EPA."

Paul's views are shared by the other GOP candidates in the Senate race. They have even crossed party lines, with Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, the front-runner for the Senate nomination on the Democratic side, promising he would "fight any attempts by the EPA to overreach its authority."

Activists promoting political action against EPA admit that many rank-and-file voters and tea party participants may not fully understand the agency's regulatory efforts on the climate front. But they argue the EPA initiative hits all hot-button ideas fueling the conservative movement.

EPA, those activists say, represents the notion that the Obama administration is trying to implement a "big government" program that will burden taxpayers with no real purpose other than to expand the federal power.

"We've got a political system that's designed for the legislative branch to be accountable to the public," said Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity. "I think most people don't understand all of the details ... but I think that just the overall complexity of it is enough for most people to know that this not an appropriate vehicle to use."

Will pressure matter?

Opponents of EPA climate regulation argue that a far-reaching political movement can delay or scuttle action, much as they believe campaigns managed to delay cap-and-trade legislation and the health care bill.

"The pressure is huge. It's not even the tea parties, it's the town hall meetings," said Marc Morano, executive editor of the Web site Climate Depot and a former staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Congress' most outspoken skeptic on climate issues. "The public opinion is powerful. That's why Harry Reid has been dragging his feet, why Obama has been dragging his feet.

"You have talk radio, Internet, blogs on a daily basis just shelling what was left of this consensus on global warming. People no longer buy it and congressmen know it."

But while conservatives are riled up about EPA's regulatory moves, the issue does not appear to have become a political liability for moderate Democrats, the de facto deciding voices on many major legislative debates.

Still, advocates say they anticipate Democrats will be under pressure as Election Day nears and it becomes clear to voters that EPA -- not legislative action -- represents the best chance of putting greenhouse regulations into law.

"They've already beaten cap and trade in Congress," Morano said. "All that's left is the EPA, and they're going after it with gusto."

Environmentalists and their allies see it differently. They say tea parties and other far-right entities show opposition to climate regulation comes far from the political center.

"It shows the fringy nature of the complaint, and that may actually serve to limit its reach rather than extend its reach," said David Doniger, policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center.

But one Capitol Hill Republican argued this week that opposition to EPA regulation would gain traction with moderate Democrats who have been battered by their party's support for cap-and-trade legislation, noting that Democrats like Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia have begun pushing measures to block or delay EPA action.

"If I were a Democrat trying not to displease the administration, trying to win midterm elections and trying to do what's right for my state, I'd say that Rockefeller does a pretty good job of threading the needle," said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), referring to legislation introduced by Rockefeller and other coal-state Democrats this week that would delay EPA climate-related smokestack rules for two years.

Source: CBC

Nova Scotia has reached an agreement with the South Korean firm Daewoo to open a $90-million plant to manufacture wind turbine towers and blades.
Premier Darrell Dexter announced Friday that the province will have a 49 per cent equity stake in a new operation to be run by Daewoo in Trenton, a town near New Glasgow.

The Pictou County plant will initially create about 200 jobs. Deputy premier Frank Corbett said the operation would eventually employ more than 400 people.

Daewoo will reportedly invest $20 million into the plant, with the province contributing $60 million and the federal government $10 million.

It is Daewoo's first foray into North America and senior officials told reporters it also intends to build offshore oil and gas platforms in Trenton and is looking at tidal turbines.

"Nova Scotia is going to be a partner in a joint venture with Daewoo of South Korea. It is a business that will address a number of objectives that the province had," Dexter said Thursday. "I mean, obviously, the creation of jobs in the Trenton area is a big one, strengthening the rural tax base."

The Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co. Ltd. plant will be built on the grounds of the former TrentonWorks plant.

Daewoo also has a deal with Nova Scotia Power to explore tidal energy and offshore wind projects.

Oregon-based Greenbrier closed TrentonWorks, terminating 330 jobs, in April 2007 after deciding it was no longer financially viable.

Archie Davidson, who worked at the plant for 30 years, welcomed news that the plant is going to be active again.

"I seen some ups and downs in this plant over the years that I've worked here, and I'm telling you it was a sad day when everyone walked out of that plant, and it was gloom and doom," he said Friday after the announcement.

"But today, the future is now and all our employees, men and women — a skilled labour workforce — will get back to work in here and make a future."

The plant had been in the community since 1872 and employed 1,200 people as recently as 2006.

Source: Environment News Service

Senator Jay Rockefeller today introduced legislation to impose a two-year moratorium on the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants and other stationary emitters.

The bill is the latest salvo in the battle over which branch of government will control greenhouse gases - the legislative branch through a clean energy and climate bill, or the executive branch by EPA regulation.

"Today, we took important action to safeguard jobs, the coal industry, and the entire economy as we move toward clean coal technology," said Senator Rockefeller, a Democrat who represents the coal-producing state of West Virginia.

"This legislation will issue a two year suspension on EPA regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources - giving Congress the time it needs to address an issue as complicated and expansive as our energy future," Rockefeller said. "Congress, not the EPA, must be the ideal decision-maker on such a challenging issue."

"At a time when so many people are hurting, we need to put decisions about clean coal and our energy future into the hands of the people and their elected representatives," he said, "not a federal environmental agency."

In April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA must make a determination regarding greenhouse gases when it comes to regulating motor vehicle emissions.

On December 15, 2009, EPA published its final rule in the Federal Register, stating, "The Administrator finds that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated both to endanger public health and to endanger public welfare."

The Supreme Court ruling gives the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. If Congress wants to change or alter that authority, or suspend it long enough to pass comprehensive legislation, Congress must be able to pass a bill to do so.

Both President Barack Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson have stated their preference for legislation over regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.

Last June, the House of Representatives passed its version of a clean energy bill that would cap greenhouse gases and establish a market for trading in emissions permits. A companion bill is still under negotiation in the Senate.

The Rockefeller bill has the support of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said today, "Senator Rockefeller's legislation is further evidence of the growing, bipartisan, and bicameral resistance to EPA's back-door climate regulations. Given the overwhelming opposition to these actions, I'm hopeful that this bill will draw additional support and advance quickly."

"If that does not occur, the disapproval resolution is guaranteed consideration in the Senate," she said.

The resolution disapproving the EPA's endangerment finding (S.J.Res.26) was introduced January 21, 2010, by Murkowski and Senator Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, along with 39 cosponsors, mostly Republicans, with one other Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska. It would remove all "force and effect" from the finding.

Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation and a former U.S. Senator from Colorado said today, "Preempting the EPA has been the number one objective of the coal industry ever since Congress started to address climate and energy legislation. Taking away or suspending their authority would set a dangerous precedent for environmental protection in the United States."

If such a bill is approved by Congress, Wirth called on President Barack Obama to veto it.

"President Obama has spoken out clearly in support of legislation to combat climate change and make the clean energy economy a reality. He should make it clear that he will veto any legislation that preempts the EPA's authority," said Wirth.

"The coal industry has had its day, and now we must together look to the future and move as rapidly as possible toward a clean, low-carbon economy," Wirth said. "The steps must include robust energy efficiency programs, expanded renewables and increased use of natural gas as a cleaner, bridge fuel."

Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica said, "The bill introduced by Senator Rockefeller would allow climate-warming pollution from the country's biggest industrial emitters to continue unchecked. It is yet another example of the overwhelming power polluting corporate interests have in Washington."

David Doniger, policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center, says the Rockefeller bill would effectively block global warming pollution limits for four years, not two because it would bar EPA from doing research on available technologies and would bar outreach and consultation with industry, state, or environmental stakeholders.

"So even after the two-year period ran out," he said, "it would take EPA another two years to get things done."

"It is not constructive to block the only working law on the books to curb global warming pollution and replace it with nothing," Doniger said. "Blocking the Clean Air Act will do nothing to bring Congress closer to passing comprehensive climate and energy legislation."

By Tina Casey

ARPA-E is on a roll.  The agency charged with propelling the U.S. into a new energy future just announced a new $100 million round of funding aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  The focus is on innovative technologies for grid-scale energy storage, along with next-generation power converters and new energy efficient heating and cooling systems in buildings – and not just because these things are sort of neat.

According to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the particular goal of this round of funding is to kickstart the economy and set it up for future growth.  As Secretary Chu sums it up, “This is about unleashing the American innovation machine to solve the energy and climate challenge, while creating new jobs, new industries, and new exports for America’s workers.”  In other words, to do what the fossil fuel industry is increasingly incapable of doing.

ARPA-E and Innovation
ARPA-E stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy.  It was established in the Department of Energy by Congress in 2007 and modeled after the Department of Defense’s successful DARPA (you know, the folks who invented the Internet).  That being 2007, ARPA-E was never funded, at least not until the Obama administration picked it up and dusted it off last year.  Since then it’s going like gangbusters and has funded a startling range of renewable energy projects from solar power that mimics photosynthesis, to fuel-secreting bacteria.

ARPA-E and Changing the Game
ARPA-E’s intention is to deliver the next generation of game-changing technology.  A round of funding announced just a few weeks ago focused on two potential game changers, new ultra high energy density batteries and high efficiency liquid electrofuels based on microorganisms.  A third focus area, advanced carbon capture for coal fired power plants, fits into the greenhouse gas puzzle but is not exactly a game changer for communities affected by destructive mountaintop coal mining.

The Latest Round of Funding
The newly announced round kicked of on March 2 and it focuses on three areas.  One is “Grid Scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatchable Storage,” which basically means cost effective storage (high tech flywheels are one example) that can manipulate the variable, short-duration generating capacity that is characteristic of renewable energy such as wind and solar.  Another is “Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology,” which involves high-performance power converters that could reduce energy consumption by up to 30%.  The third is a homage to Michael Jackson.  No, really.  It’s called “Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices (BEET-IT).  This focus area is seeking high efficiency heating and cooling technologies, with an emphasis on technologies that perform in warm, humid, and hot climates.  BEET-IT is designed to boost American exports to developing economies overseas, where ARPA-E anticipates an increase in the ability to afford Western style heating and cooling equipment.

By Dolores M. Bernal

Better be thinking about learning an extra trade or getting another college degree because according to employment trends, the job market for working Americans in the future seems pretty dire.

Late last year, Forbes published an opinion piece by former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich titled, “Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back” where he writes about the declining jobs in the manufacturing sector and how these jobs are, well, not coming back.

Blue collar workers and their families have been the worse affected by these disappearing jobs at car assembly and part plants, in the garment and apparel industry, etc. A total of 22 million jobs were gone between 1995 and 2002 and the jobs losses continue to rise.

According to Reich, even manufacturing jobs are disappearing in China. The reason? Higher productivity, more robots taking jobs away from real humans, and an explosion in the high tech industry.

At the turn of the 20th century, the assembly line opened the door to a mass of job opportunities to men and women alike. The two World Wars produced a boom in the manufacturing industry — many Americans reached the middle class and others became quite wealthy due to this. It was a prosperous time in America which led to many of our modern achievements, but that America is now gone.

The impact on seniors

Poverty among the elderly has been rising over the past decade, according to a Census Bureau report released on March 2. About 13 percent of the population is made out of people over 65 and, get this: 9.7 percent of them live in poverty.

Remember these were seniors that lived through the time period when manufacturing jobs exploded. Sure, many of them didn’t necessarily hold manufacturing jobs, but a good portion of them did. So, if seniors today are not making ends meet even though they lived their younger years during a time of many opportunities, what do you think is going to happen to people today who have lost their jobs and have no savings in let’s say, 30 more years? Will these also be seniors who will be living in poverty? Most likely.

The impact on you

With the rapid decline of manufacturing jobs in states like Ohio, Michigan, California, New York, etc., the job market becomes more saturated — the pool of blue collar workers needing to work becomes gigantic and their opportunities for employment shrink by the day. Most of those are out of work will never be able to work in manufacturing again.

This means that if you have a college degree and you can’t find a job right away, even your chances at getting a job that requires a lower set of skill, will be tough. Why? Because blue collar workers are turning to these jobs in order to survive. You see, a whole generation of people who once worked has suddenly being displaced.

No money for retraining

If you thought that the federal government is spending money to retrain people who once worked in the manufacturing industry, think again. In January, tampabay.com published an article about how Florida is struggling to find money to retrain workers. It was the same in Seattle almost a year ago, and last September in Chicago.

Stimulus money has helped fund some retraining projects in California, but there isn’t much of that going around elsewhere. How will we retrain an entire generation of blue collar workers and those who have lost their jobs in this last recession if the money isn’t there?

The educated American

The average yearly cost of a private college education is $35,636 and for a public education is $15,213, and this costs are rising. Most students are ending up with astonishing amounts of student loan debt and it will take 30 to 40 years to pay it off.

But even with a college degree the chances of finding a good job after graduation will be quite daunting. Most job industries are suffering job declines, the only ones growing: health care and computers. If you majored in English — one of the top 10 most popular majors at colleges campuses in the US, good luck — better start thinking of going back to school.

Indeed, many people holding just bachelor’s degrees are now going back for a Master’s degree. Times have changed and even though once upon a bachelor’s degree landed you a bright future, that is seldom the case now. But, can you afford more student loan debt?

A dire future

Well is there hope? Will Americans be able to enjoy prosperity again? It depends which Americans you’re talking about. There is one group that enjoys prosperity now and perhaps will for their rest of their lives: the rich. For many decades, the gap between the rich and poor has continued to widen.

From the NY Daily News:
The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans — those making more than $138,000 each year — earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007 and the previous high of 11.22 in 2003.

…Median income fell last year from $52,163 to $50,303, wiping out a decade’s worth of gains to hit the lowest level since 1997.

Poverty jumped sharply to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.

President Barack Obama hasn’t taken any steps to close that gap, in fact, his bailout package or TARP money made Wall Street moguls even richer. When the recession took hold of the country, the only ones getting the aid were the banks. There was nothing for the struggling American family, all they kept saying was that “it will trickle down to them eventually.” Yes, when they have lost their homes, filed for bankruptcy, or shot to death their whole family.

Until Americans wake up and smell the putrid smell of poverty, the politicians in Washington will continue to pass tax breaks for the wealthy, find ways to accommodate and please business interests, and get into wars with countries in the middle east. But why?

Civic participation is something that has been fluctuating for years — in the 1960 presidential election, 63.1 percent of Americans cast their vote, in 1996 it was only 49.1 percent. In the 2008 election we saw some improvement with 56.8 percent of voters casting votes. Will we ever see at least 70 to 80 percent of Americans turn out to vote for needed reforms?

The erosion of our so-called Democracy and freedoms (i.e FISA and the Patriot Act) will not lead to more jobs or prosperous times for American families — well maybe in the prison system. Correctional jobs are on the rise, just take a look at this:

The growing prison population will create new supervisory positions and correctional officer posts, resulting in a faster-than-average employment growth rate through 2012 for correctional officers. Inmate populations will likely increase as an effect of mandatory sentencing laws resulting in reduced parole and longer sentences.

A ray of light

Two things could make our economy improve and could bring back needed jobs for blue collar workers and other workers: 1) A shift in the business world, away from profit-making goals to solution-oriented goals, and 2) Good-paying green jobs and a strong green tech industry.

We know that the first proposition may never happen, but the second has a better chance. Right now we face a battle with an increase of toxic and polluting greenhouse gases. Energy conservation is a must if we don’t want to burn more fossil fuels for electricity generation. We have an opportunity to turn those manufacturing jobs into green jobs where the US becomes the #1 exporter of solar panels, for example. But those “green collar” jobs need to be good-paying jobs with benefits that can once again lift working Americans to the middle-class.

One of the bills that hasn’t come to debate or vote in the Senate floor is the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) or also known as the “Waxman Bill.” There are provisions in that bill that can set a solid foundation for growth in the green manufacturing industry. This bill is a ray of light for the future of American working families. There are some things in the bill that I, personally, don’t like — it could have been a better bill if emission standards had been tightened more, but the bill is still a good beginning.

Former White House adviser on green jobs, Van Jones, was a visionary who could see clearly that investing in this sector could greatly benefit Americans. Unfortunately, the conservatives managed to get him removed after some insignificant video surfaced, showing Jones calling Republicans “assholes” at a conference. The idiotic sensitivity of some Republicans squashed Jones’ plan to move forward with green job initiatives. This alone probably cost Americans millions of jobs that could have been created.

China and South Korea are already ahead of the curb in creating green jobs in their own countries. They want to be leaders in the industry, just like Japan leads the world in the electronic industry.

From the ChinaDaily.com (August 2009):
China is winning a global race to create “green collar” jobs, six months after countries worldwide launched $500 billion spending plans to drive a low-carbon economy.

Following the economic downturn, both the United States and Europe aim to spur jobs in a green push to fight climate change and boost energy security, but China may leapfrog both this year in new wind power – a key measure.

Republicans in the senate don’t want the Waxman Bill to pass because they are looking after the interest of the oil and coal industries. The bill would force “dirty” corporations to buy “pollution credits” if they want to continue doing business as usual: freely polluting our air and water.

There is more to the Waxman Bill, but in a nutshell, this is something that in order to pass it needs the support of all Democrats in the senate, plus the few moderates in the GOP (Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Olympia Snowe).

Yes, there is hope if Americans pay a little more attention to legislation that could benefit them. They need to be more active and outspoken. They need to put pressure on their elected officials and get them to look after their interest, instead of that of corporations. The key is not to give up even if the future looks gloomy. Change has always occurred. The party of real change is certainly somewhere out there, but it must first happen within you.

By Alison Gregor

Constructing or renovating a building to make it environmentally sustainable can be a daunting task for any owner, but Jamestown Properties, a German commercial real estate investment company, has decided it will go “green” in nearly its entire $4 billion portfolio of buildings, all located in the United States.

