You don’t want to disappoint these kids.Photo: Sean Suddes/Sierra Club

From Seattle to Pittsburgh, children can be found outside, playing football and baseball, or just playing a good game of tag. However, hundreds of thousands of children are unable to take part because the air they breathe is making them sick. It was disturbing, then, last week that the Energy and Commerce committee held a hearing in which Republicans were pushing ahead on legislation to gut the Clean Air Act and retire important safeguards against the very pollutants that cause these children and so many others significant health problems.

This week, in their zeal to let big polluters control public policy, Republicans attached their Dirty Air Act as a rider to their 2011 budget Continuing Resolution (CR) — important legislation to fund the operations of the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year.

Hundreds of thousands of children face the severe health risks associated with air and water pollution. That is why Congress first adopted the Clean Air Act under President Richard Nixon, and, in the 40 years since its enactment, air pollution has been reduced by 60 percent, while our economy has grown by more than 200 percent. In its first 20 years, the Clean Air Act has prevented an estimated 843,000 asthma attacks, 18 million cases of respiratory illness among children, 672,000 cases of chronic bronchitis, 21,000 cases of heart disease and 200,000 premature deaths. Further, studies show that the benefits of Clean Air rules to the American people outweigh any costs by 30 to one.

But the hearing last week wasn’t about how the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress could better protect children. Instead it was about Republican proposals to gut the Clean Air Act, to hamstring the EPA, and write Big Polluters a blank check. Some folks wrote about it, but the effort by Republicans to replace successful and needed legislation with their Dirty Air Act has largely slipped beneath the mainstream media.

It is clear, however, that Republicans do not intend to modify the act, revise it, or improve it — they intend to eviscerate it.

It deserves such approbation because it flies in the face of something we all desire — to breathe clean air. Because Americans in both red and blue states exalt in inhaling that precious mix of oxygen and a few other gases upon which all else in life depends.

Nor can a lack of clarity about the science justify the Republicans’ assault on the law. Huge power plants are now burning more than 1.1 billion tons of coal [PDF] and pouring out 2.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, gases that are irrefutably changing our climate and increasing concentrations of ozone that are directly making our children’s asthmatic gasps more frequent and severe. Their effort to spray an ink cloud of doubt about this unassailable fact was revealed as quite pathetic when they failed to produce one credible scientist who contradicted this rock solid conclusion. Not one!

Imagine that. All the billions in the polluter’s pockets couldn’t turn up one peer-reviewed study on the planet to refute this scientific conclusion.

Every time America moves forward in cleaning up our air, lobbyists flock to the Capitol and scream bloody murder about the costs of compliance with the law — costs that have always ended up being a fraction of what they predicted. Americans intuitively understand our power to innovate and solve these pollution problems, and by significant margins they oppose Republican attempts to gut the Clean Air Act.

Americans know a good thing when they see it. Let’s keep the “Clean” in the Clean Air act.

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So as the Congress returns to work this year, its post-Copenhagen duty remains the same as its pre-Copenhagen responsibility:  to pass an energy bill that both jump-starts the United States’ economy and screws down the nation’s carbon pollution. There are two obvious reasons we must pass energy legislation, one pertaining to our self-interest, and the other to the world’s.

First, our economic self-interest demands action on energy, independent of any international framework on carbon reduction.  Job creation in clean energy remains job No. 1 for this country. Those jobs will not magically spring into existence; they will be created only if the United States Congress passes bold energy legislation. 

Did China abandon its plans for a massive buildup of clean energy technologies for lack of a treaty coming out of Copenhagen? Did it cancel its plans to build 30 gigawatts of wind energy in the next decade? Did it shut down its electric-car manufacturing plants in Tianjin? Did it shutter its efficient lighting research in Hong Kong? Did it reduce its development budget for lithium-ion batteries to power electric cars? Of course it didn’t.

Just three weeks after the world failed to reach a binding agreement in Copenhagen, China announced its intentions to build the world’s largest solar-powered electrical generating facility in western China, a plant capable of powering 3 million homes using a vast array of photovoltaic cells. The juggernaut of Chinese investment in these clean energy technologies rolled along without Copenhagen even being a speed bump. China continues to invest $12.6 million an hour in an effort to create whole new clean energy industries.

