Image: Power Up America

The Occupy Wall Street protests are focusing Americans’ attention on the fact that power is increasingly consolidated into the hands of very few individuals and corporations. This is especially true in the energy sector. Two weeks ago, the country’s five largest oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell — released their third-quarter profits and once again revealed that high gas prices are bad for consumers but great for Big Oil, which pulled in a staggering $101 billion in profits during the first nine months of 2011.

Today Washington politicians publicly bicker over renewable energy credit programs that will only cost taxpayers $2.5 billion while the oil-and-gas industry quietly pulls in $7 billion in annual subsidies. But even that is not enough for Big Oil. These companies are now lobbying hard for even more federal government support, for even more of the public’s waters and lands to be opened up for drilling rigs or pipelines, and for even fewer health and safety standards to govern those projects.

At the same time, those of us who pay the taxes that subsidize Big Oil — call us the 99 percent, though in reality we’re more like the 99.99 percent — must continue paying out precious dollars at the pump and must suffer from the ill-health effects of fossil-fuel pollution because we have very little choice in how we power, or fuel, our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We have the power to choose a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future.

What could that future look like? Fast forward to America in 2030. Picture rolling up to the gas pump and having a choice of a petroleum product or a bio-based one, maybe from algae or switchgrass — or instead just plugging your electric or hybrid vehicle into the fast-charging electrical outlet located nearby. In 2030, conventional cars and light trucks will average at least 54.5 miles per gallon, saving our nation the expense of importing 2.2 million barrels of oil per day.

Picture an America where you don’t have to drive at all because buses, trains, and light-rail systems are convenient and accessible. Bike lanes are no longer a luxury of certain coastal cities, but are the norm along heavily trafficked commuter corridors. And cities are designed to allow workers to live much closer to their jobs, avoiding long commutes altogether.

Picture an America where at least half of our electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind, solar, wave, and geothermal. Sound impossible? It’s not. Other countries, especially in Europe, are already on track to get there. Germany has set a goal of 45 percent renewable energy by 2030, and Denmark is hoping to be completely fossil-fuel free by then.

In 2030, Americans could have the choice of whether to buy power from big utility producers or instead to install household or community-scale energy systems themselves — systems that allow excess power to be sold back into the grid, making the consumers the owners of America’s energy system. We could have a smarter grid, where home appliances and even plug-in electric cars could “talk back” to power distribution centers, which would distribute power more efficiently and effectively across the entire system and avoid costly blackouts. We could see homes built and renovated to efficiency standards that allow consumers to use far less electricity, for far less money, than they do today.

In this America, our companies, labs, and universities would lead the world in the research and development of new and even more efficient energy systems — creating jobs, new businesses, and export opportunities while giving consumers even more choices in how their power is generated, distributed, manufactured, and used.

In this vision of America, consumers have fundamentally more choices and more control. And workers have more and better jobs — they are inventing, manufacturing, installing, operating, and maintaining a huge range of technologies in the renewable energy, energy efficiency, fuel, and vehicle industries. Unlike in the current economy, more than 25 percent of them are working in the manufacturing sector, ensuring that our energy future is Made in America, and that we’re exporting our innovative technologies to other solution-hungry countries.

Construction workers also will fare well in this new economy. The reason: Their skills will be called upon to build new energy-efficient buildings, or to retrofit the 115 million houses and small businesses [PDF] that are currently responsible for more than half of America’s energy consumption. Whatever these future green workers’ skills and specialties, their wages are higher and their occupations more varied than in the current economy.

In this America, the air and water are clean. The oceans and lakes are healthy enough to support a range of uses, from a vibrant commercial fishing industry, to family trips to the beach in summer, to offshore wind production that powers our economic growth. Our most precious public lands are protected from mining and drilling but remain open for recreation and tourism, which alone create 388,000 jobs on Interior Department lands and 224,000 jobs on Forest Service lands.