The overhaul involves fixes as simple as installing low-flow water fixtures and as complex as revamping heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. Jamestown expects to recoup costs through energy savings, the ability to charge higher rents and higher resale values.

Jamestown, an acquisition and management firm based in Cologne, Germany, and Atlanta, has invested $12 billion in commercial properties in the United States since 1983 through private equity funds for German investors. Matt M. Bronfman, the company’s managing director and chief operations officer, said Jamestown’s executives believed that real estate holdings, new and existing, would be increasingly valued by their sustainability and environmental impact.

“We come at things from a bit of a European perspective, and Europe is far ahead of the United States in the environmental movement,” Mr. Bronfman said. Sustainability “will become a key factor to the point where, if you haven’t taken environmental measures, you will have trouble, whether it’s leasing your office building or what have you,” he added. The company said it would spend $3 million to $10 million to retrofit all of its properties.

Jamestown invests through private equity funds. There may be several dozen public and private green building funds worldwide, said Gary Pivo, director of the Responsible Property Investing Center at the University of Arizona and a professor of urban planning and natural resources. Prominent ones include the Investa Commercial Property Fund, based in Australia, and the Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund I, based in New York. “There are an increasing number of private funds that are incorporating green buildings and energy-efficient buildings and other principles of sustainability into their property selections and their portfolios,” Mr. Pivo said. “But there are not very many that are committed exclusively to green buildings.”

In December 2008, Jamestown acquired Green Street Properties, a development and consulting firm in Atlanta that focused on environmental sustainability. It will continue to operate as a subsidiary of Jamestown.

Jamestown “saw us as a way of accelerating the greening of their brand and portfolio,” said Katharine Kelley, who retained her position as president and chief executive of Green Street. “One of the first things we did after joining forces was to start work immediately on a number of existing buildings in Jamestown’s portfolio.”

One building where the conversion is virtually complete is 999 Peachtree Street, a 621,000-square-foot office building with street-level retail space in midtown Atlanta, acquired through the Jamestown Co-Invest IV fund in 2007 for $127 million.

Jamestown has obtained gold certification from the United States Green Building Council with various strategies, like starting bicycle sharing and carpooling programs, and adding a Zipcar station. Energy-efficient lighting saves 476,000 kilowatt hours a year, and the building recycles paper and uses sustainable Post-it notes and file folders.

Tenants in the building, including ERS Global and Flad Architects, follow sustainable practices, said Michael Phillips, Jamestown’s creative director. “I would say we look kindly on tenant build-outs or interior choices that are green,” Mr. Phillips said. “But I don’t think it’s a requirement.”

The goal with 999 Peachtree is to hold it for the duration of the closed-end Co-Invest IV fund, which is seven to 10 years, benefiting from reduced operating costs that may also attract tenants who will pay a bit more, Mr. Phillips said.

Rents for green offices have been shown to be about 2 percent higher than rents for comparable buildings nearby, according to a study done by John M. Quigley, an economist and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and two other researchers.

When the fund closes, Jamestown will sell 999 Peachtree, but it is difficult to tell how much the building’s conversion and certification will add to its valuation, Mr. Phillips said. Since green building funds have been around only for a half-dozen years or so, few if any of their assets have sold, he said.

“It depends on who buys the investment at the end,” Mr. Phillips said. “An insurance company or pension fund typically wants to buy buildings that offer the most modern technology. Green technology is considered the most progressive.

“At the moment,” he continued, “the advantages of being green might be less about a premium, and more about offering a wider pool of buyers.”

Other buildings that Jamestown is retrofitting for environmental sustainability include 1250 Broadway, near 31st Street, and Chelsea Market, at 75 Ninth Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets in Manhattan.

While 1250 Broadway is poised to obtain a gold certification from the Green Building Council, Chelsea Market, a collection of 17 buildings cobbled together, is quite old and doesn’t make a good candidate for certification, Ms. Kelley said.

“You have to customize a green solution depending on the specific project, and its investment profile, and where it is in the market cycle,” she said.

Jamestown has performed an energy audit at 1250 Broadway, a 770,000-square-foot office building built in 1968, that has led to a 15 percent reduction in annual energy consumption and carbon emissions.

“It’s things as mundane as adjusting fan speeds or repairing or upgrading controls, or even some more expensive items like cleaning the chiller cores,” Ms. Kelley said.

Jamestown is also setting up programs to replace cleaning chemicals with environmentally safe products and retrain the custodial staff.

“We’re putting aerators on the faucets, and changing out the water closets in the bathrooms and looking at perimeter office lighting,” Ms. Kelley said. “There’s a whole laundry list of topics.”

Within a year, Jamestown will recoup the $350,000 it has invested in converting the 39-story building through increased efficiencies, she said.

The plans for Chelsea Market, a 1.1 million-square-foot retail and office property, call for a rooftop market garden.

Mr. Pivo said there had been no empirical studies showing the effectiveness of green building funds, which are still only a fraction of the entire universe of property funds, in achieving environmental ends, though he said they should prove beneficial.

“There is at least a theoretical probability that when enough investors commit to selecting for greener or more sustainable investments,” he said, “that that will lower the cost of capital for corporations and developers who are working in the greener and more sustainable area.”

Jon Boggiano, a principal partner in Everblue Energy, a company in Charlotte, N.C., that offers training in sustainable building principles, said green building funds could overcome one of the biggest problems in sustainable building — a lack of capital.

Most of the truly sustainable buildings, he said, cost more upfront and are developed by government, universities or as corporate headquarters. “Those owners are looking at the lifetime costs of the facility, whereas most commercial developers look at the first cost and don’t really care about future utility payments or impacts because they will sell the building and not have to pay those bills.”

“Unless the capital that’s buying buildings is willing to pay for true sustainability,” Mr. Boggiano said, “developers are going to go for cheaper costs. So if a fund is willing to say that green is going to be one of our criteria, and they’re willing to invest in those front costs, that actually is the best way to have an impact.”

BY CIARÁN HANCOCK

ABOUT 50 per cent of America’s top business leaders believe a lack of clarity on climate legislation is negatively impacting upon the ability of the US to compete in the global market.

This is the key finding to emerge from a survey of Fortune 500 senior executives undertaken by Irish renewable energy group NTR, which has established a foundation to support climate change initiatives.

The majority of the 130 respondents to the poll, which was conducted by Brunswick, said they did not require a legal framework to commit to specific actions or to create so-called “green-collar” jobs.

Business leaders said corporations should take a greater role in the climate policy debate.

Commenting on the findings, NTR chief executive Jim Barry said: “The results clearly show the business community considers the climate change challenge to be real and is responding, irrespective of government action.”

Seventy per cent of the respondents said climate change would be an important part of their commercial decision-making within five years. But almost three in four of the business leaders said security of energy supply was a more “pressing issue” for them than climate change.

The NTR Foundation will be launched in New York tomorrow, with former US president Bill Clinton acting as keynote speaker.

NTR has committed €5.5 million to the venture, and shares in the company.

Source: PR-USA.net

The February issue of, Green Expectations, the Green Collar Association monthly newsletter features an in-depth interview with Ann Duffy, Corporate Sustainability Officer for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games (VANOC). Duffy is interviewed by Director of Research and Communications, Dr. Michael O. Dayan, who asks about her role as Corporate Sustainability Officer and the sustainability efforts by the Olympic Organizing Committee.

This issue also contains “It's the Jobs Stupid:  Business and Politics 101,” a key article by Ron Sokolov, Green Collar Association Senior Vice President for Strategic Partnerships on the  "Framework for Climate Action" put forth by Senators Lindsey Graham, Joseph Lieberman, and John Kerry as well as articles by Green Collar Association staff writers Joseph Tohill, Anran Luo, and Alanna Mackenzie.

This month’s issue of Green Expectations also conations important news from some of Green Collar Association’s members: Johnson Controls, Yale University, New York Institute of Technology, Five Winds International, Johns Hopkins University, HVAC Reeducation, Laney College, SAI Global, University of California at Berkeley, National Labor College, and Columbia Univeristy.

Every month Green Collar Association brings its members insight into the growth of green collar jobs from North America’s leading experts in business, journalism, education, technology, non-profit, and politics. Recent lead articles in the Green Collar Association newsletter include exclusive pieces by Michael Ignatieff, Harvard Scholar and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Andrea Buffa of the Apollo Alliance.

To read this month’s Green Collar Association newsletter visit: http://www.greencollar.org/feb2010.html Collar Association

Green Collar Association

Green Collar's mission is to advance the socially responsible economy and promote green collar jobs by aligning the interests of companies, educational institutions, and members of the workforce - including professionals and skilled workers.

We believe that an issue of such critical importance to our economic growth, national security, and environmental health will require a collaborative approach that engages the best and brightest ideas, people, and resources from each sector.

Thus, Green Collar Association is focused on:
·  Building Bridges: Helping companies, educational institutions and groups representing the workforce better understand each other's needs and challenges to reduce costly missteps and errors

·  Cross Pollination: Establishing a clearinghouse for exchanging best practices, tools, and ideas within and among all three groups

·  Creating a Fair Playing Ground: Providing public policy support and guidance on the Federal levels on issues affecting the green economy and particularly stimulating green collar jobs that will allow our members to compete with those in other countries

·  Developing Next Generation Leadership: Offering the most comprehensive listing of educational and job opportunities in the socially responsible economy

·  Stimulating Profitability: Helping companies and educational institutions to benefit financially from a green, socially responsible economy through access to new customers and new ideas

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POWER YOUR EDUCATION TO THE NEXT LEVEL!

By Gordon Hamilton

Castlegar's Celgar pulp mill has received a $40-million federal grant for a green energy project that turns biomass into enough energy to supply 22,000 homes with power for a year, integrating the forest industry into the provincial initiative to become energy sufficient by 2016.

The Celgar project, the first to be funded under Ottawa's $1-billion Green Transformation Program, is expected to generate 48 megawatts of power when it comes online in September. Celgar intends to use 13 megawatts for the mill's energy needs and sell the rest, 35 megawatts, to BC Hydro.

"That's enough energy to power 21,636 households a year," said Susan Danard, manager of media relations at Hydro. "It guarantees a nice source of clean, reliable energy to BC Hydro and our customers."

The mill's green energy will replace imported energy from Alberta or the U.S. that is generally generated by burning fossil fuels.

Further, it will add a new source of revenue to the mill by adding a valuable bioenergy component to the pulp-making process. The extra revenue -- the exact amount is not being disclosed -- will enable the Celgar mill to be more competitive globally, said David Gandossi, vice-president at Mercer International, the Vancouver-based forest company that owns the Celgar mill. It is one of Canada's largest and most modern.

Gandossi said the Celgar mill is investing the $40 million primarily in a new condensing turbine and other steam-saving projects.

The steam is being generated by burning black liquor, a biofuel that is a byproduct of the pulp-making process. Pulp mills routinely use black liquor to generate their own heat and energy, but creating energy for the grid is a growing application in B.C.

Gandossi said European mills routinely generate power for electricity grids, enabling them to lower costs.

Mercer was one of four forest companies to sign electricity purchase agreements with BC Hydro in 2009 as part of the provincial policy to reach energy self-sufficiency by 2016. The Celgar project is the largest and will be the first to come online. Hydro already had agreements with two other forest companies, Tembec and Tolko Industries. All six contracts will provide Hydro with enough power for 85,000 homes.

The B.C. pulp and paper industry is generally considered to be on the verge of being replaced by lower-cost global competitors. Bioenergy production is giving the industry a new lease on life.

Gandossi said the provincial government is beginning to realize that pulp mills can be integrated into the energy system in a much more efficient way than other forms of bioenergy, such as simply burning wood waste to create energy. When the new turbine comes online, the Celgar mill will be not only making pulp but also capturing and using more than 75 per cent of the energy within its wood waste feed stock.

"A pulp mill takes what is otherwise a waste product -- the residuals of a sawmill or the residuals in the forest that previously didn't have a value -and creates value-added pulp from it, employing 500 people to make a product you can sell and make money at," Gandossi said.

"The other half is the energy component that we refine. You can sell [it] as electricity or biofuels or whatever else you can make out of the black liquor."

By Jeffery Ball

The world's leading organization on climate change says it is working on a strategy to better police the experts who produce its high-profile reports, to try to ensure they adhere to rigorous scientific standards.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs to "leave no stone unturned to come up with a set of measures so this can be ensured," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations-sponsored organization, said.

Separately, the Met Office, a U.K. agency that does prominent weather and climate research, said it was proposing a new effort to improve temperature measurement.

The move by Mr. Pachauri and other IPCC leaders to step up oversight and enforcement of the panel's existing policies follows a string of revelations that have prompted criticism of the organization, which won a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its report that year concluding that climate change is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by human activity.

"We certainly don't feel comfortable with the loss of even one iota of trust," Mr. Pachauri said. "We are grappling with this issue and we'll come up with some measures."

Chief among the revelations was that the IPCC's 2007 report, which runs to about 3,000 pages, erroneously projected that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

"That's a classic case that should have got caught," Mr. Pachauri said. "That one single instance is enough of a lesson that we do something to make sure it doesn't recur."

As the IPCC moves forward with its review, the Met Office, a U.K. government meteorological agency and research center, announced a new planned effort to improve the measurement of the earth's temperatures—data it said is necessary to "strengthen decisions on adapting to climate change."

The Met Office, whose research is often cited by the IPCC, said in a statement that a more-robust set of data on surface temperatures around the globe will provide a clearer picture of how the planet's climate is changing.

Government officials in many countries have asked for detailed information as they mull whether, and how, to implement policies designed to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that the IPCC says are contributing to climate change.

Much of climate science focuses on making broad projections about how increased greenhouse-gas emissions might change the global average temperature.

But even as political bids to curb emissions stumble—a big U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in December ended without agreement on mandatory steps—policy makers want to better understand how climate change might affect temperature extremes and particular regions. That, the Met Office said, will require more-granular temperature data.

The new effort "will augment, not replace," current temperature data, the Met Office said. It will provide more-frequent temperature readings. And the information will be "fully peer reviewed and open to scrutiny," the Met Office noted.

The transparency of climate-science data has come into question in the wake of the release late last year of more than 1,000 emails from the computers of another U.K. scientific center, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Those emails appeared to show scientists there trying to squelch the views of others who questioned their research pointing to a significant human influence on the climate. The university has launched an investigation.

The changes at the IPCC will focus less on rolling out new policies than on enforcing those already in effect, Mr. Pachauri said.

Among them: extensive checks on the research that is to be cited in IPCC reports.

In addition, some IPCC leaders said, the organization needs better procedures to correct any errors in its reports once they are found.

"I hope we'll be able to do something by which we can infuse confidence in our audience and assure them that the IPCC takes this issue very seriously," Mr. Pachauri said.

Source: Southern California Radio

The county will spend about $1.3 million to train low-income and unemployed Angelenos for jobs in "green'' industries.

The funds for the job programs come from the state's Employment Development Department.

Short-term technical training will be offered at Los Angeles Trade Tech College and Los Angeles City College to 195 unemployed or underemployed residents in need of new skills.

Participants will be identified through the county's WorkSource Centers.

Those with construction-related experience will be targeted for programs that will train them in sustainable building practices related to plumbing, heating and air conditioning and construction management. Other new job skills would qualify participants as solar panel installers or energy efficiency auditors.

Businesses partnering with the jobs program have committed to provide jobs for those who successfully complete the training, according to documentation provided to the county Board of Supervisors.

The Dow Chemical Company, the Energy Coordinating Agency of Philadelphia (ECA), and the City of Philadelphia, announce a city-wide contest as part of an effort to help Philadelphia become "the greenest city in America." The "Coolest Block" contest will allow residents of Philadelphia row homes to compete to win an energy-saving "cool roof" and other energy efficient products, such as air sealing and insulation, for their entire block.

"Row homes are part of Philadelphia's history and charm and have long been a unique architectural feature of the city," says Liz Robinson, executive director, ECA. "The black asphalt roofs typically found on row homes not only contribute to increased energy consumption, they deteriorate more quickly than a white 'cool' roof and can affect the structural integrity of the whole building. Our goal with the 'Coolest Block' contest is to both conserve energy and preserve these historical homes."

Cool roofs are energy-saving white roofs that reflect the sun’s heat and help prevent it from being absorbed into the roof and house. Traditional black, asphalt roofs soak up heat and allow it to transfer into the upper floors of the home, putting a strain on air conditioning or cooling units and increasing energy costs. White cool roofs can reduce the cost of cooling a home by as much as 20%, and the exterior of the roof can be 50 - 80 degrees cooler than a black asphalt roof on a hot summer day. Cool roofs are also highly durable and require less maintenance and replacement than typical asphalt roofs.

Scott Young, global director, Energy Efficiency Portfolio, Dow Building Solutions says, "Dow is committed to practical, energy-efficient solutions that make a difference in people's lives. With our technology to help create cool roofs and our insulation and air sealing products, homeowners can look forward to more comfortable temperatures in their homes and significant savings on their monthly energy bills."

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, proper insulation and air sealing of the home can reduce heating and cooling costs by as much as 30%. Air infiltration - which often occurs between walls and floors, around windows and doors, and through other gaps and cracks - can account for as much as 40% of heat loss in homes (source U.S. DOE). One of the best ways to insulate and air seal a row home is to use insulating foam sealants, which expand on contact to help bridge these openings, keeping heat outside during the summer and inside during the winter.

Along with a cool roof, the winning block will receive:

• An energy audit - from basement to rooftop - assessing where insulation and air sealing products could help improve the home's energy efficiency.