Why would a country continue on this path in the absence of a treaty out of Copenhagen? The answer does not lie in some noble and selfless Chinese effort to bail the world out of its predicament as recompense for China’s less than stellar performance at Copenhagen. The answer lies in China’s smart, insightful, and visionary recognition that there will be billions of dollars and millions of jobs to be had in the next several decades in the new clean energy economy. 

The Chinese recognize that the nation that gets a jump start in these fields will have the “first mover” advantage and that it will be difficult for the second players to catch up. The Chinese want to be first, biggest, and most globally competitive from the get-go. The Chinese recognize that the absence of a binding treaty doesn’t belie the fundamental economic facts; if you don’t move on clean energy now, you will be left at the starting gate, with a 20th century economy in a 21st century world.

Our national economic self-interest was the same both before and after Copenhagen. It is in our country’s best interest to lead the world in technological innovation, as it always has. The outcome at Copenhagen should not blind us to both the economic opportunity of action and the economic threat of inaction on the energy front.

We are fully capable of building a new domestic clean energy economy, something I learned while co-authoring Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. The number of businesses in this country ready to take off in clean energy ought to give everyone confidence.

We should also recognize what really happened in Denmark. For the first time, the United States, long the world’s leading emitter, engaged with the rest of the world on climate. For the first time, other major emitters publicly declared their intentions to cut either their emissions or their energy intensity. For the first time, the developed and developing world had an honest discussion about mitigation.  We now can explore new approaches in bilateral agreements, or within assemblages of developing countries that now represent the bulk of the emissions.

All of us ought to hope the Senate is able to move forward and do the work necessary to forge a clean energy bill this year. I understand it is difficult. I know the Senate may be weary after dealing with health-care legislation. But the emerging clarity of the economic opportunities before us, and the urgent need for action on climate change, do not permit delay.

Given the terrifying new evidence of the increasing rates of climate change and ocean acidification, the question before us is the same one that melancholy Dane asked in Elsinore Castle years back, just a few miles from Copenhagen. As Hamlet said, the question is, “… to be or not to be.”

Only this time, it is all of us in deep trouble, not just an indecisive Danish prince.

There are two types of pesky partisans on the loose right now who refuse to accept reality due to their ideological blindness — birthers and global warming deniers. This realization struck me last week as I listened to Republicans argue that we should let the world boil over, all while they “dithered” over reading silly emails written between a few climate scientists. The members of the Flat Earth Society may be out of ideas, but they are not out of denials.

All the shouting in the world can’t refute the fact that the science of climate change is sound.iStock PhotoThe Flat Earth Society is, of course, the climatic analog of the birthers movement, determined to undermine Americans’ confidence in clear facts about climate change. The first fact they deny is that the first American black president was elected last year. The second denial concerns the well-established scientific consensus that the earth is warming and the oceans are acidifying because of human activity.

Both birthers and the climate-change deniers work on a similar premise — that concrete facts can be subjugated to the power of fear. Both movements fear change and contemplate that they can create enough smoke and confusion to fertilize the ascendency of fear. They both enjoy big megaphones and are capable of big noise, but are both fundamentally rotten at the factual core.

So they work to obscure plain and unbridled truth by pointing to the inartful language contained in a bunch of emails from a British research institution. While the obvious truth is that the Arctic is melting, the Greenland glaciers are melting, climate change refugees are moving, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic than in preindustrial times, the seas are rising, and the deserts are expanding — the deniers continue to blow their smoke calling global warming science a “trick.” If this is a trick, it is one that is now undermining the very foundation of the globe’s climate, and perhaps changing it more quickly than any time in the planet’s history, except a couple of times when we were hit by comets or asteroids.

But let’s give the deniers their 15 minutes of fame and consider what the scientific consensus would be even if the British researchers were, in fact, members of some evil international conspiracy on the order of the group “Spectre” that James Bond so nobly fought years ago. Simply put, the impact of concluding that the British were out to lunch is zero. As the National Academy of Sciences concluded, and White House science adviser John Holdren articulated at a congressional hearing last week, we have so many separate threads and data sets that lead to one overwhelming conclusion: we cannot take our eye off the ball in pushing for vigorous CO2 emissions caps.