That’s one vision for our energy economy in 2030. Here’s another one [PDF], brought to us by the American Petroleum Institute. It’s a future where all our coastlines are opened to deep water drilling, even though we know more drilling won’t make us more energy independent or significantly lower our gas prices. In this America, pipelines take dirty energy across pristine landscapes to refining stations, so we can export that energy to developing countries that are themselves trying to choose a cleaner future. Coal miners continue to risk illness and death by going deep into the bowels of the earth. And tops are still blown off pristine mountain ranges to extract and export those resources.

Huge swaths of federal lands that were once off-limits — places such as the outer continental shelf on our East Coast or portions of the Rocky Mountains that are protected today — are instead open for drilling and exploring, without regard to potential health and safety costs. In this America, most energy workers aren’t inventors, manufacturers, or construction workers, but instead are making minimum wage behind the counter in gas stations. And consumers continue to be slaves to the volatile global prices of fossil fuels while a small handful of companies reap the global profits.

We have the power to decide, right now, what America looks like in 2030. Decisions are being made every day from Wall Street to Washington, D.C. — decisions that will put us on a path to a clean, just, and vibrant future, or instead chain our future options to a path of pollution, poverty, and growing peril. At this moment, our government is facing decisions about whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline to transport heavy, polluting tar-sands oil from Canada across the Great Plains to refineries in Texas; whether to allow the Environmental Protection Agency to keep our air and water clean; whether to keep subsidizing oil while exempting natural gas drilling from health and safety regulations; and whether to provide the targeted government support and private-sector levers necessary to ensure America continues to lead the world in new and cleaner energy solutions for the global market.

In the next few years, we will face even bigger decisions, in particular the decision about whether and how to place a value on carbon so that we start to bring down emissions and address global warming, and about how to adapt to the global warming impacts that our cities and citizens are already beginning to feel.

We have the power to build an energy future that works for everyone, not just for Big Oil. The choice is ours.

Cross-posted from the Center for American Progress. This post was coauthored by Susan Lyon, special assistant for energy policy at the Center for American Progress, and Matthew Kasper, an intern with the energy team at American Progress.

There’s one thing we know for certain about green jobs: They are real, well-paid, and growing. The jobs that make up the clean energy economy are on the rise when jobs in many other sectors are slipping away or moving overseas. With 14 million unemployed Americans, they are a sign of hope in an otherwise stagnant economy.

In terms of sheer growth, the cleantech sector glows especially brightly. The July 2011 report “Sizing the Clean Economy” from the Brookings Institution and Battelle’s Technology Partnership Practice makes clear that emerging cleantech sectors saw explosive growth in recent years.

In particular, the clean economy sector focused on clean energy — especially wind, solar, fuel cell, smart grid, biofuel, and battery companies — grew far more quickly than the economy as a whole. The Brookings report slices and dices the data in a number of ways. But most striking is the major jobs growth in clean energy between 2003 and 2010: Solar thermal and wind grew by 18.4 percent and 14.9 percent, respectively.

This chart breaks down the top 10 of these specific clean technology industries in terms of their annual average percent change in jobs from 2003 to 2010:

Segments with initially very few jobs saw particularly dramatic change over time, though the total jobs in the segment may still be much smaller than in others with a larger baseline.

This chart breaks them down in terms of absolute change in jobs:

Some other facts and figures you should know about green jobs and the clean energy economy:

• There are currently 2.7 million jobs in the “clean economy,” broadly defined to include both mature and emerging industries across the cleantech, transit, conservation, waste, agriculture, and other clean sectors.
• The clean economy as a whole — not just the cleantech sectors discussed above — grew by 8.3 percent from 2008 to 2009, in the depths of the recession. This was almost double what the overall economy grew during those years. This is in large part thanks to the Recovery Act.
• Median wages are 13 percent higher in green energy careers than the economy average.
• Three separate programs for energy efficiency retrofits employed almost 25,000 Americans in three months since earlier this year. The Weatherization Assistance Program, Energy Efficiency Block Grant Program, and State Energy Programs collectively upgraded over half a million buildings since they began to ramp up earlier this year. These programs mainly hired construction workers, a key point during a time of particularly heavy unemployment in the construction sector.