• Installation of Dow's air sealants and insulation products in the participating contestants' residential homes, in both the basement and the attic to help increase comfort and energy savings.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges that includes representatives from local media, environmental organizations, and the building industry. The deadline for entry is April 5, 2010. More information More information and the official contest rules are available at www.retrofitphilly.com.

About The Dow Chemical Company
Dow combines the power of science and technology with the "Human Element" to passionately innovate what is essential to human progress. The Company connects chemistry and innovation with the principles of sustainability to help address many of the world's most challenging problems such as the need for clean water, renewable energy generation and conservation, and increasing agricultural productivity. Dow's diversified industry-leading portfolio of specialty chemical, advanced materials, agrosciences and plastics businesses delivers a broad range of technology-based products and solutions to customers in approximately 160 countries and in high growth sectors such as electronics, water, energy, coatings and agriculture. In 2009, Dow had annual sales of $45 billion and employed approximately 52,000 people worldwide. The Company's more than 5,000 products are manufactured at 214 sites in 37 countries across the globe. References to "Dow" or the "Company" mean The Dow Chemical Company and its consolidated subsidiaries unless otherwise expressly noted. More information about Dow can be found at www.dow.com.

About Energy Coordinating Agency of Philadelphia
The Energy Coordinating Agency (ECA) is a non-profit corporation, founded in 1984, whose mission is to help people conserve energy and to promote a sustainable and socially equitable energy future for all in the Philadelphia region. Our services to low income people are at the heart of our mission and are provided in collaboration with our citywide network of 14 Neighborhood Energy Centers. In the past year, ECA provided over 40,000 low income families 86,218 energy services, valued at more than $27 million, leveraging our budget of $8.4 million more than 3 times on their behalf. These services include: budget and energy counseling; bill payment assistance; energy conservation treatments, and energy education. Our conservation services saved these families an average of 20% of their energy costs, enabling them to meet their expenses and stay in their homes.

About Greenworks Philadelphia
Mayor Michael Nutter created the Mayor's Office of Sustainability (MOS) to help the city leverage its existing assets and mitigate its exposure to the effects of global warming. This means changing the way that government does business. It also means giving citizens the tools they need to lower their own carbon emissions and reduce their vulnerability to increasing energy costs. Sustainability is a core mission for the Nutter Administration and the work of MOS, primarily through the implementation of Greenworks Philadelphia, will help decrease the city's vulnerability to energy prices and climate change, increase our capacity to compete in global markets for new jobs and new businesses, and ensure that all residents share in the city's prosperous future.

By Julie Sharp

Southern California Edison is giving green and going green as it recently donated $1 million to 10 state community colleges engaged in environmentally-friendly job training programs.

El Camino College in Torrance was one of the 10 to receive $100,000 that will be distributed through scholarships.

Students enrolled in courses that partake in green education, such as heating and air conditioning, architecture and construction will be eligible to apply for the scholarships.

The industry and technology department at El Camino recently purchased a solar panel model for students training in the heating and air conditioning course.

Course instructor, Vic Cafarchia hopes to acquire more panels for his classes.

Cafarchia also said that the need for such training is rising as the demand for energy efficient technology, such is solar panels, is increasing.

"These are the jobs of the future. Some exist today and many of them do not. So it is important to provide quality education now," said SCE representative Tammy Tumbling.

Programs at other recipient community colleges statewide eligible for the SCE funds include: study of solar panel installation, water and wastewater management, transportation and alternative fuels, bio fuels production and farming and environmental compliance or sustainability planning.

Stephanie Rodriguez, the dean of industry and technology at El Camino College said the school is looking to develop more jobs in the green, sustainability field -- jobs of the future.

The scholarships at El Camino will be available for students beginning 2011.

By Cindy Chan

Jobs in the environmental sector are growing rapidly and Canada needs to catch up to train more workers to meet the demand, says a recent report.

A construction worker walks on a green roof at the 2010 Athletes Village on Nov. 4, 2009, in Vancouver, Canada, host city of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games which began on Feb. 12, 2010. (Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)

The Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), the country’s national organization for educational research, says that in 2011 the demand for environmental employees is expected to increase by 8.1 percent, fuelled by rising interest in environmental issues.

Taking the latest figures from ECO Canada, an industry-led group that specializes in research, training, and certification of environmental careers, the council says the pool of qualified workers is not keeping up with the rising demand.

The council says that the number of graduates from post-secondary environmental programs dropped by 9 percent between 1999 and 2005. It also estimates that in the meteorological field alone this year there will be more than 3,000 unfilled jobs.

“The green economy is an undeniable part of our society and global culture, and it is critical that Canada is prepared to meet this sector’s need for skilled workers,” said Paul Cappon, CCL’s President and CEO, in a press release.

Careers in the green economy span a broad range. Some examples include botanist, geologist, oceanographer, landscape architect, petroleum engineer, eco tourist operator, environmental lawyer, park interpreter, policy analyst, and pollution control technologist.

ECO Canada estimates that the environmental sector accounted for more than half a million jobs across the country in 2006. By 2011, the demand in this sector is expected to increase by nearly 40,000 jobs, reaching more than 570,000.

Mr. Cappon notes that people who pursue environmental careers are “a special shade of green,” as they are drawn to their professions by personal belief rather than money or power.

“Students choose green careers primarily because of their personal interest in environmental issues, strong emotional connection towards the environment and passion about the environment and environmental issues,” the CCL report said.

While the CCL findings identify the impending skills shortage, they also point to some potential solutions.

Based on research on career choices in the environmental sector, CCL recommends stimulating students’ interest in the environment early as the key to increasing the supply of environmental program graduates.

The elementary- and middle-school years are important times for providing environmental education programs to children.

The CCL report suggests offering students experiential activities such as outdoor programs, field trips, and summer camps to stimulate a sense of empowerment and interest in environmental work.

Research suggests that both students and teachers may have a limited understanding of the diversity of jobs available in the environmental sector, and may even have stereotypical misconceptions about certain careers. They need better information about the sector and its career opportunities, CCL says.

Another challenge is the numerous career-related resources available that can cause indecision and anxiety without proper guidance.

Students need help to navigate and make sense of all the information and to work through the career decision-making process, recommends the report.

Source: Center for American Progress

Green jobs continue to make inroads in the U.S. economy. Growth in these jobs was a robust 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007 compared to 3.7 percent overall, and in January President Barack Obama promised $2.3 billion in Recovery Act Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credits for clean-energy manufacturing projects nationwide that will create tens of thousands of clean-energy jobs. Meanwhile, the stimulus bill is pumping $30 billion into the clean-energy sector, and aggressive smart grid deployment could create 270,000 U.S. jobs and a further 138,000 if our smart grid technologies are exported to a global market.

Some regions have become green jobs strongholds. Here are the top five U.S. cities that are seeing the most growth.

San Francisco
California leads the nation in clean-energy jobs with roughly 125,000—and San Francisco is a big source for these jobs. The Clean Edge report identifies the Bay Area as the number one metro area for clean technology job activity, and San Francisco recently passed $100 million in revenue bonds to support renewable energy projects. More than 50 percent of the city’s commuters travel on public transportation and 20 big construction projects have recently applied for LEED certification.

Boston
It’s no surprise that the Greater Boston area is a leader in green technology. After all, it has the highest concentration of colleges and universities of any metropolitan area in the world. Boston—including Worcester, Lawrence, Lowell, and Brockton—ranks fourth in the Clean Edge survey of 15 top U.S. metro areas for clean-tech job creation. And two big sources of green construction and engineering jobs in Boston are wind power—it’s the city’s third-largest fuel source—and the fact that new buildings have to be constructed to meet LEED certification standards.

Mayor Tom Menino appointed an Energy Management Board in 2003, which studied energy use in 362 municipal buildings and identified potential savings. For the second consecutive year, Menino’s Boston Green Awards included a separate category for bike-friendly businesses.

Detroit
There’s good news for Detroit despite Michigan’s 15.3 percent unemployment rate. Department of Energy green technology grants to fund factories and create green jobs will tap into the Motor City’s skilled automotive workforce to bring hybrid and electric technology to the forefront of the American auto industry. Michigan had already created more than 22,000 clean-tech jobs by 2007, and the new federal grants will make those numbers grow. Automotive companies not based in Detroit have recently opened hubs in the city, and a mechanical engineer working on plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles in Detroit can expect to make $63,600 median pay with a bachelor’s degree, reports Clean Edge.

Portland
Oregon may struggle with unemployment like the rest of the United States, but with more than 20,000 clean-energy jobs created in 2007 alone—the most in the nation—it’s clear that sustainable Portland is the place to be. The city gets half of its power from renewable energy sources, 35 percent of its buildings have been certified by the U.S. Green Building Council, and a quarter of the workforce commutes to work by bike, carpool, or public transportation. The city’s $50 million “Grey to Green” initiative, which began in July 2008, aims to add 43 acres of ecoroofs, plant 33,000 yard trees and 50,000 street trees, and restore native vegetation while halting the spread of invasive plants to better manage stormwater—all of which will help create a green-collar workforce for Portland’s already green economy.

New York City
There are plenty of opportunities for green jobs in New York City. “Growing Green Collar Jobs,” a collaboration between 50 community, labor, and private sector groups in New York City, supports organizations such as Sustainable South Bronx, which has worked since 2001 to move South Bronx residents from welfare to green-collar jobs through education, outreach, and programs like “Greening the Ghetto.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched PlaNYC 2030 in 2007, a program with 127 greening initiatives, including $1 billion for retrofitting buildings to boost energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, create homes for more than 1 million New Yorkers, and ensure that all residents live within a 10-minute walk to a park. Meeting these goals will create thousands of green-collar jobs in a variety of fields from urban forestry to renewable energy. In addition, 80 percent of Big Apple residents use public transportation, which is a boon for the city’s goal to have the cleanest air quality of any major U.S. city.

By Juliet Eilperin and David A. Fahrenthold

With its 2007 report declaring that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Prize -- and a new degree of public trust in the controversial science of global warming. 

But recent revelations about flaws in that seminal report, ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are undermining confidence not only in the panel's work but also in projections about climate change. Scientists who have pointed out problems in the report say the panel's methods and mistakes -- including admitting Saturday that it had overstated how much of the Netherlands was below sea level -- give doubters an opening.

It wasn't the first one. There is still a scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. But in the past year, a cache of stolen e-mails, revealing that prominent climate scientists sought to prevent the publication of works by their detractors, has sullied their image as impartial academics. The errors in the U.N. report -- a document intended to be the last nail in the coffin of climate doubt -- are a serious problem that could end up forcing environmentalists to focus more on the old question of proving that climate change is a threat, instead of the new question of how to stop it.

Two Republican senators who have long opposed a cap on carbon emissions, James M. Inhofe (Okla.) and John Barrasso (Wyo.), are citing the errors as further reasons to block mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Last week, Barrasso called for an independent probe into the IPCC, suggesting that the United States should halt any action on climate until it verifies the panel's scientific conclusions.

Inhofe said Thursday in the Senate that the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to curb greenhouse gases should be reexamined, since the U.N. panel's conclusions influenced the agency's finding that climate change poses a public threat. "The ramifications of the IPCC spread far and wide, most notably to the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse gases from mobile sources endanger public health and welfare," Inhofe said. On Friday, a coalition of conservative groups filed a petition to overturn the EPA's finding on the same grounds.

"There is a sense that something's rotten in the state of the IPCC," said Richard H. Moss, a senior scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland, who has worked with the panel since 1993. "It's just wildly exaggerated. But we need to take a look and see if something needs to be improved."

The IPCC climate assessments are, by any standard, a massive undertaking. Thousands of scientists across the globe volunteer to evaluate tens of thousands of academic documents and translate them into plain-English reports that policymakers can understand.

Climate researchers say the errors do not disprove the U.N. panel's central conclusion: Climate change is happening, and humans are causing it. Some researchers said the U.N. panel's attitude -- appearing to promise that its results were infallible, and reacting slowly to evidence that they were not -- could undermine the rest of its work.

"What's happened here is that there's an industry of climate-change denialists who are trying to make it seem as though you can't trust anything that is between the covers" of the panel's report, said Jeffrey Kargel, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies glaciers. "It's really heartbreaking to see this happen, and to see that the IPCC left themselves open" to being attacked.

Kargel said he noticed an error in the report of the IPCC's second working group, a research unit, in 2007. The report said huge glaciers in the Himalayan mountains might disappear by 2035. Some glaciers are melting, but they are too enormous to disappear that quickly: "It's physically impossible to kill the ice that fast," Kargel said.

He said colleagues regarded the error as too ridiculous to fuss about until recently. Last month, the journal Science printed a letter to the editor that traced the origins of the mistaken data: The U.N. panel seemed to have quoted an activist group's report, not a peer-reviewed study. And, in citing another source, it appeared to have committed a serious typo: The year 2350 had become 2035.

Another line that has sparked scrutiny reads, "Up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation," and links to a report co-written by the World Wildlife Fund. The analysis cited key work by Woods Hole Research Center senior scientist Daniel C. Nepstad, but the link to an advocacy group instead of a peer-reviewed paper infuriated conservatives.

"The underlying science is certainly there, but the citation process the IPCC went through is sloppy. There's no other word for it," said Doug Boucher, director of the Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The IPCC did not respond to requests for comment.

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, said that the U.N. panel could hurt its own public standing by not admitting how it exaggerated certain climate risks or connections, such as linking higher insurance payouts to rising temperatures when other factors are driving this trend.

"The idea that the IPCC can or should strive to be infallible is really not helpful," Pielke said. "When errors and mistakes are inevitably found, the fall is that much further. . . . There's a real risk that the public perception could swing [toward greater disbelief in climate science]. Even though the reality is that the science -- the underlying science -- hasn't changed."

The error about the Netherlands was in a background note in the 2007 report that said 55 percent of the country lay below sea level, but that figure included areas that were actually above sea level and prone to flooding.

U.N. Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth, whose nonprofit group has highlighted the work of the IPCC, said that the pirated e-mails gave "an opening" to attack climate science and that the scientific work "has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended."

It is unclear whether the controversy will hamper passage of a bill to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which has stalled in the Senate. Paul W. Bledsoe, of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, said that if people want to know why the "bill is having a hard time in the Senate, I would rank [concern about climate science] lower than the economy and the financial meltdown."

Scientists are debating whether they need to revamp the IPCC process or scrap it. The journal Nature published an opinion section Thursday in which several researchers floated ideas on how to change the U.N. panel, along with a piece written by Moss and others showing how scientists could increase collaboration across disciplines to produce more accurate climate projections more quickly.

And Christopher Field -- co-chair of the second working group for the IPCC's next assessment -- said the panel needs to improve its fact-checking, even if it means enlisting report contributors' students to help do the job.

"My goal is to produce a report that's 100 percent error-free, to the maximum extent possible," he said. "The fact that the IPCC runs on volunteer labor makes it a challenge, but it's too important a challenge to ignore."

By Christopher Donville

General Electric Co.’s energy finance unit said it may double the capacity of a wind farm in British Columbia, increasing its bet on renewable-power in Canada’s westernmost province.

GE and Vancouver-based Plutonic Power Corp. last year bought the unfinished, 144-megawatt Dokie Ridge Wind Project, the first equity investment in wind energy in Canada for both companies.

“British Columbia has tremendous natural resources that are ideal for large-scale renewable energy projects,” Alex Urquhart, who runs the energy financial services unit, a division of Fairfield, Connecticut-based General Electric’s GE Capital division, said in a statement today.

GE and Plutonic are considering expanding Dokie to 300 megawatts, the companies said. Whether the expansion and other renewable developments will get built depends, in part, on government policies and incentives.

“Capital will move to where the `return`s make the most sense,” Urquhart, who globally oversees about $23 billion in energy investments, said today in an interview.

The first phase of Dokie should be operational next year and provide enough electricity to power 34,000 homes annually, the companies said.

Plutonic and GE Energy Financial Services also are building a C$660 million ($628 million) run-of-river hydro-electric project on glacier-fed streams about 190 kilometers (118 miles) northwest of Vancouver. The 196-megawatt East Toba River- Montrose development is slated to be completed this year.

Dokie’s phase one and the Toba-Montrose project are being developed with financial aid from the government of Canada’s ecoEnergy program, the companies said in the statement.

So-called run-of-river power projects rely on water diverted from rivers that’s `return`ed to its normal course after spinning turbines.

Source: Columbia University

School of Continuing Education and Earth Institute Collaborate to Teach Effective Management for a Sustainable Planet

Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education and the Earth Institute have announced a new Master of Science in Sustainability Management, which will enroll its first class in the fall of 2010.  All organizations, whether they are multinational corporations or local nonprofits, face a growing number of environmental challenges from limiting carbon emissions to managing water resources.  The program trains leaders to bridge the gap between the principle of sustainable development and its practice.

The new graduate program is designed to meet the growing demand for sustainability managers. It prepares students to be leaders in implementing solutions to limit the degradation of resources and the production of waste. Such efforts are essential for effective organizational management in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Typical graduates will grow into leadership positions in a broad range of fields and industries, including environmental stewardship, facilities management, construction, operations, architecture and design, utilities, energy, communications, financial services, healthcare, education, and manufacturing.

“Columbia is proud to offer a program that melds academic leadership, scientific rigor, and professional practice to form a unique and interdisciplinary community dedicated to making lasting advances in global sustainability practice,” said Kristine Billmyer, dean of the School of Continuing Education.

“The M.S. in Sustainability Management is the first program of its kind in the metropolitan New York region. New York City is the nation’s center of finance, learning and communication. By building this exciting new masters program here, we believe it will quickly have impact all over the world,” said Steven Cohen, director of the program and executive director of the Earth Institute.

