Green Labor Journal - Working for a Substainable Future

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR)

Made in America: green energy, green jobs - Remarks at 2010 Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference

Print this article

I do want to say, any time that there is an organization that’s called the Blue-Green Alliance, it’s something I want to be involved in. I think it’s just a tremendous analogy of blue for workers and jobs and our economy, and green for our stewardship of the environment.

And for so long, so many have said that blue and green are at war, so we now know that they’re not at war and that they’re working together to make both our economy and our planet a better place.

So this is the pretty good thing, and the goals of having a more robust economy, of strengthening national security and being better stewards of the planet are all tied into the conversation, the dialogue and the debate that we are having here in Washington, DC.

Tying together the green economy
I wanted to address a few pieces of that dialogue regarding vehicles, buildings, the generation of renewable energy and manufacturing and how those tie together.

Now I like to emphasize the role of vehicles. Vehicles utilize about 40 percent of the energy in our economy, and as I’ll get to in a minute, buildings another 40 percent, but it disturbs me that we spend a billion dollars a day on foreign oil.

Now two years ago when I was campaigning and oil prices spiked so high that it was two billion dollars a day. One billion dollars is better than two billion dollars, but we thoroughly expect the price of oil to go back up again and this is a tremendous part of our trade deficit.

And every single time that dollars go overseas, those are dollars that are escaping our economy and that do not reverberate through wages and restaurants and grocery stores and every other part of our economy to make families stronger.

In addition, most of those dollars go to countries that do not share our core national interests. They end up in the hands of Chavez in Venezuela and various folks in the Middle East; that is not the place that we should be sending our dollars.

So national security is tied together, and indeed I’ll come to that in a little while but I was meeting with the vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on an issue, and regarding the interaction between Doppler radars and wind turbines and the first thing he said to me was, “I know, before you say it, I know that wind turbines contribute to our national security,” so that message is certainly getting through, even into the military leadership.

Electric vehicles
So 2010 represents a real year of the electric vehicle. Now out in the parking lot we have a 1939 UPS all-electric delivery vehicle, I understand it would go eight miles. Well I’m not sure what kind of route you could go on those eight miles, but it represented certainly the fact that electricity has been with us for a long time.

There were a lot of electric cars before there were virtually any oil-powered or gasoline-powered cars. And electricity is coming back into its own. It won’t be that long before we’ll be able to choose between the Tesla sedan, the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt and a bunch of other electric vehicles.

If we could go the first 40 miles in our passenger vehicles on electricity on any given day we’d be reducing 70 percent of the carbon dioxide produced by our passenger cars. That’s a pretty significant impact.

And indeed electric vehicles bring together the magic of regenerative breaking. Well if you can capture the energy every time a heavy vehicle comes to a stop, you have re-captured a tremendous amount of energy that’s currently lost.

And then there’s the fact that electricity generation is more efficient than burning fuel directly in cars. Even if you were to take that same fuel and burn it in a power plant and distribute it on the grid you still come out ahead of burning it separately in individual cars.

And of course electric vehicles then present the possibility and the potential to have that electricity generated in a non-carbon fashion. So those forces coming together mean that electrification of our cars and our delivery fleet is a very important part of the puzzle.

I’m working with Sen. Dorgan and Sen. Alexander on a bill for the deployment of electric vehicles.

This bill will create deployment communities to take and establish locations in the United States of different size, of different shape to really show that you can take and produce additional electric cars and additional infrastructure in a way that accelerates both.

High-speed rail
It is important to recognize that there are other elements of our transportation economy that I won’t dwell on because I know I’m going to start getting the nod if I hit my ten minutes here, but I do want to observe – it’s already been talked about – rail.

I believe last year when the rail lobby was in my office they had pins that didn’t say 480, I think they said 457, and so of course I did what I was supposed to do which was say, “And what’s 457 for?”

And Obey has already told us – it’s pretty remarkable if you think about that a gallon of diesel can take a ton of freight 457 miles. It’s remarkable and it does represent tremendous efficiencies that can be gained.

We need to be looking at that. We need to be looking at high-speed passenger rail. We need to be continuing to redesign the form of our cities to produce options to using personal vehicles.

Portland, Oregon has had a lot of folks come in – how many folks have ever visited Portland, Oregon? Wow, look at that. Alright. Go, Oregon. Because it is really working on the form of the city.

We have state-wide land use planning with boundaries around our urban centers; this was a strategy set up almost 40 years ago now, and it really, as the communities have expanded to bump those urban growth boundaries, it’s redefined the form of the city.

And meant we put far more investment in the urban core than we would otherwise and made the use of Metro more feasible.

And now we’re putting down streetcars. And those streetcars represent a little bit of an alternative; they’re more like a permanent bus in a way in that economic development builds up around them because they are permanent, but they’re far more efficient than burning fuel in a bus.

And those street cars that are now being produced in Oregon by Oregon Iron Works and I believe that right here in DC I understand rail is being laid for streetcars. And any decision makers from DC, please buy those streetcars in America, which means the only place you’ll buy them is Portland, Oregon, because it’s the only place they’re being built now in America.

Energy efficient buildings
Well let me turn now to buildings. Buildings also use about 40 percent of our energy.