If you laid out end to end all the emails the deniers now have their knickers in a twist over, they would still not cover up the thousands of square miles of the Arctic Ocean that are now ice free in the summer. You could chop up all the emails and spread them over Greenland, but they would not insulate the island’s massive glaciers enough to stop the rapid loss of volume that have now been confirmed by multiple examinations, all of them independent from the British study caught up in the email non-scandal. It is neat public relations “trick” the deniers are now using in an attempt to fool the public into abandoning efforts to fight this global crisis, but it is going to fail, for two reasons.

First, it is going to fail because there are Republicans who have the courage to stand up to both the birthers and to the deniers. We should be encouraged by the comments of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who recently said that email controversy or not, the fact that the earth is warming due in part to human action is well established. Courage comes in many forms. Insistence upon listening to clear science, even if it disturbs some ideological views of certain groups, is one admirable form of courage.

Second, the deniers are going to fail because their cynical allies, the birthers, are going to fail. The birthers have not been able to stop an American president from going to Copenhagen to lead the world in an effort to stop global warming. We ought to be proud we have a president who can say, “The nation that leads in clean energy will be the nation that leads the world, and I want America to be that nation.”

With an attitude that sees global warming as an economic opportunity as much as an environmental problem, we have a president who can spark a new period of economic growth and leave both the birthers and the deniers where they belong, in the dustbin of history.

Spread the news on what the føck is going on in Copenhagen with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, or smoke signals.

Last week in Congress, I met with three people who represent the three imperatives of our efforts against global warming. One represents the morality of the endeavor, another who received the Nobel Prize represents the science behind the economics, and the third is a well known gym rat who represents the way our democracy will answer the call. All three of them share one important trait — they are all allies in the race to save the planet from the scourge of climate change.

That the Dalai Lama is an important voice in the climate change debate might strike some as surprising. After all, he has his hands full trying to protect the religious liberty of the Tibetan people. But in our meeting with him and Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Capitol, he made it abundantly clear that he considers climate change a mortal threat to his people as well as to all of the one and a half billion people who depend upon the rivers flowing from the threatened glaciers of the Himalayas.

His depiction of the already dry Tibetan plateau made it clear why the increasing desertification and loss of glacier mass are without question a scientifically proven problem demanding an international response. The Dalai Lama is more than a spiritual leader, he is a man who esteems science, and he told us the science of this is clear to him. It was perhaps a coincidence that the week the Dalai Lama came to Washington, D.C. with his message about the science of climate change, several major American corporations quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of its refusal to recognize the scientific urgency of responding to this threat.

Why is it that a humble man wrapped in saffron robes living at the foot of the Himalayas gets it when so many allegedly technologically advanced corporate leaders do not? Fortunately, a large number of American business leaders are demanding action at an accelerating rate, and are willing to say goodbye to the retrograde forces of denial to make their point.

Just down the street from the Capitol, I met another leader who won the Nobel prize in physics. Dr. Steven Chu is leading a revamped and rejuvenated Department of Energy in its efforts to jump-start the U.S. economy with a burst of clean energy innovation. What he was doing theoretically to win the Nobel Prize, he is now doing practically by pumping out several billion dollars a month in loan guarantees and grants to help new business get on their feet in the biggest, boldest, most productive economic opportunity on our horizon — the clean energy revolution.

Secretary Chu revealed that what made him willing to leave the comforts of academia to jump into the Capitol fray was the obvious need to save the planet from climate change. But now that he is in the post, he has taken to the task of building jobs and economic growth with a full recognition of another threat, that of the possibility that China will seize the initiative and come to dominate the world’s market in providing clean energy technologies. Over lunch he emphasized his concern that China’s investment of about $12 million a minute will allow it to gain an insurmountable lead over us in building new clean energy industries here.

Secretary Chu made a statement that might stun many Americans. He believes China has passed America in the field of high-tech manufacturing, not low-cost manufacturing. His statement revealed a new truth. We have historically feared the ability of China to beat us due to their low-wage rates. That fear now properly should be replaced by a concern about its ability to dominate high-tech manufacturing.

But Secretary Chu has an answer to that gloomy prospect: America can become a major provider to the world of clean energy products and services, if we play our cards right.