The program is offered on a full-time or part-time basis to accommodate the schedules of working professionals.

By Alister Doyle, REUTERS

Negotiations by G20 countries, switch to majority voting for UN decisions, might succeed where Copenhagen failed, analysts say

Climate talks by the Group of 20 and a suggested shift to majority voting for UN decisions could revive work on a new pact to fight global warming after the low-ambition Copenhagen summit, analysts say.

The UN Climate Change Secretariat has asked all nations for views by Feb. 16 about how many UN meetings are needed in 2010 to try to build momentum for the next annual ministerial talks, in Mexico from Nov. 29 to Dec. 10.

Countries are unclear what to do after Copenhagen fell short of a binding treaty urged by most nations and left the 2010 calendar almost bare. The only other planned UN meeting before Mexico is of bureaucrats, in Bonn, Germany, from May 31 to June 11.

"So far there hasn't yet been the engagement of a smaller group of countries to lead the way," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the World Resources Institute's climate and energy program.

Analysts said the G20, with summits in Canada in June and South Korea in November, might be able to help by focusing more on climate change. Calls for a relaxation of a need for unanimity on key UN decisions could ease work on a new deal.

"We need to work on the UN process -- item one is to allow for majority decisions," said Johan Rockstrom, head of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. All agree that the 194-nation UN talks are unwieldy so smaller groups are needed along the way. But Copenhagen showed that developing nations -- including those most vulnerable to desertification, rising sea levels or floods -- felt left out.

This year, U.S. President Barack Obama might want to defer to the G20 rather than push the U.S.-led Major Economies Forum (MEF) of 17 top emitters, which met six times in 2010. The G20 adds Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to MEF members.

"The United States will be very careful not to set up something that looks like a rival process to the UN," said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, adding that the G20 was a more likely venue than the MEF for climate talks.

Washington is an outsider among rich nations by staying out of the UN's existing Kyoto Protocol for cutting emissions by 2012. And carbon capping legislation is stalled in the Senate.

Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, also said Washington might be more willing to favour the G20 than the MEF. The MEF might meet if other countries, perhaps the European Union, asked for talks.

December's Copenhagen summit disappointed many nations with a deal led by major emitters, such as China and the United States, to limit global warming to below 2 C, twinned with a promise of $100 billion in annual aid from 2020.

Stavins said that finding a path to a more robust deal was a "tremendous challenge."

"It's also a game of chicken between the United States and China: China is not going to take action before the U.S. does. The U.S. Congress is very reticent to take action unless China does," he said.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has urged a review of the principle of unanimity to streamline decisions.

The Copenhagen Accord, the main outcome of the summit, was merely "noted" rather than "adopted" as a UN plan after opposition from Sudan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia.

Navroz Dubash of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi noted that China, India, South Africa and Brazil wanted extra UN meetings this year, sending "a pretty strong signal that they don't want the UN to be marginalized."

"On the other hand others, such as the U.S. and Australia, are actively seeking other venues," he said.

Kim Carstensen of the WWF environmental group and WRI's Morgan said a priority should be aid to help developing nations cope with climate change. Rich nations have promised about $10 billion a year from 2010 to 2012.

"What's going to be really important for me is that we move on finance. I think that should be possible. I think the way that would happen would be a mix of different meetings," Carstensen said.

Source:USAtoday

Climate shifts can happen quickly and without warning, making it difficult to identify tipping points that could lead to irreparable global disaster, according to a new study by the University of California, Davis.

"Many scientists are looking for the warning signs that herald sudden changes in natural systems, in hopes of forestalling those changes, or improving our preparations for them," study author Alan Hastings, professor in UC-Davis' Department of Environmental Science and Policy, says in a university news release.

This map shows the loss of Arctic sea ice from Sept. 2009 (in white) compared with the median ice extent for Sept. 1979 to 2000 (in magenta).

Yet Hastings, a renowned ecological forecaster who uses mathematical modeling to understand natural systems, adds:  "Our new study found, unfortunately, that regime shifts with potentially large onsequences can happen without warning — systems can 'tip' precipitously.

This means that some effects of global climate change on ecosystems can be seen only once the effects are dramatic. By that point `return`ing the system to a desirable state will be difficult, if not impossible."

In 2006, Hastings received the Robert H. MacArthur Award, the highest honor given by the Ecological Society of America. His new study, "Regime shifts in ecological systems can occur with no warning," was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and was published online by the journal Ecology Letters.

By Cole Wheeler

In an effort to dovetail physical fitness with sustainable practices, Yale Athletics and the Office of Sustainability are rolling out a marketing campaign to promote environmental consciousness while working out.

The Athletics Department launched Bulldog Sustainability on Jan. 15 to publicize its ongoing efforts to reduce energy, water and paper use at all athletics facilities and events, said Bryant Blount, the department’s development and outreach assistant. The department hopes to make the campaign a sustainable model for other programs nationwide, he added.

Yale Athletics’ sustainability efforts date back to the fall of 2008, when an anonymous donor provided funding to make the department more sustainable. Since then, efforts have largely focused on restructuring and streamlining energy, water and paper use within the department through measures ranging from investing in water-saving shower heads and eliminating disposable cups at sports practices to installing iPod chargers powered by exercise bikes and elliptical trainers, said Matthew Bloem GRD ’11, a research assistant employed by the Office of Sustainability to promote the campaign. Bulldog Sustainability, whose logo was unveiled at the Yale-Brown men’s basketball game Jan. 15, represents a broadening of that effort, he added.

“As we’ve entered our second year, what we’ve done is tried to sort of brand it, and that’s what people are seeing now,” he said.

For most students, the most visible part of the program is the signs that recently appeared in Payne Whitney Gym and its locker rooms. The “Briefly Nude Challenge” encourages gym users to take shorter showers, while the “Shake It Off Challenge” reminds hand-washers that after “20 good shakes,” they only need one paper towel to dry their hands. Blount said the department hopes that these and other tips will change the gym habits of the Yale community, Blount said.

Research assistant Alice Henly ’10, a varsity rower, is working to spread Bulldog Sustainability’s model beyond Yale’s campus. The University is working with the NCAA to create an online database of sustainability practices, which other athletics programs could use as a model for their own sustainable initiatives, Henly said. The Environmental Protection Agency has also expressed interest in the campaign, she added.

“This initiative is trying to be the first of its kind in terms of its comprehensive nature,” Henly said.

Reactions of gym users to the campaign have been overwhelmingly positive, Payne Whitney fitness center supervisor Elias Georges said.

“I had one person out of 300 that said ‘too many signs,’ but that’s negligible, almost moot,” he said.

Four of six gym users interviewed said they were enthusiastic about the program, though some were skeptical about the effectiveness of signs on users’ daily practices. Kyle Sherman MUS ’11 said he was optimistic that the campaign’s message would reach people.

“It’s always good to have in the back of your mind,” Sherman said. “I would say it makes a little bit of an impact and when it’s up all over the place, all the time, you can only ignore it so much.”

Yale’s iPod-charging exercise equipment was featured last semester in an NBC Connecticut TV segment entitled “Going Green — Pedal Power.”

Source: Laney College

Laney College, a multi-ethnic urban community college in downtown Oakland, California, has been developing and expanding a series of sustainable building performance programs over the last five years. We are excited to have recently joined the Green Collar Association and look forward to networking with partner colleges. Here we provide a brief overview of our programs:

The Environmental Control Technology (ECT) program offers degrees and certificates in residential, light commercial, and commercial HVAC/R (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning and Refrigeration) systems and a new certificate and degree in Building Automation Systems (pending approval). Supported by a National Science Foundation Grant, the program has expanded and deepened its curriculum to focus on best energy management practices in system design, installation, repair, operations, and maintenance. The program has recently joined the U.S. DOE and EPA Labs 21 Initiative as a Center of Excellence in High Performance Operations & Maintenance (O&M) Education and Training. Please visit http://elaney.org/wp/environmental_control_tech/ for more information on the ECT program.

In March 2009, the ECT program sponsored the first California Community Colleges Energy Efficiency and HVAC Symposium with 30 regional community colleges participating. Conference resources are available through the ECT website. In June 2010, we will host a two-day intensive workshop and peer exchange for HVAC and Building Automation programs nationwide. If you are interested in learning more and attending, please contact Barbara Widhalm at bwidhalm@peralta.edu.

In response to the growing demand for energy efficiency technicians in the residential/light commercial sector, we have launched two new grant-funded interdisciplinary programs in the past year, both designed with extensive industry input.

The Building Performance and Energy Efficiency Program (BPEEP) is an interdisciplinary accelerated one-year course of study designed to qualify graduates for immediate employment in weatherization, energy auditing, diagnostic assessments, and energy efficiency retrofitting. With applied coursework in Environmental Control Technology, Carpentry, Architecture, Electrical, and Engineering, graduates are able to choose from a wide range of career and continuing education options.

The Oakland Green Jobs Corps (OGJC) is a six-month intensive all-day program in energy auditing, energy efficiency retrofitting, water conservation, and solar hot water and PV installation. The courses build construction, carpentry, electrical and plumbing skills. Students learn about green building materials and techniques, emerging technologies, and strategies for evaluating existing buildings for green retrofitting opportunities. Field learning opportunities, including solar, greywater and rainwater installations, are available on weekends. 

For more information on both programs, please visit http://elaney.org/wp/green/.

Our curriculum is built around hands-on, problem-based learning opportunities, supported by our extensive lab facilities, including a full-size hyronic HVAC lab and multi-vendor building automation system. We have been fortunate to have had strong industry support throughout the lab and curriculum development process. Please come and visit!

Source: HVACRedu.net

Prepare For Industry Certifications ONLINE:  Building Analyst Quick Start, Service Core Program, EPA 608 Review, and R-410A Certification Courses
Powered By HVACReducation.net

Heron, Montana/ February 2010/ GreenCollarEdu.net and HVACReducation.net, the leading online industry education providers, deliver the training you need to keep your customer’s homes functioning at the very peak of performance.  Now, more than ever, HVACR technicians need certifications.  You can study for them in the comfort of your home or office, on your schedule, ONLINE. 
•  If you’re interested in working toward BPI’s Building Analyst Certification Exam, enroll in our Building Analyst Quick Start program. 
•  If you want to prepare for NATE’s HVAC Core Certification Exam, enroll in our HVACR Service Core Program. 
•  If you need to brush up before taking your EPA 608 Exam, or earn your R-410A Certification, owe have a course for that too or you can visit our blog page and view our Free R-410A Webinar

The Building Analyst Quick Start Program is made up of two comprehensive online courses:  Principles of Building Science and Comprehensive Building Assessment.  Instruction aligns with ANSI/ACCA Quality Installation & Maintenance Standards.  These courses come with an online instructor.

•  107 The Principles of Building Science Course is full of scientific facts, interactive exercises, pictures, videos, graphics, and text. Everything an individual in the building, remodeling, or trade industry needs to know to make buildings perform more efficiently. The PBS course has also been designed to help prepare individuals on the path to various NATE, NARI, BPI, RESNET, and other industry credentials related to green building performance. This course is both BPI and NATE recognized for 28 hours of continuing education.  90 days enrollment.

•  301 Performing the Comprehensive Building Assessment Students will start out learning the systems, tools and techniques commonly encountered during visual observations including evaluation of envelope components, mechanical systems and base loads such as appliances and lighting. They will then step into diagnostic testing learning first how to work safely. Students will learn how to set up and use the blower door for building pressurization/depressurization testing; and how to utilize the data obtained in making decisions. Students will learn combustion safety testing (including worst case depressurization, draft and spillage testing), and how to test various appliances for CO including: furnaces, boilers, water heaters and other combustion appliances. Students will also learn basic duct diagnostic testing. Finally, students will be taught how to use assessment information and diagnostic results to develop a work scope which can then be presented to a customer. This course will refer to the BPI Building Analyst as well as to various industry codes and standards. This course is NATE and BPI recognized for 30 hours of continuing education.  90 days enrollment

The HVAC Service Core Program is a comprehensive program specifically structured to prepare technicians to successfully pass the initial NATE Core Service Exam.  It focuses on learning objectives that have been identified by HVACR industry groups (ARI, NATE, RSES, ACCA, BPI, and PAHRA) and consists of one (1) math review and eight (8) courses students receive a 60 day enrollment for each course. These courses come with an online instructor.  Students are registered for one course at a time.  For course descriptions, visit our online catalog.  The courses making up the Service Core Program are:

R. 050 Applied Math Review
1. HVACR 101 Fundamentals
2. HVACR 102 Safety
3. HVACR 111 Electrical DC Theory Plus
4. HVACR 112 Electrical AC Theory Plus
5. HVACR 113 Electrical Common Components
6. HVACR 114 Electrical Motors
7. HVACR 121 Systems Properties & Measurement
8. HVACR 141 Refrigeration I

EPA 608 Review is a selection of four learning modules designed to provide all the necessary information for a technician to prepare for the EPA 608 Certification exam at the Universal level.  Modules are titled: Core, Type I, Type II, and Type III. Although there is no instructor, the course is rich with visuals, animations, and checkpoint tests to enforce your learning experience. Use the modules as an introduction, or a review just before you take the exam. 30 days enrollment.

R-410A Refrigerant Technology for HVACR Technicians course is designed to familiarize the technician with the differences between R - 22 and R - 410A. Background, regulations, impact on the industry, and application requirements will be presented. The course provides the technician with practical knowledge for safe performance of service techniques on systems containing R - 410A. If you understand the parameters of this course and then successfully complete the final examination, you will comply with many equipment manufacturers’ policies requiring safety and service "certification" prior to purchasing equipment containing R - 410A refrigerant. Because this course is a special qualifications course, it does not come with an instructor. However, a complete reference manual is included and is shipped upon enrollment. Instruction aligns with ANSI/ACCA Quality Installation & Maintenance Standards. This course is NATE recognized for 10 hours of continuing education (CEHs) which are applicable to NATE recertification, and BPI recognized for 5 continuing education units (CEUs). This course has been approved by International Comfort Products, LLC. Six Modules cover:
• R - 410A Refrigerant Background
• R - 410A Refrigerant Regulatory Requirements
• R - 410A Refrigerant Basics
• R - 410A Refrigerant Safety, Handling, and Service Considerations
• R - 410A System Components, Retrofitting, and Charging
• R - 410A System Troubleshooting

In addition to the efficiency and performance courses spot lighted above, HVACReducation.net and GreenCollarEdu.net have a full catalog of online assessments, reviews, short module courses, full-length courses, programs, 4 year apprenticeship, and customized employee training programs.  If you or your organization are considering online learning in the HVACR or related industries, please contact us.  For more information and pricing, visit our online Campus Store.

HVACRedu.net, founded in 2000, provides access to complete, comprehensive and growing online education programs, recognized by the leading experts in the HVACR industry as the primary online education resource.  Courses are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for the convenience of adult learners.  Courses are guided by skilled industry professionals who maintain contact with each enrolled student.  Quality education, student success, and exceptional customer service are the primary objectives.

GreenCollarEdu.net (a service of HVACReduc.net) is your source for comprehensive education and training programs that support nationally recognized standards from across the green building and green trades industries in areas such as building performance, renewable energy systems, green remodeling, insulation, air sealing, fenestrations, and the HVACR industry.

CONTACT:
Chris Compton, CEO 
Web:  http://www.HVACRedu.net
OR
Web:  http://www.greencollaredu.net
Email:  ccompton@hvacreducation.net 
Phone:  (888) 655-4822 x1116
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Blog: http://www.hvacreducationtechtips.blogspot.com/

POWER YOUR EDUCATION TO THE NEXT LEVEL!

Source:   UC Berkeley Extension

UC Berkeley Extension today announced its new designation as a U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Education Provider. USGBC sets the standards for the green building industry in the United States and abroad through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System certification program. UC Berkeley Extension is the first continuing education program at the University of California, and one of the few public continuing education programs in the country, to offer USGBC-approved course credits.

With the Obama administration's budget proposal this week for $2.4 billion in energy efficiency and renewable energy programs—and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' prediction of a 30 percent growth over the next decade in top green jobs such as mechanical engineer, environmental engineer, environmental educator, and landscape architect—the demand is growing among professionals for more green industry education.

The UC Berkeley Extension sustainability courses approved by USGBC are designed to meet that growing demand. They include advanced courses in solar, sustainable construction, renewable energy, transportation, clean technology, and sustainability leadership and management. All USGBC-approved courses are rigorously peer-reviewed and approved for credit toward LEED Professional Credentialing Maintenance.

"We are delighted to work with the USGBC as an Education Provider," said Diana Wu, dean of UC Berkeley Extension. "These approved courses will directly benefit professionals who need to 'green' their skills and knowledge to stay competitive in this emerging green economy. Our goal is to earn USGBC approval of the majority of courses in our sustainability program to meet the education needs of this growing workforce."

"Education Providers play a pivotal role by working with USGBC to provide green building professionals with the diverse continuing education they need to grow their knowledge and their careers," said Rebecca Flora, USGBC's senior vice president for education and research. "Anyone interested in broadening and deepening their understanding of green building theory, techniques and trends will benefit from the diverse and quality course offerings from USGBC and its Education Providers."

UC Berkeley Extension's Sustainability Studies program includes more than 60 courses for professionals in emerging green industries. The program emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability in a broad range of important areas including green building design and construction, LEED, solar and renewable energy, climate change and land use planning, and clean technologies. This spring, UC Berkeley Extension offers several new sustainability studies courses, as well as two new specialized programs of study: Leadership in Sustainability and Environmental Management and Solar Energy and Green Building.