In sum, the clean economy has continued to grow even while industries across America have had to lay off workers or close up shop. Instead of dancing on the grave of those few clean energy companies that do not make it, we need to support the smart growth policies and investments that can create more green jobs while strengthening our greater economy.

Image: Climate Progress

The past few weeks have seen a perfect storm of misinformation on green jobs: What they are, how many there are, how much they contribute to the economy. Many of those throwing numbers around have relied on one source, a recent report from the Brookings Institution, which worked with Battelle’s Technology Partnership Practice to attempt to define, evaluate, and count green jobs as a part of the economy from 2003-2010.

It is clear to those of us who have been deeply engaged in making the case for green jobs for years that the Brookings report has been almost universally misunderstood. Hence this post to try and clear up some of the details. But first, a digression about green jobs.

The phrase “green jobs” does not stand for, and in fact has never stood for, one specific set of occupations that can be set aside and easily counted. In this, green jobs are not unique. Think about “high-tech jobs,” for instance. There are jobs in inventing and developing software, to be sure. But there are also jobs in using software to make existing companies more productive and efficient. There are manufacturing jobs associated not only with the hardware in our computers, but with the servers we use to store data. There are construction jobs that would not exist were it not for the need to build server farms. All the jobs that have come about because of the invention of the computer, and the transformation of our economy from a low-tech to a high-tech one, are arguably “information technology jobs.”

Similarly, “green jobs” go way beyond the obvious jobs, like the wind turbine operators. They span huge numbers of industries and occupations, and touch nearly every sector of the economy because they can include all those who use cleaner or more efficient energy and fuel, as well as those who invent, manufacture, install, operate, and maintain those things. Just like the phrase “high-tech jobs” has come to stand for an entire economic transformation toward computerization of nearly everything we do, so does “green jobs” stand for a huge transformation in the kinds of energy we use to underpin our long-term economic growth.

So, back to the Brookings report. In that report, Brookings researchers tried valiantly to pin down at least some of the industries and occupations that are most clearly associated with the green economy transformation. They did an admirable job, and here’s what they actually found:

1. A lot of people already have green jobs. Brookings found that there are currently 2.7 million jobs in the clean economy, as broadly defined to include not just mature industries like manufacturing, transportation, and public services, but also emerging industries like solar, wind, and battery technology. It also includes conservation and restoration jobs. That’s 2.7 million people who have jobs because their employers, cities, or states — or their country, through the Recovery Act — prioritized moving away from dirty fossil fuel use and toward mass transit, or clean energy, or energy efficiency services — or because they have realized they need to clean up the mess left by generations of fossil fuel use.
2. Green jobs are part of a growing, not a shrinking, sector of the economy — and some green industries are growing incredibly fast. Broadly defined, the clean economy — again including transportation, restoration, efficiency, clean energy, etc. — grew at 4.3 percent from 2003-2010, adding half a million new jobs. Pause to think about that: That’s half a million people who now have jobs in these sectors, and might not have jobs at all if their companies, cities, and states hadn’t decided to become a little cleaner and greener. The part of the clean economy sector that is focused on clean energy in particular — the wind, solar, fuel cell, smart grid, biofuel, and battery companies — grew far more quickly, at an average rate of 8.3 percent, which is nearly twice the growth rate of the economy as a whole.
3. The overall clean economy grew during the recession, but was not exempt from its impacts. Given the huge growth in clean energy and fuel sectors, you’d think we’d see a higher overall growth rate for the clean economy as a whole. What kept that growth from being more explosive? The same thing that brought down the economy as a whole and threw us into recession: the housing crisis. A lot of green jobs are in construction, because green building and energy efficiency retrofits are such a fantastic way to bring down energy costs and lower our carbon footprint. Just like the rest of the construction sector, this part of the clean economy suffered when the bottom fell out of the housing market. But even given that fact, we still saw 4.3 percent growth, because not all green jobs are construction jobs.
4. That gets us to the next point: Green jobs are spread across industries and occupations. You can find them in everything from research and development, to manufacturing, to construction and installation, to operations and maintenance, to retail and service. Unlike jobs in the much-touted real estate and finance sector, they are not all concentrated into a relatively small set of occupations. That means that when the bottom fell out of the real estate and finance markets, there was still growth across all green jobs sectors. Similarly, when gas prices went up this past summer, as they invariably do, the parts of the green economy that are focused on alternative vehicles and fuels were suddenly a hot spot for growth. This diversification across occupations and industries makes the green economy smarter, more secure, and more sustainable than the economy as a whole.
5. Green jobs are spread across regions, too — also unlike a lot of jobs in the financial sector, which tend to be concentrated in big cities on the coasts. Brookings found that of all regions in America, the South has the highest concentration of jobs in the broader clean economy.
6. Green jobs are good jobs for all Americans, not just the small number with college degrees. Finally, Brookings found — as we and others have found in the past — that a lot of green jobs are in what are sometimes called “middle-skill” occupations, meaning that they require education and skills beyond high school, but not necessarily up to the four-year college level. Twenty-six percent of clean economy jobs are in manufacturing, which is a sector where workers with specific technical skills, but no bachelor’s degree, can make a solidly middle-class living. Why do we care? Three big reasons: First, nearly 70 percent of our workforce lacks a four-year college degree. That’s a lot of people shut out by high-skill industries. Second, middle-skill jobs have always been the key to America’s middle class
   . Build an economy that only creates high- and low-skill jobs, and you build an economy with vast income inequality. And third, when we build up the manufacturing sector here in America, we can export our products to other countries, making us competitive in the global economy.

Those are some of the facts about the new clean economy. It goes beyond clean energy, though that is probably the most exciting and high-growth sector. A green jobs growth strategy spans industries, occupations, skill levels, and geographic regions, making these businesses and workers less vulnerable to price spikes, extreme weather events, recessions, attacks — you name it.

And most important, the clean economy is real. It employs real people in real jobs with real salaries — something at I bet the 14 million Americans who are currently unemployed sure wish they had.

Will Congress finally end government handouts for Big Oil?

The Senate plans to vote tonight on the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act — legislation that would eliminate $21 billion of tax loopholes over the next decade for the five largest oil companies. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and 28 of his colleagues, would close tax loopholes for Chevron Corporation, ConocoPhilips, Exxon Mobil Corporation, and the U.S. subsidiaries of BP and Royal Dutch Shell. And it would require that all recovered funds go to the U.S. Treasury to reduce the federal budget deficit. 

Given the current drive to reduce the deficit by slashing existing programs, these funds could potentially replace cuts in other vital programs such as Medicare, cancer research, and food inspections. Yet these five companies continue to fight hard to maintain unfair tax advantages underwritten by everyday Americans who are struggling to pay their bills even as these companies make record profits. Big Oil, in short, wants its tax breaks and its huge profits, too.

Each time Americans’ gas bills go up, so do Big Oil’s profits. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, Persian Gulf unrest combined with speculators bidding up prices led to oil prices rising by more than one-third. Higher oil prices on the world market led to higher gasoline prices across our nation, and the big five oil companies made $32 billion in profits. Profits of this size are quite common. Between 2001 and 2011, a period marked by gas price volatility, these five companies collectively made more than $900 billion in profits. In 2010, Exxon Mobil finished first in the Fortune 500 list of company profits for the eighth year in a row, with Chevron coming in third and ConocoPhilips 16th. 