Now he is our ally in the great race to develop and deploy high-tech, clean energy technologies so that we can fulfill America’s destiny to be the arsenal of clean energy to the world, just as we were the arsenal of democracy during World War II. It is a thrill to see the billions of dollars of investment that his department is now helping to promote, using the stimulus funds we provided in Congress, because this is the real-world application of the ideas we have promoted in our book Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. What were developing ideas and dreams in Apollo’s Fire are now becoming hard realities.

The next day, I had the good fortune to meet another leader, this one a noted gym rat, a devotee of the game of basketball, who asked a me and few other congressmen to come over and play a few games of basketball at the former tennis court he had made over into hoops court at the White House. He was to be named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize the next day, but that day President Barack Obama was most notable for his crossover dribble.

That move of his would surprise many for its effectiveness and his ability to get to the hoop and score. In this way his basketball game is just like his strategy on clean energy legislation — his forthcoming score is going to surprise a lot of people. Until we passed our energy bill in the House, most said it couldn’t be done. Now they are saying we cannot get a bill out of the Senate. Those folks are wrong, just like the folks were wrong who might have thought that Obama is too skinny to go to the hoop in traffic.

The dynamic is in our direction. All the relevant pressures are breaking our way. The resignations from the Chamber of Commerce, the increasingly clear science, the signs of bipartisanship emerging in the Senate, the increasingly clear picture that we need a new horizon for job creation to pull us out of the recession, the emergence of clean energy leadership in the business community from Detroit in electric autos, to the southwest in solar thermal technologies, to the Midwest in a host of new manufacturing opportunities, all point to a real chance for success this congress.

And don’t you think that the belated realization that if Congress does not act with a scalpel, the EPA will act with a cudgel, has finally brought the sudden sense of revelation in many parts of the industrial community that they had better get in to the game instead of denying it exists?

This story about the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, and a presidential gym rat may sound like the set up of a pedestrian joke, but it represents a troika of forces that are on the cusp of the greatest industrial revolution yet. The Dalai Lama represents the morality of the necessity of change, the physicist represents the economic and scientific necessity of change, and the presidential gym rat represents the political possibility of a clean energy revolution. Together those three men I met last week are the embodiment of hope.

Victory is within our reach and they will help us find a way to seize it.

On April 21, Congress stepped back in geologic time when the House of Representatives passed an energy policy of the dinosaurs, by the dinosaurs, and for the dinosaurs. This energy bill is truly a “Jurassic” piece of legislation that relies on a limited energy source derived from creatures and plants that died millions of years ago. In fact, 93 percent of the $8 billion in tax incentives in the bill go to oil, gas, and other traditional energy industries.

A patriotic sight.

Photo: Tennessee Valley Infrastructure Group Inc. c/o NREL.

Shortly before the House debate, one national leader said, “I will tell you with $55 oil we don’t need incentives to oil and gas companies to explore. … What we need is to put a strategy in place that will help this country over time become less dependent.” Incredibly, that leader was President George W. Bush. Even the president with the worst environmental record since Warren G. Harding cannot conceal that this energy bill is more technologically suited for the 19th century than the 21st century.

Instead of this petroleum-soaked energy policy, some of my colleagues and I have been promoting a new vision for our energy future, one that would avoid drilling in our pristine areas, while creating jobs, enhancing our national security, and protecting the environment. This clean-energy vision, called the New Apollo Energy Act, is based on optimism rather than self-doubt, on new technologies rather than archaic methods, and on faith in Americans’ innovative talent rather than capitulation to narrow special interests. New Apollo will commit our nation to clean energy to increase domestic high-tech employment, reduce the effects of climate change, and advance our country toward independence from foreign oil. Though the Republican leadership refused to allow us to offer a version of New Apollo as an amendment to the energy bill, I will soon be introducing it as a separate bill in Congress.

New Apollo draws its inspiration from President Kennedy’s original “Apollo” plan, which in 1961 challenged the nation to put a man on the moon within the decade and return him safely to Earth. Kennedy recognized that Americans love a good challenge and are the most creative people in human history. In a similar way, New Apollo challenges Americans to harness their legendary ingenuity and technological prowess to build a clean, economically beneficial energy system on our own planet — a planet we want to keep comfortably fit for human habitation and free from global warming and conflicts arising over the control of petroleum.