And there is huge potential to increase the energy efficiency of so many buildings built over such a long period of time; long before we had the insulation standards, the double-paned windows that we have today and so on and so forth.

This is why Home Star and Building Star are such important programs and why, as you visit Capitol Hill, certainly encourage you to please weigh in heavily on Home Star and Building Star.

You know, former President Bill Clinton came to our caucus, and he came to talk about jobs and the economy, and he spent virtually his entire time talking about buildings. And the statistics he had were that there is no more cost-effective way to create jobs than invest in the energy efficiency of our buildings.

And so the idea behind Home Star and Building Star, one focusing on residences, one on commercial buildings, is that folks would do a lot more energy conservation if they could overcome the upfront cost of those renovations.

I think about my house back home and I could use some additional double-paned windows but the upfront cost was a bit of a sticker-shock.

But if I knew I could pay for that with a low-cost loan that would be on my electric bill and the savings would actually be as much as the cost of the loan payments, then there is no upfront cost and I’m much more likely to adopt that strategy and much more likely, therefore, that jobs will be created around that.

“Clean Energy Works” Program
There is a program in Portland called “Clean Energy Works” that embodies exactly these ideas and the Oregon state legislature has now created a state-wide strategy to do the same, but we need a national strategy to do this.

And there are two close cousins of this: One is the Rural Energy Savings bill, and this is to work with electric co-ops so they can do 3 percent loans; and the other is the Industrial Energy Savings program, Senator Sherrod Brown is introducing that today – some of you may know it as the 48C program – and I’m proud to co-sponsor that as well.

But Home Star and Building Star can generate 350,000 jobs over the next two years and save four billion dollars a year in energy costs. Energy savings is a gift that keeps on giving.

So we have a challenge. A challenge should be, as you talk to legislators on the hill, that the Senate passes Home Star and Building Star by Memorial Day so that this can be on the President’s desk and be put into action by Labor Day.

Renewable energy generation
I’ve got a couple minutes left so I want to talk about generation. I want to see us generate non-carbon power here in America; both because it’s right for the environment and it’s right for building the American economy.

Oregon has potential in wind and wave and geothermal and solar; various parts of the country have different types of potential.

Oregon also has enormous potential in biomass. And I want to mention this for a moment, because often biomass isn’t talked about in the same breath.

But if you think about the carbon dioxide challenge in our environment – you know I was talking about this a couple years ago and a woman said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great, Jeff, if we just had machines that took carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?” And I said to her, “You’ll be happy to know we grow millions of those in Oregon.”

And if you take and you have the sort of sustainable harvest, you get a win-win, because we have millions of acres of overgrown, second-growth forests untended. It’s bad for the environment, it is bad for timber, and so it can be thinned if there is an economic end use for those thinings.

And right now the reason they’re unthinned is because nobody can afford to pay for it, but if we can produce both co-generation at one end of the biomass spectrum as one way to create energy, and you can capture 80 percent of the energy, you’re pulling carbon dioxide out of the air.

And it’s a loop; you’re not bringing more coal and oil out of the ground. And there’s also potential in biofuels, and starting June 1, there will be construction on the first commercial biofuel operation in Oregon, which will use a cycle involving the harvesting of poplar trees.

Wind: in Oregon, right now, the Department of Defense, through that conversation I mentioned a few minutes ago, just approved the construction of Shepherds Flat – a wind project. That one project will have the potential of 800 megawatts.

Now for comparison, the Boardman Coal-Fired Plant in Oregon is 613 megawatts. So that shows wind is a serious, serious player. And in addition to Shepherds Flat, we have an additional 1,900 megawatts that will be under construction this year, for a total of 2,700.

That’s a serious part of the puzzle. And if we combine that renewable energy with end use and electric cars, replacing coal power, et cetera, we have a real positive cycle.

Green energy, green jobs: Made In America
Well, I want to conclude by saying we need to seize this moment to build things in America. The motto for our green energy, green jobs strategy needs to be “Made in America.”

When we’re building Shepherds Flat, we’re using turbines from General Electric. We want to see America building turbines and shipping to the world. We want to see American intellectual capital being shipped to the world.

Because this is a factor that could produce a lot of living wage jobs, a lot of union jobs, a lot of foundation for our families.

And I’m going to tell you if we look at the broad history of the last several decades, the wages of working families plateaued in 1974. That was the year I came out of high school.

We’ve had a tremendous increase in productivity over those decades, but working families are not benefitting, and part of the reason is so much of our production has shifted overseas. So let us seize this moment with this potential in solar and wind and wave and geothermal and biomass, to build an America and ship our products overseas.

If I could leave you with one thing it’s this: As you go out on the Hill to talk, you may be thinking about, “Well, there’s going to be all other sorts of components of this dialogue, there’ll be White House press conferences, there’ll be ads on cable TV and so forth.”

And that’s true. There’ll be a lot of that in the conversation.

But the most important element in this dialogue to getting something done in Congress is all of you. The person-to-person communication. And I certainly encourage you to not be shy, to simply say this is about creating jobs.

This is about American companies having additional potential to manufacture and sell things to the world. This certainly is, as well, about being good stewards of our planet and both are important, and let’s get it done together, and thank you very much.

Jeff Merkley is a United States Senator from Oregon.