These companies often use their profits not to explore for more oil on or near our shores but rather to boost their stock price via stock buybacks. This is where a company purchases its own shares in the marketplace to reduce the overall number of shares on the market and drive up the price of those remaining shares. Exxon and Conoco spent more than half of their first quarter 2011 profits on buybacks. Back in 2008, when record 2008 oil prices also brought record profits, four of the Big Oil companies spent a major proportion (one-third by Chevron) to nearly all (88 percent by Exxon) on stock buybacks.

Ordinarily huge profits should lead to moderately higher tax bills, returning some benefit to the government and to American taxpayers. Not so in the case of Big Oil. During periods of enormous profits, some of these companies had relatively modest federal income tax bills. From 2009 to 2010, Exxon Mobil had an average effective federal income tax rate of 17.6 percent — less than the average American family’s rate of 20.4 percent. From 2007 to 2009, Chevron’s average effective income tax rate was about the same as an average family’s tax rate.

Between high profits, stock buybacks, and low taxes, these companies have done very well over the past decade. Yet these five companies alone receive over $2 billion annually in benefits from tax loopholes, some of which are nearly 100 years old. These programs were put in place at a time when oil companies were “emerging industries” that needed government assistance to create the market and infrastructure vital to domestic production. That’s no longer the case. 

And make no mistake — these tax expenditures qualify as government spending. They are simply spending programs that operate through the tax code rather than, say, a direct grant or loan program. As then House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) himself noted last year, “what Washington sometimes calls tax cuts are really just poorly disguised spending programs that expand the role of government in the lives of individuals and employers.”

Eliminating the $2 billion in tax loopholes would have only a tiny impact on these companies’ bottom lines. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently determined that “the total expected tax revenues [from the tax provisions] are only 5 percent of the earnings of the five largest firms in the industry.” In other words, eliminating these loopholes would reduce Big Oil’s earnings by one nickel for every dollar of profit.

Despite the claims by Big Oil chief executives before the Senate last week, eliminating these tax breaks would have no impact on gasoline prices or oil production. The CRS concluded that eliminating these provisions “would be less likely to reduce oil output, and hence increase petroleum product (gasoline) prices.” A new report by the congressional Joint Economic Committee came to the same conclusion: “The repeal of the tax breaks will not affect oil and gas production decisions in the near term, and will have little or no impact on consumer energy prices in the immediate future.” 

In contrast, diverting these funds to deficit reduction would have an impact on the federal budget deficit. The same congressional Joint Economic Committee study determined that S. 940 would “reduce the deficit by $21 billion over 10 years and encourage investments in alternative energy and energy efficiency.” 

We believe this is a valuable bill. Eliminating unfair tax advantages for some of the nation’s most profitable businesses makes eminent sense. We also support deficit reduction as a critical step in these troubled fiscal times. But because the recovered funds would go entirely toward deficit reduction, this bill unfortunately would not actually lower gasoline prices or help American families cope with them. These are critical goals, and we believe Congress must take action to address them. In particular, the Center for American Progress urges the Obama administration and Congress to take action to:

• Crack down on the speculation that added at least $20 per barrel to the price of oil this winter and spring during the run-up in oil prices earlier this year, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs & Co.
• Invest in transportation choices that allow Americans the freedom to ignore high gas prices. These must include choices that meet the needs of different American lifestyles, including urban, suburban, and rural. This includes investments in electric cars, trade-in programs for more fuel-efficient vehicles, public transportation operating funds, and investments in new intercity transit systems such as high-speed rail. For relatively modest investments, we can dramatically increase America’s freedom from oil.
• Adopt the next round of fuel economy standards to require cars to get 60-plus miles per gallon by 2025. This would build on the new fuel economy standards that require the average car to get 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.

These measures are essential to reduce high oil and gasoline prices, reduce oil demand and use, save drivers thousands of dollars in lower fuel purchases, reduce pollution, and enhance national security. Investing in next-generation fuels and vehicles has the added benefit of making American companies more competitive, as they work to design and manufacture the future transportation technologies for both the American market and overseas.