Founded in 1891, UC Berkeley Extension is the continuing education branch of the University of California, Berkeley. Extension offers 3,000 courses each year, including award-winning online offerings, free and low-cost public lectures, and more than 60 professional certificates and specialized programs of study. UC Berkeley Extension is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Source:Five Winds International

The Challenge
One of the top retail stories in July 2009 was the news that Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, planned to develop a worldwide sustainability index for products sold in its stores. Walmart’s Supplier Sustainability Assessment was the first step toward that index, and they asked top tier global suppliers to complete the questionnaire within three months. 
For some suppliers who already had a sustainability strategy and team, filling out the questionnaire – which covers energy and climate; material efficiency; natural resources; and people and community – was a relatively easy task. For others, the questionnaire was a wake-up call.

Our client, a US-based manufacturer of cleaning products1, quickly realized that Walmart wasn’t only asking for transparency. They were looking to screen their suppliers based on sustainability performance. The company contacted Five Winds International for assistance, asking, “Could you help us score well in Walmart’s sustainability assessment?”

Our Approach
Through several discussions about the product portfolio, customers, and the company’s existing sustainability goals, the team quickly zeroed in on the questionnaire’s energy and climate section.

Five Winds identified the data needs and customized its existing carbon footprint templates to efficiently gather and tally the data. A walk-through energy audit of product facilities followed the footprint work, with a view toward identifying both capital improvements as well as “easy fixes”. Five Winds provided the footprint data in a format the company could use to readily substantiate its claims and score. Reduction targets based on ‘business as usual’ projected growth and cost of sales also enabled the client to set meaningful and achievable goals that could also be communicated to Walmart.

Benefits and Value
Prior to its work with Five Winds International, the company scored “below target” on all energy and climate questions. Within two months, the company scored “above target” and was able to satisfy its customer’s request. As an additional benefit from the carbon footprint and energy audit, the company uncovered an opportunity to reduce 4,000 tons of carbon emissions and save $350,000 annually through improved lighting, installation of a proposed wind turbine, and more efficient management practices.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

Five-course program will teach sought-after skills to aspiring professionals

Students anywhere in the world can now earn a certificate in geographic information systems by taking courses online from The Johns Hopkins University.

The online certificate, offered by the university's Environmental Sciences and Policy Program and endorsed by the Maryland Higher Education Commission in July, is opening for student enrollment in the fall 2008 semester.

Geographic information systems, or GIS, allow users to collect and interpret data that are displayed as maps, reports, and charts to reveal spatial relationships, patterns and trends.

 “According to the Department of Labor’s High-Growth Industry Initiative, geospatial technology is one of the top three fastest-growing industries,” said John Boland, chair of the Environmental Sciences and Policy Program. “The job potential for people skilled in GIS is extraordinary, and the Johns Hopkins online certificate in GIS caters to this audience. All five courses are administered online, allowing professionals to earn the certificate on their time.”

GIS has boomed in recent years because many industries can capitalize on this data-rich technology. Professionals in law enforcement, disaster planning, marketing, real estate, environmental management, telecommunications, public health, urban planning, and more are now realizing the advantages of adding GIS skills to their repertoire.    

“The university is dedicated to a bold initiative of augmenting our existing on-site degree offerings with quality distance learning in a robust, interactive, and asynchronous online format,” said Sarah Steinberg, associate dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “The success we’ve had with our Environmental Sciences and Policy Program reassured us that providing the certificate in GIS in the online platform as well was the right thing to do. And because the format is asynchronous, students can keep pace with their peers regardless of where they live.”

Required Courses for the Online Certificate in GIS
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
In this course, students become familiar with GIS concepts and gain the experience necessary to appreciate the utility of GIS in decision-making. Topics covered include the fundamentals of cartography, geo-referencing, data structures, database design, project planning, and basic spatial data analysis. The course provides an overview of the capabilities of GIS software. Class time is divided between lectures and GIS exercises that reinforce critical concepts. Completion of a term project is part of the course.

Remote Sensing: Earth Observing Systems and Applications
This course introduces remote sensing as an important technology to further our understanding of Earth's land, atmospheric, and oceanic processes. Students study remote sensing science, techniques, and satellite technologies to become familiar with the types of information that can be obtained and how this information can be applied in the natural and social sciences. Applications include assessment of land cover and land use; mapping and analysis of natural resources; weather and climate studies; pollution detection and monitoring; disaster monitoring; and identification of oceanographic features.

Introduction to Spatial Analysis with GIS
This course introduces students to using statistical techniques for solving spatial problems. Students will learn to apply the principles of statistics to address the distribution and location of a variety of problems. Examples and assignments are drawn from many GIS applications: business, urban planning, security, public health, transportation and telecommunications. Topics include spatial sampling, measures of dispersion and central tendency in spatial analysis, and regression analysis applied to spatial data.

Advanced GIS Modeling (formerly Advanced GIS for Environmental Modeling)
This course moves beyond the fundamentals of GIS to explore application to problems in various sectors. Students review current research in the field, learn relevant modeling techniques, and utilize advanced software tools for analysis. The course involves the use and integration of a variety of data sources including maps, GPS, and satellite imagery. Specific GIS techniques in spatial analysis are introduced. The course builds on former GIS software experience. Students develop a significant GIS project over the course of the semester and present their findings at the end.

Development and Management of GIS Projects
This course teaches knowledge and skills for managing GIS projects, including technical, legal, ethical and institutional problems. Students will examine the institutional role of geographic information systems and technologies, explore key issues in organizational management of GIS projects (planning, staffing, budgeting), and develop skills to design and manage geospatial databases. Ethical and legal issues in data acquisition, sharing, and representation will also be discussed.

For more information about Johns Hopkins’ online certificate in GIS, please contact:

Dr. Eileen McGurty
Associate Program Chair
Environmental Sciences & Policy Program and Certificate in GIS
(410) 516-7049

By Bryan Walsh

Since his election, President Barack Obama has emphasized the importance of developing new sources of energy and cultivating the jobs that will come with them. "I am convinced that whoever builds a clean energy economy, whoever is at the forefront of that, is going to own the 21st-century global economy," Obama told a bipartisan meeting of governors at the White House on Wednesday.

But, increasingly, the President's new clean economy seems to rely on old sources of energy. At his State of the Union speech on Jan. 27, Obama coupled calls for comprehensive energy and climate legislation with a mention of the need for offshore oil drilling, and his 2011 budget includes $36 billion in new loan guarantees for nuclear power.
(See the World Future Energy Summit.)

On Tuesday, the White House further announced new steps to boost production of biofuels, which are considered environmentally questionable by many greens, and to expand research into technology that would help capture and store carbon emitted by burning coal. It is an energy program designed to increase U.S. energy independence and to create new jobs but, to the dismay of greens, not necessarily to reduce carbon emissions. "Every American is anxious to have an energy and fuel agenda that puts us back in control of our own energy and fuel future," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters. "[This is a] clear pathway to energy security."

The new White House plan will support the development of five to 10 carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) demonstration projects by 2016. The idea is to show on a commercial scale that coal can be burned cleanly for electricity — without accelerating climate change — by injecting millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ground. The new plan isn't exactly new, though. In 2003, former President George W. Bush authorized a similar CCS pilot project called FutureGen, though the program was eventually shut down, ostensibly for exceeding budget projections. But under the current White House plan, the Department of Energy will be spending far more, investing more than $4 billion in CCS, with the expectation that industry will add another $7 billion.
(See the top 10 green ideas of 2009.)

Environmentalists are generally against so-called "clean coal" projects on the grounds that the technology remains unproven, and because they justify the continued use of coal, which is currently one of the major sources of greenhouse gases. But Secretary of Energy Steven Chu — who once said, before his time in government, that "coal is my worst nightmare" — now believes that coal is too plentiful in the U.S. not to develop a way to burn it cleanly. "Fossil fuels will likely be a continuing source of electricity for the foreseeable future," said Chu. "We believe this is an important part of the response to climate change."

In fact, Chu is right: Coal accounts for nearly half of the U.S. electricity supply, and the percentage is even greater in China. The International Energy Agency projects that the demand for coal will increase 53% between 2007 and 2030, which is perhaps the most frightening figure for climate scientists. Although there is no guarantee that CCS will work, the world needs it to work and government should be the one funding its initial development. And if the U.S. can succeed in developing truly "clean coal," it will have created a technology the rest of the world can use.  (See pictures of the new ways to boost energy efficiency.)

The government's intentions regarding biofuels are somewhat less straightforward — apparently muddied by politics — and its plan could backfire. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday finalized the long-term renewable-fuels mandate created in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. That law required the production of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel annually by 2022. (Total biofuel production in 2009 was 11.1 billion gallons.) The key word is "renewable" — in recent years, many scientists have argued that ethanol made from corn isn't renewable at all, because the deforestation and other changes in land use associated with scaled-up ethanol production would more than cancel out the carbon emissions saved by switching from gasoline to ethanol.

In finalizing the Renewable Fuels Standard, which determines which biofuels are classified as green, the EPA says it took into account indirect land use (that is, how much new land would need to be cleared to plant food crops to replace the corn used to make fuel) for the first time, and still determined that corn ethanol qualifies as renewable, emitting at least 20% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline. "We wanted to know that they were really renewable," said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. "That's exactly what happened here through the review process."

In addition to corn ethanol, the new fuel standard will encourage the development of advanced biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol, fuel made from the waste parts of plants. And the EPA says that by producing 36 billion gallons of biofuels per year by 2022, the U.S. will reduce its dependence on oil by more than 328 million a barrels a year, the equivalent of taking 27 million cars off the road annually by 2022. But while green groups praised the EPA for taking land use into account in the new standard, classifying corn ethanol as green still flies in the face of recent science to the contrary, as well as the actions of California, which is currently being sued by biofuels advocacy groups that claim the state's low-carbon fuel standards are too restrictive of corn ethanol.

Jackson insists the EPA review process was thorough — "I would not sign a rule if I did not believe we filled the lines," she told reporters — but the U.S. Department of Agriculture advised the rulemaking, and the ethanol lobby has powerfully influenced that agency in the past. The EPA says that it expects improvements in crop yield and productivity to help limit land use changes from ethanol — less land needed for more corn — but that kind of industrial agriculture has its own environmental impacts.

More to the point, however, biofuels may never be a truly sustainable solution to climate change, not in a world with a growing population and growing food demands. But supporting biofuels does make for good politics, especially among Republicans in the farm states of the Midwest. Ditto clean coal and nuclear power, two energy sources always beloved of conservatives. It's bipartisan energy policy. "I am convinced that America can win the race to build a clean energy economy, but we're going to have to overcome the weight of our own politics," Obama said Tuesday. "We have to focus not so much on those narrow areas where we disagree, but on the broad areas where we agree."

If Obama can barter nuclear and biofuel subsidies for Republican support for, say, a carbon cap, his policies might be worth it. But if not, his energy policy — at least in its early stages — risks being pulled down by the weight of Washington politics.

By Chris Martin &  Jim Efstathiou Jr.

President Barack Obama is spending $2.1 million to help Suntech Power Holdings Co. build a solar- panel plant in Arizona. It will hire 70 Americans to assemble components made by Suntech’s 11,000 Chinese workers.

That gap shows the challenge Obama faces as he works to create “green” jobs. Asia makes more than half the world’s wind and solar energy equipment, and is gaining ground as U.S. factories lose out to cheaper labor and higher demand for clean energy. China for the first time topped the U.S. in wind-turbine manufacturing and installations last year, the Brussels-based Global Wind Energy Council said yesterday in a report.

Obama is giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to the wind and solar industries to create jobs in the U.S. even as production expands faster overseas. First Solar Inc., the world’s largest maker of thin-film solar-power modules, won $16.3 million to add 200 manufacturing jobs at its Ohio plant, yet 71 percent of its planned factory growth will go to Malaysia. The company employs 4,500 globally.

“The cost of manufacturing here is too expensive compared to Asia,” said Guy Chaffin, chief executive officer of Elite Search International, a Roseville, California-based executive search firm that has found employees for Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar and Solar Millennium AG. “As far as a flood of good jobs coming to the U.S., we’re not seeing it.”

To compete for clean-energy jobs, the U.S. must create demand by capping fossil-fuel pollution that contributes to global warming, Carol Browner, Obama’s coordinator of energy and environment policy, said yesterday at the opening of a three-day renewable-energy conference in Washington.

Cap-and-Trade Proposal
Obama backs a “cap-and-trade” system to limit carbon emissions and establish a market in pollution allowances, a proposal that passed the House and has stalled in the Senate. Congress is also debating measures, backed by the administration, that would require utilities to buy some of their power from renewable sources.

“Will batteries that power the next generation of hybrid cars come from South Korea or South Carolina?” Browner said. “The best way to take advantage of these opportunities is to put in place the right price signals here at home, create the demand here at home so that our companies will make the investment here at home.”

The U.S. solar industry added about 18,000 jobs last year, almost doubling total employment to about 40,000, said Monique Hanis, a spokeswoman for the Solar Energy Industry Association, a Washington-based lobbying group. About half those were in manufacturing, she said.

Wind Industry
Jobs in the wind industry held steady at about 85,000 last year, as a drop in manufacturing was offset by gains in installations and development, according to the Wind Energy Association.

“We really want the manufacturing jobs, too, and that will require long-term incentives,” said Denise Bode, chief executive officer of the Washington-based trade group. She is pushing for a renewable-energy mandate that would require utilities to buy an increasing amount of their needs from solar and wind generation, similar to programs in more than 28 states.

“Can’t we all agree that these jobs shouldn’t be going to China or Germany or Spain -- they should be right here in the United States?” Obama said at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Feb. 1. “Let’s put people to work on solar panels and wind towers and cutting-edge batteries.”

Last year’s $787 billion economic stimulus package included about $80 billion for energy programs and created 200,000 jobs in construction and clean energy even as 7.2 million jobs were lost over the past two years, according to Obama. The package included $2.3 billion in tax credits for renewable energy manufacturers. Obama wants to expand that subsidy by $5 billion.

‘Good-Paying’ Jobs
Republican critics such as Senator Christopher Bond say such subsidies are producing many low-wage construction jobs and few better-paid manufacturing positions, all the while increasing the federal deficit.

“Green jobs like solar power are good-paying, middle class-supporting manufacturing jobs,” Bond of Missouri said in an interview. “Those jobs are in China and Malaysia. Solar companies in Missouri are creating low-wage jobs to install them.”

Suntech, the world’s largest maker of polysilicon solar panels, said last week it plans to open a plant in Goodyear, Arizona, that will assemble 30 megawatts of solar modules a year starting in September. In China, Suntech plans to boost production capacity this year by 40 percent to 1,400 megawatts.

In Wuxi, China, where Suntech makes solar panels, the monthly minimum wage is 968 renminbi ($141.79), according to China’s official newspaper People’s Daily. That’s 89 percent less than the U.S. minimum-wage of about $1,320 a month for a 40-hour work-week.

Driving Investment
First Solar plans to expand production capacity 64 percent to 1,802 megawatts by 2012, mostly in Malaysia. The company’s Ohio factory will add 53 megawatts to match capacity in Germany. A plant in France will be capable of making 106 megawatts. A megawatt of energy can power about 800 average homes, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

“Most of our plants are outside the U.S.,” Rob Gillette, First Solar’s chief executive officer, said during a Senate committee hearing on Jan. 28.

Low manufacturing costs and policies that boost demand by limiting carbon-dioxide emissions “will drive investments and manufacturing overseas unless policies here help drive market growth,” Gillette said.

Source: NYIT

Congressman Steve Israel Joins Ceremony to Unveil NYIT's Solar Carport-Key to NYIT's Green Print Initiative and a Major Contribution to Sustainable Energy Solutions for Long Island

New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) officially introduced the first of two solar carports it is developing at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on July 27 at the Central Islip site.

Part of NYIT's "One Spot, One Car, One Commute" solar plug-in hybrid electric vehicle project (S-PHEV), the freestanding, four-car carport prototype has solar panels integrated into its structure. The carport shades parked vehicles while collecting energy from the sun and converting it into power to charge plug-in hybrid vehicles.

U.S. Congressman Steve Israel (D-Huntington) participated in the ceremony with NYIT's President Edward Guiliano and other members of NYIT's faculty and administration. The congressman was instrumental in helping NYIT secure a $500,000 federal grant that funded the solar carport research, as well as a campus-wide "green print" initiative to determine the carbon footprint of the university, to research alternative energy technologies, and to undertake broad efforts to reduce energy consumption on campus and in the community.

"I'm proud to have worked with NYIT to make this innovative project happen. This is a great example of how alternative energy technologies can help us all go 'off the grid.' I look forward to the day when we're all using solar panels to charge our cars and light our homes," said Rep. Israel.

Daniel Rapka, who received a master's degree in energy management from NYIT in 2007, is program manager for the S-PHEV project and an instructor in NYIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, estimates that a single 200-square-foot parking space can collect enough solar energy on an annual basis to enable a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle to drive the typical daily New York metro commute.

According to Rapka, "Charging plug-in hybrid electric cars is only the first step. The solar power generated by the carports can also be diverted to the local power grid and, in the near future, with a process called Vehicle to Grid (V2G) sharing, the plug-in electric hybrid cars can be a resource for the grid."

David G. Schieren, a 2006 graduate of NYIT's energy management master's degree program and CEO of EmPower, the solar contractor that designed and installed the carport, said "Charging electric vehicles with solar energy means that we can drive without consuming any fossil fuels-that is the ultimate goal. This is a grand slam for energy security, the environment, and domestic economic growth. EmPower is proud to be partnering with NYIT on this vital project that represents significant progress toward this goal. We look forward to collaborating on making this technology a widespread reality."