Our New Apollo Energy Act will provide $49 billion in government loan guarantees for the construction of clean-energy generation facilities that will produce power from wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, oceans, coal with carbon-sequestration technology, and other sources. The legislation will also commit $10.5 billion to research-and-development investment tax credits for clean energy-producing operations. In addition, it includes a 10-year extension of the current credit for electricity generated from clean sources. Making these clean energy sources cost-effective for citizens will require this type of bold infrastructure investment by the federal government.

There is no one silver bullet that will solve the nation’s energy crisis, so New Apollo pursues a number of other strategies as well. It creates national net-metering and interconnection standards that allow homeowners who generate clean energy to reduce their energy bills by feeding surplus electricity back into the grid. It also contains a renewable portfolio standard that will require all utilities to produce 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2021.

Of course, the best way to generate energy is to not waste it, so New Apollo includes incentives for American consumers to drive fuel-efficient vehicles, including tax credits for the purchase of hybrid, alternative-fuel, low-emission advanced diesel, and fuel-cell vehicles. It also provides an incentive program to encourage domestic automotive and aerospace manufacturers to develop new fuel-efficient automobiles and planes.

These boosts for clean energy and efficiency will make it possible to meet our bill’s call for notable reductions in daily domestic oil consumption — cuts of 600,000 barrels a day by 2010, 1,700,000 barrels by 2015, and 3,000,000 barrels by 2020. These numbers are approximate estimates of the amount of oil the United States would soon be importing daily from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the entire Middle East, respectively, without a change in current policy. Lessening our dependence on foreign oil will greatly strengthen our national security.

That is in sharp contrast to what we would see under the Republicans’ Jurassic energy bill — an 80 percent increase in petroleum imports between 2002 and 2025, according to the president’s own Energy Department. That bill fails to recognize that the United States has only 3 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves but consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil — simply put, we cannot drill our way to energy independence. Even with the most generous estimates, opening up the Arctic Refuge and other treasures for exploration would not have any significant impact on oil supply or prices.

A smart energy policy must also address the threats posed by global warming. Scientists have found overwhelming evidence that climate change is caused by rising greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. The argument is over — debating global warming is as sensible as debating gravity. New Apollo would enact a proposal similar to the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act by capping our emissions of greenhouse gases while allowing companies to purchase and trade credits amongst themselves to ensure the most cost-effective reductions, and funding research to help industries make the shift to cleaner operations. The bill targets one of the biggest greenhouse-gas offenders — coal — by providing $7 billion for the development of energy-efficient coal-fired power plants that sequester 90 percent of their carbon-dioxide emissions.

Allowing America’s clean-energy industries to stagnate is economically dangerous. While the U.S. has remained fixated on oil and gas, Denmark, Germany, and Japan have surpassed our country in reaping the economic benefits of renewable-energy technologies. Non-U.S. companies now produce about 90 percent of solar photovoltaic panels, with Japanese firms alone controlling about 49 percent of the solar-technology market — technology that Americans originally developed. European companies control 85 percent of wind-turbine manufacturing, and the U.S. currently imports fuel cells from Canada. New Apollo will close this technology gap with foreign competitors by investing billions of dollars in new federal research into advanced clean technologies, and creating a government-funded risk pool to help struggling start-up clean-energy companies commercialize their products.

America’s high-tech hubs like the Puget Sound area, which includes my home district, will significantly benefit from investment in clean energy. One study by the Apollo Alliance has found that a substantial federal commitment to clean energy could yield up to 3.3 million jobs nationally.

There is a sad irony in the fact that humans are now relying on energy from fossilized dinosaurs and vegetation, which died most likely as a result of climate change, to such a great extent that we are altering the nature of our own atmosphere. But we can change our path through optimism and ingenuity — our country has a history of taking on tough challenges and triumphing. It is now time to roll up our sleeves, get down to work, and lead the world in developing new energy technologies through a New Apollo Energy Act.

This piece reflects the opinion of its author and should not be taken to constitute an official endorsement by Grist Magazine, its staff, its board, their psychotherapists, or their aestheticians.