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week, the five Big Oil CEO’s continued to whine about the threat of losing their tax breaks despite their enormous wealth and success. Echoing red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, ConocoPhilips actually said that efforts to remove the tax breaks were “un-American.” At the hearing, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) prodded Conoco’s CEO Jim Mulva to retract this offensive comment, but he refused to do so.

Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Schumer urged the companies to contribute to our nation’s economic well-being by giving up these relatively modest loopholes to reduce cuts in student loans and other critical programs. They shamefully refused to play their role in America’s economic recovery.

As with nearly every Senate action, it will take a supermajority of 60 votes to remove the Big Oil tax loopholes. These tax breaks have been on the chopping block several times before, but have never been eliminated. But public support for redirecting these subsidies is at a high point. Perhaps this time the will of the American public, combined with the efforts of courageous senators from both sides of the aisle, can actually overcome the tremendous power of Big Oil’s large campaign coffers and even larger propaganda machine.

This article was cross-posted from the Center for American Progress.

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union on Jan. 25, 2011, waved the green flag for innovation and competition in the cleantech sector. He proposed a number of programs to speed the development and manufacturing of domestic energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors to help American businesses race with their Chinese, German, and other competitors. But before the president’s proposals had completed their initial laps in Congress, the Republicans’ proposed House “continuing resolution” (or spending bill) for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 (FY 2011) waves the yellow caution flag that they would slow down — if not outright halt — the promise of America’s cleantech revolution and all the ensuing companies and jobs it would create.

The proposed bill would slash cleantech and energy investments by nearly 30 percent, devastating this growing but immature industry that struggled during the Great Recession. The House Appropriations Committee majority brags that it “cuts climate change funding bill-wide by $107 million, or 29%, from the fiscal year 2010 enacted level.” The proposed budget includes (view specific program cuts in the bill here [PDF]) many other cuts that would harm innovation, the economy, and public health:

The previous 111th Congress passed a continuing resolution that would fund nearly all of the federal government through March 4, 2011. The proposed House GOP spending bill would fund the government for the remainder of FY 2011, which ends Sept. 30, 2011. The House Appropriations Committee majority claims its bill would cut spending by more than $100 billion between now and Oct. 1. And clean energy, one of the great hopes for American global competitiveness, is one of its biggest targets.

The proposed budget bulldozes the building blocks of cleantech innovation and economic growth. It would slash spending for science, information, research and development, infrastructure, job training, efficiency, domestic manufacturing, solar and wind power, and transit options that could help reduce our oil dependence. Here are the details.

The truth is out there but we’re not going to look: The proposed budget would slash funding for scientific study of our atmosphere and the consequences of the past 150 years of massive carbon-dioxide pollution on our climate. Some representatives seek a $379 million cut in NASA’s programs to study climate change from space that would deprive scientists of essential knowledge about our increasingly chaotic climate. The bill would also devastate America’s clean energy and other scientific research by cutting the Department of Energy’s Office of Science by 18 percent.

Ignorance is bliss: In addition to flattening funding for scientific investigation, the House Republicans’ proposed spending bill would devastate the federal government’s ability to study, understand, and communicate vital information about our changing energy sector. It would cut the Department of Energy’s independent Energy Information Agency (EIA) by nearly one-sixth. EIA is the preeminent collector and disseminator of vital statistics and projections of energy production, consumption, and pollution.

The budget also would wipe out the “Greenhouse Gas Registry” that collects data on companies’ carbon-dioxide pollution. These two cuts would save a paltry $25 million. For comparison, this is just one-twentieth of the $500 million spent on military bands in 2010. The large congressional climate science denier caucus clearly believes that ignoring the problem will make it go away.

Keep inventors in their garages: Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google Inc. and other companies, worries we are falling behind in the clean energy race because investments in research and development (R&D) are completely inadequate to drive innovation and growth:

America spends only about $5 billion-about half a percent-per year on new energy R&D. … America spends more on potato chips than we do on our new energy R&D.