The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place in the Student Activities Center (SAC) parking lot at NYIT's Central Islip site on Carleton Avenue (Country Road 17), just south of East Suffolk Avenue. In addition to the ribbon cutting, President Guiliano and Rep. Israel spoke, and NYIT experts discussed the technical aspects of the carport. NYIT's two converted hybrid Toyota Priuses, as well as several campus electric vehicles, were on hand to demonstrate how the carport works.

By Gary Stephen Ross

The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture. — Jonathan Raban

When I knock off work this September afternoon, around two o’clock, I’ll stick an Eckhart Tolle book in my backpack, hop on my bike, and head for the North Shore. I thought of going sailing on English Bay, or playing tennis at Jericho, or golfing at Shaughnessy, or maybe swimming laps at the Second Beach pool, but I’ve decided to do the Grouse Grind instead. Along the way, pedalling furiously, I’ll give the one-finger salute to a few road-hogging, carbon-emitting drivers before stopping in at Choices to grab a Happy Planet juice. Organically recharged, I’ll follow the seawall to the Lions Gate Bridge and over to North Van.

At the foot of Grouse Mountain, I’ll join the hundreds of other fitness buffs who scramble up the 2.9-kilometre trail on a typical summer’s day. Stumping up the Grind is a what-the-hell-was-I-thinking workout; it takes about an hour (personal best 58:45, actually, as recorded by the chip in my season pass). Up top, with luck, and once I stop feeling as if I might hurl, I’ll score a table on the patio. There, enjoying a Granville Island Lager and gazing out over the Strait of Georgia, the city, and much of the Lower Mainland, I’ll tweet about the experience, check email, and bullshit with fellow Grinders about the brilliant summer we’ve had, the awesome view, and all the poor saps who don’t live here in the world’s most livable city, at the centre of (as our licence plates assure us) the Best Place on Earth.

Any city of consequence is, from the outside, a lamination of clichés; Vancouver, even more than most places, lends itself to spoof. The melodramatic views, the dependable wackiness of local (and provincial) politics, the green roofs and sustainably harvested spot prawns and Critical Mass cycling rallies, and, especially, the alternating smugness and insecurity of the citizenry: what’s not to parody? Everything’s in 3-D. You want drug addiction and wrenching, in-your-face psychosis the likes of which you’ll find nowhere else? Stroll through the Downtown Eastside, a twenty-square-block human zoo. Want to visit an Asian enclave that’s a cyberlike parallel universe? Check out the Aberdeen mall in Richmond, south of the city proper: two solitudes, Pacific variety. Think you’ve got a cool urban recreational space where you live? Try the spectacular, 400-hectare promontory called Stanley Park, with its bald eagles, heron rookery, and ever-shifting vistas of ocean, mountains, and container ships at anchor, awaiting their turn at the gateway to the Pacific Rim.

The trouble with clichés, of course, is that they heighten reality while bleeding it of subtlety. And so it’s possible to be startled by Vancouver, right there in front of you, but not quite take it in, as you do a killer whale that breaches suddenly, once, before disappearing; or to admire the city without seeing beyond its fetching outline, as you might a server at Cactus Club, a “casual fine dining” chain staffed by lush young women in low-cut black dresses, some of whom are no doubt putting themselves through medical school.

“All the moms with their little yoga mats,” a friend from Toronto chuckled as we emerged from lunch in Kitsilano one day last summer, “and their fair trade lattes. And their reusable shopping bags, for buying local produce.” Well, sure, how quaint, and how handy that the caricatures are so plentiful. Don’t forget Chip Wilson’s seaweed-neutral Lululemon wear, standard issue for the yoga moms. And Gregor Robertson, our bicycle-happy mayor. And Sarah McLachlan, doing public service announcements for the SPCA. And the Dalai Lama, who visits regularly, and the snowboarders, and the life coaches, and the never-say-die No Games 2010 coalition, with their megaphones and spray paint, vandalizing the Olympic clock that has been counting down the days, minutes, and seconds until the Games begin and Vancouver takes its rightful place among the great cities of the world that have hosted the Winter Games: Sarajevo, Albertville, Nagano, Lillehammer, Calgary!

Amid the stereotypes, of course, obscured by them, Vancouverites live substantial, complicated, inaccessible lives. Newcomers say folks here are quick to engage you in a friendly chat but slow to invite you over for dinner. There may be a flaky, hippie vibe to the lineup at Trout Lake Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, but there is a seriousness of purpose as well, an act-on-it conviction that organic tomatoes from the Okanagan are in every way superior to industrial tomatoes from Mexico. Local initiatives to address the Downtown Eastside, too, are more than compulsory nods toward civic responsibility; they are attempts to ameliorate vexing problems before they ossify into permanence. In a city where crappy little bungalows go for a million bucks and many luxury condos belong to offshore owners who spend little time here, there’s real concern that Vancouver has become a high-end global tourist destination young and working-class people can no longer afford.

Social issues are kept front and centre by the same smart, committed cadre of activists who remind you that The Corporation (book and documentary) was done by Joel Bakan, a cooler, post-doc version of Michael Moore (Bakan teaches law at UBC and plays jazz guitar on the side). Some of the most high-powered people in town sit on the board of Streetohome, an agency created to address homelessness. A 2,000-square-metre community “farm” has been established in the middle of the Downtown Eastside. A local writer, Charles Montgomery, launched a homestay program for Olympic visitors, with half the proceeds going to charity. Tom Cooper, a Christian minister who heads City in Focus, organized a 2010 outreach initiative that has brought together more than 1,100 religious and community organizations. A young activist, Matt Hern, started a car-free day on Commercial Drive a few years ago that this June will involve half a dozen neighbourhoods. There is a palpable sense of participating in a grand civic experiment; this adolescent city is a work-in-progress, and many citizens, one way or another, eagerly partake in the work.

MR. GREEN
Green” is not merely a buzzword, a mantra, or a way of life for many people here; it’s an orthodoxy. Vancouver has long served as a repository for sustainable thinking. David Suzuki was a lonely voice decades before people like Bono and Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio joined the choir. Greenpeace set sail from these shores on its international mission; and the new wave of eco-warriors, though you may not know their names, is even more directly shaping the global agenda. It was the UBC economist William Rees who made graspable the notion of the carbon footprint — essentially, one’s impact on the planet, a yardstick now widely used to measure an economy’s capacity to sustain itself. At Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island in 1993, Tzeporah Berman was a young tree hugger; now, in a volte-face that angers many of her fellow activists, she argues for the very things she once questioned, such as wind farms and tidal power and run-of-river projects, believing the issue of climate change is so urgent we must exploit every alternative energy source we can. Meanwhile, from his office at Simon Fraser University, the economist Mark Jaccard, a member of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consults to NGOs and governments the world over, basically arguing that we don’t have time to effect change through smart hydro meters and ten-cent plastic bags, that rigorously enforced legislation is the only way to go.

Mayor Robertson, too, with his shirt model looks and too-good-to-be-true bio (international sailor, Cortes Islander, organic farmer, family man, green entrepreneur, NDP member of the provincial legislature), is more easily caricatured than fathomed. Having vowed to create the world’s greenest city, he has, predictably, posed for photo ops in the community garden he put in at City Hall and cycled for the TV cameras in the bike lane he dedicated on the Burrard Bridge. But he’s done considerably more. The city’s hiring of Sadhu Johnston, a driving force behind Chicago’s Greenaissance, was a coup. Its Vancouver 2020 report, which Robertson unveiled at an environmental conference last fall, was notable for its eschewing of vague bromides in favour of hard targets: a 33 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2007 levels; the creation of 20,000 green jobs; a 20 percent improvement in the efficiency of all buildings. And the city’s brand (yes, cities these days are branded) is “Green Capital,” after the hoped-for flood of investment in sustainable businesses. There is even talk that City Hall may be a way station en route to the premier’s office in Victoria — an office now occupied, for a third term, by the Liberal Gordon Campbell, himself a former Vancouver mayor.

Sustainability has become the defining narrative of Robertson’s mayoralty and may well be his legacy; if he does set his sights on provincial pastures, he’ll have serious green cred. By the most dependable benchmark we’ve devised — GHGs, or annual greenhouse gas emissions per capita — Vancouver (at 4.9 tonnes) is already the most eco-friendly city in North America, well ahead of New York (10.5 tonnes), Los Angeles (13 tonnes), Seattle (11.5 tonnes), and Toronto (11.6 tonnes). And in just about every reckoning of the world’s eco-friendly cities, Vancouver ranks up there with Reykjavik, Copenhagen, and Malmö. We have the most advanced electric vehicle infrastructure and municipal bylaws in North America, and Nissan will introduce the world’s first all-electric, zero-emission vehicle, the Nissan LEAF, here in 2011, ahead of the global rollout in 2012. The Athletes Village at Southeast False Creek will likely be the largest LEED gold–certified development in the country. Vancouver diverts more than half its recyclable waste — the average among Canadian municipalities is 22 percent — and aims for 70 percent by 2015. Methane from the landfill south of town warms forty hectares of greenhouses for local vegetable growers. It’s no surprise that the billionaire Aquilini family has turned its attention to greener waste management, believing that public education — and a few years — is all that stands between the city’s practice of trucking 500,000 tonnes of garbage annually to Cache Creek, in the BC interior, and the sort of waste-to-energy incineration that has reduced emissions in cities like Vienna, Osaka, and the Aquilinis’ ancestral hometown, Brescia, in northern Italy.

The green ethos pervades the city’s planning department, and the configuration of Vancouver’s glass-towered downtown — the work of former planner Larry Beasley — is so widely admired that much of the urban planning world comes here to pace our sidewalks, the better to understand view corridors, high-rises on retail pedestals, and the commotion of people and cafés and bicycles and townhouses that the urban theorist Jane Jacobs called the “sidewalk ballet.” Beasley was a master at extracting heritage, green space, and public amenities from developers in `return` for density. Never mind that many critics find the mould rigidly standardized and the city full of monotonous, copycat architecture; Beasley, who left in 2006 (and took a good chunk of the planning department with him), is always jetting off to Rotterdam or Dallas or the Emirates, adapting “Vancouverism” on four or five different continents.

Many local architects are also in demand elsewhere. James Cheng, who designed the Shangri-La hotel and condo complex (at 200 metres, Vancouver’s tallest building), is responsible for the Shangri-La now going up at Adelaide and University in Toronto. Peter Busby is often in Abu Dhabi. John and Patricia Patkau are developing a massive project for the University of Pennsylvania. Chinese planners have a particular fondness for Vancouver talent: Bing Thom, an Arthur Erickson acolyte who’s done a dozen notable buildings here, is working on Dalian New Town, a city for a million people; Nick Milkovich has created a 110-hectare community for Weihai’s Golden Thread Hill; and Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden is designing Crystal City, an entire residential and commercial neighbourhood in Beijing. In the hyper-build lead-up to the 2010 Games, Vancouver devised a carefully systematized approach to the built environment that we now export around the globe.

Indeed, if the measure of an idea is how widely it’s disseminated and how passionately it’s embraced, this city is anything but the kayaking, navel-gazing, pot-smoking Lotus Land of popular imagination. It’s a hotbed of entrepreneurship and creativity. “Doesn’t anybody here work?” a visitor joked one October afternoon as we walked past a surprisingly active Kits Beach. Yes, people do work, all the time — just not in head offices, since we have very few. They launch start-ups, they freelance, they find Wi-Fi spots, they unfurl blueprints at Starbucks. They invent, imagine, concoct. Sure, we have Jean and Alastair Carruthers to thank for Botox, as apt a metaphor for superficiality as you can imagine. But we also have Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon to thank for the 100-Mile Diet, which began as a blog on thetyee.ca and has become shorthand for the global locavore movement (in much the same way that, about twenty years ago, Douglas Coupland’s first novel coalesced the skeptical, cockeyed anomie of the day into Generation X).

Laugh at the clichés, but understand that leading-edge thinking elsewhere is often the norm here. From North America’s only supervised injection site to a police chief who openly supports the idea of making addiction a public health issue, not a criminal one; from UBC’s breakthroughs in sports medicine to the bold social experiment of the Woodward’s development, which combines public housing with high-end units; from inventors like Phil Nuytten, the father of the underwater Newtsuit, to Internet millionaires like Markus Frind (plentyoffish.com) and Stewart Butterfield (flickr.com); from D-Wave’s breakthrough in quantum computing to Saltworks Technologies’ cost-effective desalination system, Vancouver incubates far more than its share of striking new ideas. If the continent is a centrifuge, flinging novelty and eccentricity and experimentation to the margins, then what Portland and Los Angeles and Seattle are to the US — last-frontier outposts of wisdom and wackiness, civic laboratories for new ideas — so, in many ways, is Vancouver to this country and, indeed, the world.

Which is one reason why that hateful phrase “world class” has lately entered the local vocabulary.

THE WORLD-CLASS THING

Attention, gourmands: heard about our restaurants? Bon Appétit spoke of Vancouver’s “thriving Asian restaurant culture, possibly the most vibrant in North America.” Beppi Crosariol suggested in the Globe and Mail that Toronto may have been overtaken as the country’s dining capital. Pointedly bypassing Toronto and Montreal, culinary titans Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened their first Canadian rooms here. The hell-bent Gordon Ramsay has described Araxi, up the road in Whistler, as “the best restaurant in Canada.” And did you know that Pino Posteraro, chef and proprietor of Cioppino’s in Yaletown, got invited to cook at James Beard House in New York? When you consider the concentration of options, is Vanhattan really such a stretch? We’re world class, right?

“The world-class thing reminds me of Toronto in the ’80s,” says Anthony Perl, the silver-haired head of urban studies at Simon Fraser University. A New Yorker, he came to Vancouver four years ago by way of Harvard and the University of Toronto. “When people start saying that, alarms should go off in city planning and governance minds. They thought they’d invented the answer; if something was done in Toronto, it must be successful. We risk that here — our megaproject mania for highways, SkyTrains to UBC, stuff like that.” UBC president Stephen Toope has announced his intention to create a world-class university.

The food scene is invoked as the pudding in which to find world-class proof, and diverse influences certainly add depth to a cuisine blessed with wonderful local produce and seafood. Vij’s, off Granville Street, was referred to by the New York Times as “easily among the finest Indian restaurants in the world,” and critics who know Japanese food rank Tojo’s, on Broadway, up there with the best of them. From the rough-and-tumble seafood shack Go Fish, to the elegant refinement of West and C and db Bistro Moderne, to the profusion of first-rate Asian spots, there’s no doubting the richness of the culinary landscape; but the microscopic attention paid to it suggests, frankly, a dearth of more substantial topics.

Restaurant criticism here, as in many a burgeoning city, sometimes resembles professional cheerleading (in which, as editor-in-chief of Vancouver magazine, I can fairly be accused of participating) or, on the web, endless amateur nitpicking. So many people spend so much time deconstructing and photographing and blogging about what they put in their mouths that you’d think they were preparing for an exam. Dining has as much to do with fashion as food, of course, each place outdoing the last in lavishness (the plushly expensive Coast) or thrift (the minimum-security Campagnolo), the daily ebb and flow recorded and amplified for distribution by a small army of “experts” — bloggers, reviewers, oenophiles, free-ride artists, all of them one click away from the next BC wine tasting, small plates sampler, or media preview. Dining out is indeed a treat — excellent, diverse, reasonable. But in what world-class city would a chef’s departure from a restaurant make front page headlines, as Rob Feenie’s from Lumière did a couple of years ago? Or would you have trouble hailing a cab at 10:30 at night? Or would Presbyterian liquor laws endure into the twenty-first century?

The professional sports scene also gives the lie to Vancouver’s longed-for status. Consider the anguish occasioned by the Canucks’ failure to go deep in the NHL playoffs each year — compost for untold column inches and endless hours of talk radio. The team’s long-ago brushes with glory (they lost to the Islanders in the 1982 Stanley Cup final and to the Rangers in 1994), and the local reflex of invoking these as moments of sporting significance, serve as inverse reminders that we’ve lacked an NBA franchise since the Grizzlies relocated to Memphis in 2001, and that the nearest Major League Baseball game is a couple of hours down the road in Seattle. The NFL Seahawks remind us that we have only the CFL Lions. The junior hockey Giants and professional soccer Whitecaps do well enough, but we’re talking WHL and MLS here, acronyms that even a sports fan may take a moment to unpack.

Besides a full roster of major-league franchises, Vancouver lacks more basic indicators of civic heft and maturity. Until last summer, when the Canada Line opened, there was no direct public transit route from downtown to the airport. YVR serves up to arriving visitors a brief parody of Northwest Coast culture — Bill Reid sculptures, fake waterfalls, canned bird noises — before depositing them in the midst of unending construction. Pacific Central Station, too, is a tacky interface between this supposedly world-class city and the world. “For lots of train travellers, their first view of Vancouver is seeing people passed out in Thornton Park,” says Anthony Perl. “We should be presenting them with the face of our city; instead, we present them with a very different part of the anatomy.”

He rhymes off a list of shortcomings you won’t find in great cities: no downtown university with an adjoining student neighbourhood; no broad pedestrian promenade; no major civic square. A great city is a world unto itself, defying attempts to break it into its constituent elements. Berlin, Rome, New York: these are urban confabulations, memory vying with amnesia, civic magma bubbling and hardening under the weight of history. World-class city? It’s the world, not the city, that gets to decide. Penelope Chester, the daughter of a French publisher, studied in Paris and New York and Boston and travelled the planet before spending a year and a half in Vancouver working for an international NGO. Now based in Liberia, she liked Vancouver but noted that locals “have an exalted sense of their city’s standing in the world, without much experience of the world to support it.” If the “world-class” discussion teaches us nothing else, it confirms that such assessments — like claims of genius or insanity — are most reliably left to others.