An essential element of innovation and competition is to nurture new technologies so they can be built and commercialized. Many inventions require continued investment across the technology innovation cycle — from invention at the federal labs and publicly sponsored universities, to public-private partnerships aimed at commercializing and licensing new technologies, to technical assistance to make our manufacturers the most advanced and efficient in the world. Finally, new technologies need market demand to help bring them to scale.

The House Republican spending bill slashes key elements of this invention support system, including the Economic Development Administration. One of its programs, the Energy Regional Innovation Cluster program, focuses on fostering regional partnerships to discover and develop breakthroughs in invention, commercialization, and deployment of clean energy technologies. Next fiscal year, the budget would also halt the low-carbon technology efforts of the DOE’s Loan Programs that are essential to support investment in clean energy technologies, including renewables and nuclear. In 2010, the Loan Programs Office was the world’s largest renewable energy projects financier. Without this office and the credit subsidies required to execute its mandate, many leading clean energy companies will struggle to overcome the industry’s “valley-of-death” financial gap to fully commercialize their technologies at scale.

In addition to these breakthrough programs, American prowess in innovation also depends on a strong advanced manufacturing sector to translate new ideas into marketable products. This leads to ongoing engineering improvements that generate second and third waves of innovation. The House Republicans’ budget undermines both sides of this innovation equation by slashing the budget of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which houses both the Technology Innovation Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

The first program fosters public-private partnerships to develop new technologies. The second program works with mostly small- and mid-sized manufacturers to help them become more energy efficient and to access new markets, including emerging clean energy markets. Without investments in research, development, commercialization, and manufacturing, the United States stands poised to become the clean energy consumer of the future, not its inventor, manufacturer, and exporter.

Keep the lights on?: The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) produced a 2009 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” grading key infrastructure segments. Energy received a “D+,” partly due to our aging and inadequate transmission system. ASCE determined that:

The U.S. generation and transmission system is at a critical point requiring substantial investment in new generation, investment to improve efficiencies in existing generation, and investment in transmission and distribution systems.

The proposed House spending bill ignores these infirmities and instead cuts funding for “Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability” by one-fifth. This disinvestment in our electricity infrastructure will undermine performance and reliability.

Who needs new jobs?: The worldwide cleantech market should expand to $2.3 trillion by 2020. To compete in the global clean energy race, America must take a page from China’s playbook and begin to seriously train our workers in key skills like engineering and science, as well as in trades such as machining, welding, and pipefitting. This is critical for our future competitiveness, as well as essential if we are to keep our existing lights on and electricity flowing through the transmission grid. Fully half of America’s utility workforce is expected to retire in the next decade.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 made a down payment on the future competitiveness and job readiness of America’s workers by investing $500 million to train people for existing jobs in weatherization, retrofitting, and the utility trades, as well as investing in science, technology, engineering, and math education, and related training for the clean energy jobs of the future. The House Republican spending bill would slash all job-training funds in half, leaving us ill prepared to compete with workers in other nations, whether in clean energy sectors or in other growing industries such as health care and telecommunications.

Let’s import more foreign oil!: ASCE included passenger and freight rail in its report card and gave the rail system a “C-.” It concluded that new investments in rail systems could:

Alleviate growing freight and passenger congestion experienced by other modes of transportation. In addition, rail is a fuel efficient alternative for moving freight long distances.

Anticipated growth over the coming decades … will tax a rail system that is already reaching capacity in some critical bottlenecks. A substantial investment in rail infrastructure will maximize efficiencies and ultimately reap broad benefits.

Yet the proposed House spending bill would cut existing rail by slicing one-tenth of Amtrak’s budget. It would also zero out funds for high-speed rail, even though our global competitors in China and the European Union have invested heavily in high-speed passenger rail to move people quickly between cities, cut air pollution from air and car travel, and free up regular rail corridors for freight rail.

Waste not, watt not: Thrift used to be a conservative value but apparently that is no longer so. The proposed House GOP budget would decimate investments in energy efficiency, cutting funding for these vital programs by more than one-third. This is penny wise but pound foolish since investments in efficiency actually lower electricity bills and ultimately save more money than they cost.

The budget would also eliminate funds for EPA’s “Energy Star” program that informs consumers about energy-efficient products and practices. In 2009 it helped consumers save nearly $17 billion on their utility bills.

Renewable energy: Out of the running?: The United States used to lead the pack in the invention and manufacturing of clean energy technologies such as pioneering breakthroughs in PVC solar. Over the past decade we were lapped by other nations due to their pro-renewable investment and energy policies. The United States ranks 11th among the G-20 nations in “clean energy investment intensity,” or clean energy investments per unit of gross domestic product. Obama is determined to gain ground so we can compete with China, Germany, and other nations. To accomplish this goal, we invested billions of dollars in cleantech under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The GOP budget would dramatically disinvest in the solar, wind, wave, geothermal, and other renewable technologies that enabled the United States to get back in the clean energy race. It would cut funds for cleantech by nearly $800 million. Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke reports that China invests almost $12 billion monthly into its renewable-energy sector: “They’re doing this because they really want to be the world’s supplier of clean energy and they recognize this will support millions of jobs.”

Taking the health cops off the beat: The Environmental Protection Agency is the federal watchdog to protect Americans from air, water, and land pollution that threatens public health and the environment. In addition to designing such public health safeguards, it cooperates with states to enforce these laws. They are defenders of public health from cancer-causing and other hazardous pollutants spewed from industrial facilities.

The proposed House budget would devastate EPA’s ability to protect our health. It would remove public health cops from the beat while making it harder to adopt new protections too. It would also cut funds for states that help them enforce these health protections. The result of these huge cuts will be more violations, more pollution, and more illnesses. These cuts could spark massive environmental law breaking.

Stay warm by shivering: The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, is a lifeline for seniors and others who cannot afford high electricity bills. By providing this assistance, people in the dawn, dusk, or shadows of life do not have to choose between eating, taking medicine, or staying warm.

The House GOP budget would cut money for the LIHEAP emergency fund by $200 million, or one-third of current funding. This could force low-income families to make the horrible choices described above. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made it clear that the GOP will proceed with steep cuts in this vital assistance. This is shameful for the richest nation in the world.

President Obama also proposed deep cuts in LIHEAP, which is a shameful act in the midst of the worst economy in 80 years. Hopefully, he will positively respond to Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Scott Brown (R-Mass.), and others beseeching the president to fund this vital service:

The budget proposal submitted by the administration today cuts the program to $2.57 billion which would be devastating for our constituents in Massachusetts. We respectfully request that as you prepare the budget for Fiscal Year 2012 you maintain LIHEAP at its current level of $5.1 billion.

We all appreciate that difficult decisions have to be made this budget cycle to restore fiscal sanity and begin to tackle the debt. However, this year Massachusetts, and many other parts of the country, have seen record breaking low temperatures and brutal storm conditions.

President Obama reminded Congress during his State of the Union that the United States faces a real innovation challenge from China, Germany, and other nations, much as it did in 1957 as the Soviet Union rocketed ahead of us in space exploration.

When the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

Instead of proposing a budget that invests in future cleantech jobs, the proposed House Republican budget turns back the clock to the Bush administration era when there was relatively little investment in cleantech and other countries began to lap us. The proposed House GOP spending bill for the remainder of 2011 would strangle cleantech innovation, competitiveness, and economic growth.

Their proposed disinvestments in energy efficiency and renewable technologies and their disruption of business assistance and job-training programs would wave the white flag of surrender in the international race to lead the cleantech industry in the 21st century. Americans should know that House Republican leaders want to force our best innovators, business people, and investors into an endless pit stop while we watch another nation cross the finish line first.