BOB THE BUILDER
Trim, affable, casually spiffy, sometimes frenetic, Bob Rennie is a fifty-two-year-old condo marketer, but that description does not begin to reflect his role or his standing in the city. Chauffeured about in his Audi S8 V-10 or his Bentley, he’s more or less constantly on his BlackBerry, from six in the morning till midnight, saying (or thumbing) things like “I’ll have a word with Rich,” meaning Coleman, the provincial housing minister; or “I’ll see what Francesco thinks,” as in Aquilini, who owns the Canucks and GM Place; or “Jeff’s away till the twelfth,” meaning Wall, the Vancouver photographer whose show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York a couple of years ago earned stellar reviews and whose works sell for a million dollars a pop. Rennie seems to know almost everyone, and almost everyone seems inordinately fond of him.

Rennie made his fortune persuading people to queue up in the rain at 5 a.m. to put down a deposit on the idea of (let’s say) 725 square feet of marble-topped, burnished steel “lifestyle.” People were buying an idea rather than a condo, since the condo they were buying was actually nothing more than a hologram of aspiration shimmering above a muddy hole in the ground. And so it would remain for months, or years, during which time their deposits would be used to complete the project. Rennie Marketing Systems took a cut — as much as $50,000 per unit — and Rennie turned a good chunk of it into a contemporary art collection (some 1,000 pieces) that rivals any in the world and explains his presence on the American Acquisitions Board of the Tate Modern in London, England.

This morning, BlackBerry in hand, wearing a crisp white shirt, black trousers, black and white sneakers, designer specs, and a red hard hat, Rennie is showing me through his makeover of the Wing Sang Building, the oldest in Chinatown. When all is said and done, the Rennie Museum will cost him something like $20 million. (“I’m not really that rich,” he says with a shrug. “I’m all in — this is my life now.”) Besides a home for his offices, the space houses an appointment-only showcase for some prized pieces (which are otherwise kept in an industrial warehouse in South Vancouver). It lets him collaborate with curators around the world to stage exhibits (the first features the work of Palestinian conceptual artist Mona Hatoum, whom he collects). The audacious renovation signals, and will accelerate, the evolution of Chinatown, the next part of the city to be gentrified and resold (with the help, no doubt, of Rennie Marketing Systems). It positions him at the crossroads where business abuts culture, and at the fulcrum of the East-West teeter-totter. And it demonstrates his money-meets-mouth commitment to the arts, in a city where the rich don’t always share his priorities.

“Would you consider what we’re doing here,” he asks slyly, above the din of mitre saws and nail guns, “a challenge to others to participate? A lot of people in this town say, ‘Why put all that money into an art museum? If you have $20 million, why wouldn’t you buy a bigger house?’ You run across that mentality all the time.”

Vancouver is awash in private-jet wealth. Jimmy Pattison, one of the best-heeled men in the country, is the informal head of a local billionaires’ club. But with notable exceptions (including Southam heiress Martha Lou Henley and developer Michael Audain), the moneyed class lacks the cultural IQ you find among the elite in established cities. Mining financier Frank Giustra donated $100 million to the William J. Clinton Foundation, and flies the former US president around the globe in his MD-87, promoting their humanitarian projects (and his own mining concerns); he gives his time and money to Streetohome, the homelessness agency; yet he seems to have little interest in ensuring his hometown has a decent opera company, ballet corps, theatre scene, or art gallery.

“Partly it’s that idea of generational wealth that Will and Ariel Durant talk about in The Lessons of History,” says Tom Cooper of City in Focus. “Vancouver’s rich are still in acquisition mode. It’s the third and fourth generation that starts thinking about endowing a chair or funding the arts or charities. We don’t have Carnegies and Rockefellers here, because the wealthy families are still too busy making money to stop and wonder what to do with it.”

“The problem in this city,” suggests Bob Rennie, “is that people put you on their boards because they want your money, not your energy or your ideas.” He doesn’t single out the decrepit, antiquated Vancouver Art Gallery, but his disdain for the VAG and its director, Kathleen Bartels, is no secret. The securing of a new site and construction of a new VAG seemed assured a couple of years ago, but the site acquisition fell through and major funding has been scarce. “I think they’re going about it the wrong way,” says Rennie. “‘We need the grand gesture: let’s hire a starchitect, let’s make a statement, let’s go for the splashiest exhibition.’ It grows out of a small-town mentality. We have people here who are royalty in the international art world: Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Roy Arden, Brian Jungen. Did you know that Rodney Graham has a major show in Basel this June? But oh no, we couldn’t possibly be good enough to stand on our own merits.”

THE BLUE BOY
My first memory of Vancouver, as a pubescent kid in the early ’60s: I’m stepping off the plane from Toronto with my father and brother into a foggy evening ripe with sulfurous emissions from the pulp mills along the Fraser River.

We check in to a place on Marine Drive called, oddly, the Blue Boy, after the eighteenth-century Gainsborough portrait that’s cheaply reproduced in the lobby of the motor inn — or maybe it’s not so odd, in a city named after the stern British Royal Navy captain who explored these shores at the end of the eighteenth century. While my brother and I fetch buckets of ice or run riot in the halls or shoot pool in the basement, Dad — employed by a union based in Pittsburgh — conducts business from our room, plotting with a cast of characters out of Damon Runyon, ordering in Chinese food and, at strange hours, arranging for a bottle of rye by asking for “Speedy Delivery.”

I vividly recall, less than half a century ago, picking blueberries and galloping horses just off No. 3 Road in Richmond, then a country byway with open sewage ditches; it’s now a retail mecca of malls, franchise operations, and sleek Mercedes. Downtown, my brother and I were stunned to realize you could step off the curb of the busiest street and all traffic would halt — no crosswalk needed. East Hastings, where Dad took us for seafood at the Only Café, was more gruff pageant than horror show, full of abject loggers and miners and stevedores and what were then called, without apology or embarrassment, drunken Indians. To us highly sophisticated easterners, the place felt like a frontier town

It’s easy to forget now, a quarter century after Expo 86 introduced the world to Vancouver (and Vancouver to the world), easy to forget after the exodus from Hong Kong in the ’90s altered the city’s demographic profile and fuelled a real estate boom, easy to forget now that Hermès and Coach and Gucci fill our shop windows — and especially easy to forget during the klieg-lit invasion of the Winter Olympics — what a small city this is. With a population of about 600,000, it’s a quarter the size of Toronto proper. Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, and Ottawa have more citizens. Hell, Mississauga has more. Winnipeg has more. Vancouver’s American analogues are not Chicago and New York, but Charlotte, Memphis, El Paso. Include the metro area, and the population swells to 2.2 million, a third of metropolitan Toronto’s. If this city were an actor, it would acquit itself beautifully in a supporting role — Philip Seymour Hoffman before Capote. If it were a fighter, it would be a middleweight, albeit one so slick and well marketed that you think of it as belonging among the heavyweights — any of which would, in fact, clobber it.

Vancouver’s youth, like its size, is easy to overlook. From the air, the downtown commercial grid, circumscribed by salt water and shining in the sun, calls to mind a sort of a mini-Manhattan, as snugly fitted as a Lego project. But look closely, and you’ll notice that only recently have the central buildings started to poke dramatically upward; only now is a mature skyline taking shape, the last of the baby teeth being displaced. Not so long ago, this thrumming, cosmopolitan nexus was little more than old-growth forest. In 1881, three decades after St. Michael’s College was founded in Toronto, it was a rudimentary settlement of some 1,000 souls. Unlike the principal cities of the East, Vancouver is only now starting to take its place in the world, to understand the value of heritage, to unfurl a history and plot a future.

One night at the Blue Boy, a union pal of my father’s drunkenly informed me that he just might have found the cure for my virginity. He was an expert in such matters, and he figured a certain young woman in the coffee shop could be the ticket. “Partner,” he said with a wink, “why don’t you head down and give it a shot?” When he volunteered to come along for moral support, I made some excuse, but of course I headed downstairs by myself at the first opportunity.

I spotted her at once, as would anyone with a Y chromosome. She was stunningly endowed, effortlessly lovely; notepad in hand, she was absorbed in the task of taking an order. I sat at the counter, trembling and dry mouthed. Only when she came over and handed me a menu, brushing aside a tendril of blond hair, did I realize she was not a young woman at all. She was a girl, scarcely older than I. Her name was Lila; her name tag said so.

Ever since that stay at the Blue Boy, through many years in Toronto and stints of living abroad and a permanent move to the West Coast in 1989, I’ve associated Lila with Vancouver — younger than she seems, less sophisticated than she might like, undeniably radiant, proud to be attracting attention but not quite sure how to deal with it, a little self-conscious as the first complications of maturity settle upon her. You can’t help but marvel at her good fortune, her beauty. You admire the earnestness of her endeavours. You envy the wealth of her possibilities.

You wonder what she’ll become.

By Christopher Greenspan

The Obama administration’s 2011 budget includes $2.4 billion for clean energy and energy efficiency. While the proposed budget cuts $40 million in fossil fuel subsidies, it includes $54 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power .

“Climate change and energy are two key issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment,” according to the Pentagon’s newly released Quadrennial Defense Review.

The Chinese government’s smart grid investments will surpass U.S. government investments in 2010, according to market research firm Zpryme.

A new University of Wisconsin study finds each ton of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere costs us roughly $40.

A new survey finds 56 percent of large firms might drop clients that fail to manage their carbon emissions.

A piece at Grist reviews some of the Sundance Film Festival’s environmental documentaries.

Local Green: Repower America launched an ad campaign urging newly elected Senator Scott Brown, R-Mass., to support clean energy legislation.

An Energy Department-sponsored grid storage project aims to reduce energy use over a 150 square mile region of Ohio.

By David DeFusco

Kroon Hall, the new home of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, has been awarded LEED Platinum certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system for new construction, Kroon Hall was awarded 59 points, or seven more than required for the top rating of Platinum.

Kroon Hall was designed to use 81 percent less water and 58 percent less energy than a comparable building and to generate 25 percent of its electricity onsite from renewable sources.

Sustainable Sites
Kroon Hall earned 12 out of 14 possible points in LEED's Sustainable Sites category through environmental sensitivity to the building landscape design and the promotion of public transportation.

Water Efficiency
Kroon Hall earned all five LEED points for water efficiency. Stormwater is collected from the roof and courtyards and filtered through native aquatic plants. Wastewater collected from sinks and showers is added to the stormwater and used for all nonpotable needs such as toilets and irrigation. Water demand is further reduced by the installation of low-flow plumbing and irrigation fixtures.

Energy and Atmosphere
Kroon Hall earned every point in the Energy and Atmosphere category for building commissioning, reducing the use of harmful refrigerants, onsite renewable energy production, building energy performance and measurement and verification. The building earned 10 points for energy performance and 3 for onsite renewable energy.
The east-west orientation of the building takes advantage of solar access and natural ventilation. Fresh air ventilation and free cooling cycles on air handling units reduce the need for air conditioning most of the year. Concrete walls and exposed concrete ceilings retain heat in winter and help cool in the summer. All appliances and equipment are Energy Star TM rated.
Solar energy is generated onsite. Solar hot water is used to heat at least 50 percent of potable water. The photovoltaic array on the roof, which is funded in part by the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, provides approximately 25 percent of the building's electricity.

Materials and Resources
Kroon Hall achieved 6 points in the Materials and Resources category. The project purchased 16 percent of the materials with recycled content and 34 percent from regional sources. Almost 80 percent of the timber purchased for the building is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Indoor Environmental Quality
Kroon Hall was awarded the maximum 15 points for Indoor Environmental Quality. Points are achieved for projects that maximize daylight and have views to the outdoors, use high-efficiency filtration for the ventilation air, give occupants control of their visual and thermal environment and utilize finished products with low concentrations of volatile organic compounds.

Innovation and Design Process
Kroon Hall achieved 4 out of 5 points for innovation and design. The project achieved points for its green education program, green housekeeping plan and exemplary performance for potable water savings.

Source: PRinside

The January issue of the Green Collar Association monthly newsletter features a lead article by Director of Research and Communications, Dr. Michael O. Dayan, explaining his optimism about the climate conference in Copenhagen. 

Every month Green Collar Association brings its members insight into the growth of green collar jobs from North America’s leading experts in business, journalism, education, technology, non-profit, and politics. Recent lead articles in the Green Collar Association newsletter include exclusive pieces by Michael Ignatieff, Harvard Scholar and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Andrea Buffa of the Apollo Alliance.

This month, Dayan reiterates his position that best hopes coming out of the conference would be a strong interim agreement versus a full and final negotiated settlement. In his piece Dayan shares his views on the momentum building among people, companies, and educators and his belief that is will not be long before governments follow their lead. “In Copenhagen I observed first-hand that people everywhere—through the everyday choices they make, though their scholarly pursuits, and with the products and services they choose—are making necessary changes. When the people call for it, governments will follow.”

This month’s newsletter also conations a piece outlining the Green Workforce Preparedness Initiative, which was presented at COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen by Green Collar Association executive officers. The Green Workforce Preparedness Initiative is Green Collar Association’s proposal for the Federal government to provide targeted financial and regulatory incentives to corporations, labor unions, and non profits that invest in the (re)training and education of skilled workers and professionals to equip them with the skills and tools to address the requirements of a green economy.

To read this month’s Green Collar Association newsletter visit: http://www.greencollar.org/jan2010.html

By Ross Marowits

Canada's battered forestry industry can be rescued by blending traditional production of wood with new eco-friendly uses such as biochemicals and bio energy, says a new study released Monday.

The forest industry needs to extract the maximum value "from every tree harvested," said Avrim Lazar, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada.

The study, based on interviews with 65 experts as well as industry leaders and government, predicts a bright future for the forest industry despite the economic downturn and collapses in the demand for lumber and paper.

An estimated 50,000 forest jobs have been lost in Canada over the past few years and the association says there needs to be changes in order to sustain the industry's remaining 270,000 jobs.

"What we need is a shift in business model, a new business model that still produces lumber, pulp and paper but also extracts maximum value from every tree harvested," Lazar said.

"The message for government is that we have to re-examine our policies and programs to make this possible. It's not government's job to support the status quo, to inhibit change. It's government's job to accelerate this transformation."

The association is calling on Ottawa to offer economic stimulus to facilitate the change through research, tax measures and other funding. The price tag is $1.5 billion over five years, half of which can come from spending reallocation.

The payback will be a big increase in clean energy for Canada, sustainable jobs in the forest industry, and revitalized investment, Lazar said.

The new green model would be able to produce the power of nine nuclear reactors, enough to meet the energy needs of 2.5 million homes, or one out of every five homes across Canada.

While demand for paper will continue to wane, Lazar said most of the industry sees good future demand for lumber, pulp, bioenergy and other new wood products.

The challenge facing the industry is to capitalize on the demand for new products to restore growth, he said.

One way of doing that is to diversify markets and reduce forestry's dependence on the United States, he said.

"The forest industry's gone through a very hard time," Lazar said. "We've done a study that points in a direction which gives us maximum chances for the future."

The head of Canada's largest forestry union said the industry association has developed the right formula for the ailing industry.

But Dave Coles of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union is concerned the Harper government won't deliver necessary funding.

"I am afraid that it will fall on deaf ears. We are still getting no indication from the federal government that they view the forest industry except as a sunset," he said in an interview.

Coles said moving to an integrated forest industry is needed, rather than just chip and burn which won't create jobs.

Pierre Lapointe, president and CEO of FP Innovations, said years of research and development have produced technologies that convert wood fibre into high-value products such as bio-fuels to heat homes or power vehicles as well as bio-chemicals to make cosmetics, solvents, food additives and renewable plastics.

Among the proposals to encourage private sector investment is leveraging the tax system by creating a capital investment tax credit similar to the United States approach.

"This new integrated model will cause investors to take a fresh and more optimistic look at the economic potential of Canada's forest products industry," said Don Roberts, managing director of CIBC World Markets and the study leader.

By Jessica Leber

President Obama's $3.834 trillion budget, to be released today, proposes to inject billions more dollars in clean energy research while slashing federal fossil fuel subsidies, according to White House officials.

The fiscal year 2011 budget will include $6 billion for clean energy technologies, mostly focused on research, development and demonstration, the White House said.

While sending more cash to priority areas, Obama is also seeking a three-year non-military discretionary spending freeze. The move is to help trim a federal deficit that is projected at $1.3 trillion in 2011 and, without efforts to rein it in, expected to balloon further in the next decade.

Obama's budget proposal will include $20 billion-worth of more than 120 terminations, reductions, and savings. The savings are necessary to fund increases in priority areas while keeping the discretionary baseline flat, according to White House Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orzag.

To further spur a switch to clean energy and trim the deficit, the White House budget will also seek to eliminate tax preferences for oil, gas and coal companies, Orzag said. OMB says the move will raise an additional $40 billion over ten years.

The budget move comes a week after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard exchanged heated words, after Gerard accused the administration for actions that have led to a dramatic drop in oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters (Greenwire, Jan. 27).

The budget cuts are sure to face resistance in Congress from both sides of the aisle. In last year's budget, the White House managed to win Congressional support for 60 percent of the cuts he had proposed, officials said. In that budget, Obama also had proposed to increase fees and eliminate tax breaks for oil and gas companies to raise more than $30 billion in revenue over a decade. But not all of the measures won support from Congress.

One measure he failed push through last year was a new $4-per-acre fee on "nonproducing" oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

The White House characterized the budget as a responsible move in tight fiscal times. "It's not a left-wing budget. It's not a right-wing budget. It's a pragmatic budget," said one official.

They also reiterated President Obama's threat last week, during the State of the Union address, to use his veto power if Congress does not act to curb wasteful spending.

Source: USATODAY

The U.S. government, which has held recycling competitions, is expanding its eco-efforts.

Today, the White House plans to announce that the federal government, the nation's largest energy consumer, will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28% over the next decade, according to a report by my USA TODAY colleague Mimi Hall.

Nancy Sutley, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, says the federal government aims to set an example for energy efficiency.  "It's a real opportunity to lead by example," Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) tells the paper. "And not just for the environment but to spur innovation and create jobs and savings."

The council says its reduced energy use in the government's 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles will be equal to taking 17 million cars off the road for a year or not consuming 205 million barrels of oil.

The story notes interesting efforts already underway:

-The Army's Fort Irwin training center in California is building a 500-megawatt solar plant in the Mojave Desert that will power the entire 22,000-person base.
-The U.S. Postal Service is building the largest green roof in New York City on a seven-story mail-processing building.
-The Department of Energy is building one of the largest biomass facilities in the country at its Savannah River site in Aiken, S.C.

Earlier this week, the White House's environmental council announced that a competition among federal agencies resulted in more than 15.8 million pounds of electronics being reused or recycled, an increase of more than 6 million pounds from the previous year's campaign.

Source: CBCNews

Winter snow season has been slowly shrinkng in past 50 years, says researcher.

Climate change and global warming are partly to blame for the current snow shortage on Vancouver's Cypress Mountain, according to the David Suzuki Foundation. (CBC)

The David Suzuki Foundation says global warming and climate change are in part responsible for what's happening to a key Olympic venue.

Olympic organizers are working around the clock to ensure there's enough snow on Cypress Mountain, home to freestyle ski and snowboard events for the Games.

Record warm temperatures and heavy rains this winter have forced VANOC to use bales of hay and to truck in snow to create the courses for the events.

The Games are a perfect catalyst for Canada to take climate change seriously in the long term, according to Ian Bruce, the lead climate change campaigner at the Suzuki Foundation.

"It's crucial, as far as our economy goes here in Canada [and] it's crucial to protect winter sports as far as our culture goes," Bruce said.

Snow season shrinking
If we fail to act, we will also lose a big part of the economy for the many communities in the country that depend on winter sports and winter sports tourism, said Bruce.

"These are really important issues that I think should be integrated into hosting the Winter Olympics. We should be calling for leadership on climate change and putting in solutions."

Research gathered over a 50-year period showed that the snow season in winters in B.C. are getting shorter by between four and five weeks, with warmer temperatures overall, Bruce said.

Efforts like those underway on Cypress Mountain to create a snow pack for the Olympics are not viable strategies for the long term, he said.

By Dave Fessler

One of the key areas of focus at the Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies was on how to foster seamless communication between the various devices on the Smart Grid.

That’s where Fred Baker comes in. He’s a Fellow at Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) – one of the world’s leading manufacturers of Internet infrastructure technology, many of which are destined for Smart Grid applications.

Fred’s knowledge of Internet communications is exhaustive – and for good reason: he was instrumental in its design. So it’s not surprising that he has some strong opinions on how Smart Grid technology and communications should be set up.

I chatted with him at the conference – and here’s what he had to say…

Preventing Smart Grid Mistakes… And Locking Out Hackers
David Fessler: What do you see as the biggest challenges with regard to Smart Grid communications?

Fred Baker: As I said during my presentation, don’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re going to make mistakes, make new ones, not old ones. The good news is that by using the standards already in place for Internet communications, it will save a lot of time and avoid a lot of the mistakes made over the past 20 years.

David Fessler: Another critical issue is security – preventing attempts to hack the system. What are the risks here? Will the Smart Grid be able to be hacked as easily as the Internet?

Fred Baker: With something as vital as a national energy grid, the critical communications networks in the Smart Grid will be physically disconnected or “air-gapped” away from the public Internet. Hackers just won’t be able to get into them easily, if at all. And with those devices that are connected to a public network, proven measures already exist that eliminate most security risks.

For more on the basics of the infrastructure/business side of the project and to read what Dr. George Arnold had to say to me, about the Smart Grid initiative.

But what does it all mean for the millions of Americans, who’ll eventually depend on the Smart Grid for their energy needs? For that, I turned to another influential figure at one of the other key corporate players…

How John Q. Public Stands to Benefit From the Smart Grid

As Dr. Arnold told me: “There are currently 130 major Smart Grid projects underway in 45 states. The grid will fundamentally change how energy is priced and how we think about and use energy, both at work and at home. But in the end, it’s the consumer who’s going to have to pay for the Smart Grid. Unless they see the benefits, they’re not going to spend money on it, or things to connect to it.”

And there’s no doubt that on the consumer side, energy efficiency will be a big focus, according to Dr. Tariq Samad, Corporate Fellow at Honeywell’s (NYSE: HON) Automation and Control Solutions division.

I discussed this with him in between presentations…

David Fessler: In layman’s terms, how would you define what the Smart Grid is – and what it’s attempting to do?

Dr. Samad: With the Smart Grid, we’re basically taking the existing electricity infrastructure and power grid, then overlaying the latest information technology and communications networks on it for the purpose of automation, control and energy management. Basically, we’re modernizing the system.

David Fessler: What area do you think will benefit the most from the Smart Grid?

Dr. Samad: The Smart Grid will be a huge enabler in the area of energy efficiency. Flattening out the demand-response-supply problem that utilities face every day will save billions of dollars annually and eliminate the need for additional power plants.

David Fessler: Tell me about Honeywell’s involvement in the Smart Grid.

Dr. Samad: About 60% of our business is focused on improving energy efficiency. Honeywell Automation manufactures industrial controls, building controls, thermostats, home energy management, security systems, sensors and similar products. All these products interface between the consumer and his environment and will potentially be connected to the Smart Grid.

So how can investors take advantage of this bold new energy initiative?

Getting Geared Up for The Grid

With the preliminary standards in place and roughly $18 billion in government stimulus money flowing into the energy and infrastructure sector, it’s a safe bet you’ll be hearing a lot more about the Smart Grid investing in the months ahead.

If you’re looking for a way to profit, big players like Cisco and Honeywell both stand to reap substantial rewards as the Smart Grid infrastructure gains traction.

However, there’s another player in the thick of the Smart Grid action, too. It’s a tiny company located in Michigan whose revenues could soar more than ten-fold as a result of the build-out that’s already starting. You can read about it here.

Source:  Reuters

The Obama Administration formally embraced the Copenhagen Accord on global warming on Thursday, a day after the president urged a fractious U.S. Congress to get to work on comprehensive legislation to stem the nation's emissions.

U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern gave notice to the United Nations that the country will aim for a 17 percent emissions cut in carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming by 2020, from 2005 levels.

The move, which confirmed the goal set by the White House late last year, was conditional on other countries also submitting their pollution-cutting targets to the accord, Stern said.

The condition was likely aimed at fence-sitters in Congress who do not want to see the United States commit to steps on fighting global warming unless other major polluters like China and India go along.

John Kerry, the Democratic U.S. senator working on a compromise climate bill, insisted that Congress would put a price on carbon, forcing companies to pay for their global warming pollution.

But he followed the lead of President Barack Obama, who called for a comprehensive climate plan during Wednesday's State of the Union speech without mentioning one of its most controversial and complicated elements, cap-and-trade, which would allow companies to trade rights to pollute.

"It's open to how you price carbon," Kerry told Reuters. "People need to relax and look at all the ways you might price carbon. We're not pinned down to one approach."

Kerry, who is working on the bill with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and independent Senator Joe Lieberman, strongly rejected the idea that progress had bogged down. "I just don't agree with that interpretation at all," he said, adding that Senate negotiations were "making headway."

GOAL DEPENDS ON CONGRESS

The final U.S. 2020 emissions goal depends on Congress passing a climate bill, Stern informed the U.N.

Kerry and others are trying to win Republican and moderate Democratic votes for the bill by including incentives for nuclear power, offshore oil drilling and clean technology jobs. Graham said the nuclear and oil drilling initiatives would not advance in the Senate without dealing with emissions.

The 17 percent U.S. target represents only about a 4 percent cut from the 1990 baseline that other rich polluters are using, showing how difficult it was for the United States to craft a domestic emissions plan.

The European Union reiterated on Wednesday an offer of a 20 percent cut by 2020, from 1990, and a 30 percent cut if other nations deepened their reductions.

The Copenhagen Accord agreed by the United States, China, India and other countries at U.N. talks in December calls for governments to submit climate plans by January 31, 2010.

It does not bind any country to emissions cuts, but it is seen as a step in moving past gridlock over the sharing of the burden of acting on climate change between rich countries and poor ones.

Duncan Marsh, director of international climate policy at the Nature Conservancy, said that with Thursday's announcement, "The United States clearly is signaling its commitment to the global process" for tackling global warming."

The House of Representatives last year passed a climate bill that relied on a cap-and-trade system. But the Senate's push to pass a bill, which might jack up consumers' energy costs, could be harder in this congressional election year as public support has appeared to dip.

A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said 28 percent of those surveyed listed global warming as a top priority this year, down from 38 percent in 2007.

A new poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason University concluded that fewer people believe global warming is occurring. But it also said more people now fear it could harm their families and future generations.

HYBRID SYSTEM

Kerry said he plans to outline a comprehensive bill that could be considered this spring, although he did not want to be pinned down to a definite deadline. "We are writing and drafting; we're pulling together the titles" of a bill.

Obama acknowledged in his speech that some people doubt the science of climate change but said it was important to move on clean energy such as wind and solar power to compete with countries like China and India in the low-carbon economy.

Graham said that statement and an emphasis on nuclear power could gain support but it was "yet to be determined" if senators could come up with a bill that could pass.

Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners in Washington, said in a note that Obama "displayed a canny understanding of the political challenges confronting recession-weary, centrist fence-sitters (in Congress)."

"Voters," he wrote, "may be much more likely to embrace a plan to best other nations in trade than a plan to save other nations from rising seas (even if it's the same plan)."

Some environmentalists were angered that Obama was receptive to more oil drilling and nuclear power.

"President Obama's support for all these dirty energy sources was a big win for corporate polluters and their Washington lobbyists, but it was a kick in the gut to environmentalists across the country," said Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica.

In recent days, according to Kerry and Graham, senators have huddled with representatives of energy-intensive industries that would be most affected by government mandating less use of dirty-burning coal and oil.

The bill has been delayed in the Senate by the healthcare debate, as well as opposition from most Republicans and many moderate Democrats.

Graham said cap-and-dividend, which would mandate carbon emission reductions while limiting the trading of pollution permits, is under review along with other options. Under that system, polluters would be required to buy carbon credits in auctions and consumers would receive most proceeds.

A carbon tax has no support in Congress, Graham said.

Source: Environmental PROTECTION

Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis announced nearly $190 million in training grants for green jobs, as authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The State Energy Sector Partnership and Training Grants are designed to teach workers the skills required in emerging industries, including energy efficiency and renewable energy. This set of green grants is the third awarded in as many weeks by the Department of Labor.

"These grants will help workers gain access to good jobs, while supporting the sort of statewide energy efficiency strategies that play a crucial role in building the green economy of the 21st century," Solis said.

Thirty-four awards ranging from approximately $2 million to $6 million each are being made to state workforce investment boards in partnership with their state workforce agencies, local workforce investment boards or regional consortia of boards, and One-Stop Career Center delivery systems. Through these grant awards, program participants will receive the technical and occupational skills necessary to obtain industry recognized credentials, DOL said.

These grants are designed to achieve the following goals:

-Create an integrated system of education, training and supportive services that promotes skill attainment and career pathway development for low-income, low- skilled workers leading to employment in green industries.

-Support states in implementing a statewide energy sector strategy including governors' overall workforce visions, state energy policies, and training activities that lead to employment in targeted industry sectors.

-Build and strengthen partnerships dedicated to building a skilled clean energy workforce. Develop new partnerships with other agencies receiving Recovery Act funds to support strategic planning and implementation efforts.

-The grants are part of a larger Recovery Act initiative — totaling $500 million — to fund workforce development projects that promote economic growth by preparing workers for careers in the energy efficiency industries.

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
 
A new ranking of the world’s nations by environmental performance puts some of the globe’s largest economies far down the list, with the United States sinking to 61st and China to 121st.

In the previous version of the Environmental Performance Index, compiled every two years by Yale and Columbia University researchers, the United States ranked 39th, and China 105th.

The top performer this year is Iceland, which gets virtually all of its power from renewable sources — hydropower and geothermal energy. It was joined in the top tier by a cluster of European countries known for their green efforts, including Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

“Countries that take seriously the environment as a policy challenge do improve, and those that don’t deteriorate,” said Daniel C. Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, who oversees the index project. “Both the U.S. and China are suffering because they’re industrial and haven’t been paying much attention to environmental policy.”

The index, viewable online at epi.yale.edu, assigns each country a cumulative score based on its performance in areas that include environmental health, preservation of habitat and reductions in greenhouse gases, air pollution and waste.

Costa Rica and Colombia remained in the top ranks. Costa Rica has made important efforts to conserve its rain forest, and Colombia has led the way in shifting to fuel-efficient mass transit.

Yet the new rankings, which are to be presented Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, cannot be precisely compared with the 2008 index, researchers said. The scientists have shifted their methodology slightly as they seek to zero in on the fairest way to quantify the broad and nebulous area of environmental performance.

Because most of the data are from 2007 and 2008, the index does not fully reflect new efforts by the Obama administration or China’s government to improve environmental performance.

It also does not fully capture the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in many countries resulting from the current recession.

One reason that Iceland scored so well, beyond its energy policies, may be its economic tailspin, one of Western Europe’s worst, which began with a banking crisis in 2008, Mr. Esty said.

Another crucial caveat is that the researchers rely heavily on data that the countries themselves report to international groups like the United Nations and the World Bank. The researchers said that countries like Cuba, in ninth place, are thought to score artificially high because the data is either collected poorly or massaged to signal progress.

The lack of reliable environmental data is a major challenge, the researchers said. “There are so many countries that are not collecting even minimal data sets,” said Christine Kim, a researcher at Yale who is program manager of the project. “The state of the data hasn’t gotten much better in the last 10 years. We have better data on baseball than we do on climate change.”

Developing a system to quantify and track environmental performance would be essential to the success of any global climate treaty requiring industrialized countries to cut their emissions and emerging economies to reduce their emissions growth. Negotiators from around the globe failed to produce a binding agreement in Copenhagen last month, but plan to meet again in Mexico City in late November.

Discord over how to measure, report and verify climate data was one factor that stymied progress in Copenhagen. The Chinese, for example, use their own scales to measure factors like air pollution, and it is hard to translate their readings into accepted Western scientific scales.

Because a country’s final ranking is based on so many environmental factors, the devil is often in the details.

Extenuating circumstances may distort the data.

Countries like Slovakia, Serbia and Montenegro performed well in part because severe economic slumps in these places shut down polluting factories, Mr. Esty said.

Some countries that score extraordinarily well in one area may not perform well over all because of unusually lackluster performances in another. The United States scores well in forestry and the provision of safe drinking water, but its ranking is low because of poor scores in areas like heat-trapping emissions and urban air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

Denmark, known as an environmental trailblazer, comes in at a surprising 32nd place. Although it has pioneered alternative energy sources like wind power, it still uses a fair amount of fossil fuel and has poor scores in protecting its fisheries.

“This data requires people to dig in and see why they are where they are,” Ms. Kim said. “For every country there are strengths and weaknesses.”

By Timothy Gardner

U.S. wind power capacity soared 39 percent last year but job growth stalled as uncertainty about renewable energy policies and the recession slowed manufacturing, an industry group said.

The combined power generating capacity of new U.S. wind turbines installed last year hit more than 9,900 megawatts, up from a gain of over 8,400 MW in the previous year. Total capacity hit more than 35,000 MW, or about enough to power 9.7 million homes, the American Wind Energy Association said.

Total U.S. jobs associated with wind energy, stalled at 85,000, about flat from the previous year as the recession took a toll on manufacturing. In 2008, job growth surged as the sector added 35,000 positions.

Denise Bode, chief executive of AWEA, said jobs stalled because of tight financing and uncertainty about wind power incentives, including long-term tax credits and a national mandate for renewable energy.

She said President Barack Obama's recovery act that set aside billions of dollars for renewable energy helped prevent job losses. Some 1,500 to 2,000 jobs were lost in wind power manufacturing, but those jobs were made up for with gains in construction and maintenance at wind power farms, she said.

AWEA wants Congress to pass national mandates for generating renewable power, which are expected to be included in a compromise climate bill to be considered by the Senate this year.

"We are trying to convince European wind manufacturers to invest in the United States but first they want to know what policies will be in place," said Bode.

The United States overtook Germany in 2008 as the world's top wind power generator. But China, which unlike the United States, has set national clean energy targets, may take the top spot for 2009 when the results are finalized.

"We are in a foot race with the Chinese who are providing more and more incentives and mandates for the industry," said Bode.

Texas led the country in added wind capacity last year with nearly 2,300 MW, followed by Indiana with 905 MW and Iowa with 879 MW. The gains came despite billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Picken's announcement last summer that he would postpone construction of a huge wind farm in Texas.

Wind accounted for about 6 percent of the electricity produced last year in Texas, according to the state.

Wind power generated only about 1 percent of power supply for the entire country last year.

Bode said if the country adopted a national renewable electricity mandates investors would put more money into building transmission lines to carry more wind from the gusty center of the country to cities with high power demand.