At a hearing last month, Senator John McCain recounted his trip earlier this summer to the Arctic fringe in Norway and Iceland, where the effects of global warming are accelerating at an alarming rate. "The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin," he said, "and now there are robins all over their villages."
While the United States and the seven other countries with Arctic territory jointly expressed concern this week about acute changes in the Arctic climate, the U.S. refuses to do anything about global warming because some Republicans steadfastly maintain that environmental laws cost jobs.
Yet, as contributor David Rejeski observes in a new PPI report, "by 1974, shortly after President Nixon signed landmark Clean Air and Clean Water laws, 50,000 jobs had been created in the construction of water treatment plants and other infrastructure to meet the new environmental standards. Another 75,000 jobs were created in new industries that focused on things like cleaning up contaminated industrial sites, and developing devices such as 'scrubbers' to filter smokestack pollution."
Although states such as California were the birthplace of energy and waste-saving strategies such as wind power, today, we are falling behind our German and Japanese counterparts in the global clean technology race. Clean technology covers the spectrum of environmentally friendly products and services with the common goal of cutting costly energy consumption and waste.
"The Bush administration's backward-looking energy and environmental policies, coupled with gridlock in Congress, have left the United States ill equipped to compete with other nations in the booming global market for environmentally clean technologies -- a market projected to be worth $607 billion in 2005," writes PPI researcher, Shamarukh Mohiuddin, in a companion paper to Rejeski's.
According to Rejeski, we are falling behind because our landmark environmental laws, created by Congress during the 1970s in a show of bipartisanship unimaginable today, are increasingly ill equipped to deal with problems such as climate change. Senator McCain, in concert with Senator Joe Lieberman, has unveiled a more modern, flexible method that uses market trading to reduce gases implicated in global warming. But many of their colleagues wrongly maintain such measures will cost too much.
As a result, private markets in the United States haven't taken much interest in energy-saving technologies that can help stem global warming gases at the same time. Clean technology companies received $580 million from venture capitalists during the first half of 2004, according to the Cleantech Venture Network, which tracks deals in the industry. That compares with $11 billion for all venture capital investments.
In a recent Sacramento Bee story, Nicholas Parker, chairman of the Cleantech Venture Network, said that European investors are far ahead of their American counterparts in understanding the risks and opportunities in clean technology.
Absent federal leadership, about 14 U.S. states have set up funds that support the development of clean energy projects. Among the most notable is California's "Green Wave" initiative, spearheaded by State Treasurer Phil Angelides. There, investor interest in green technologies is growing as a result of plans by Cal-PERS and the California State Teachers' Retirement System to inject a combined $950 million into the fledgling industry in the coming years. That cash infusion, backers say, could create 52,000 to 114,000 high-paying jobs and generate $11 billion to $25 billion in annual revenues in the state over the next six years.
As a result, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seasoned during the high-tech boom in the 1990s are using their experience and their windfalls to launch new clean technology startups. Such ventures range from technologies to purify water in homes and government agencies, wireless sensors to monitor power usage in supermarkets, wind power generators, paper-thin solar cells, biological products for plant growers, nuclear waste disposal programs and ocean wave power-generating systems.
The Clinton administration launched a National Environmental Technology Strategy to ensure that environmental laws send the right market signals, and to enable U.S. environmental technology producers to better compete in global markets. It should have been a no-brainer for the new Bush administration, which was seeking a positive "jobs and environment" message, to build on that strategy. "Unfortunately," Rejeski writes, "high-level White House commitment to the concept of a national environmental technology strategy evaporated after the 2000 election and many of the federal programs put in place in the late 1990's have languished as a result."
To jump-start such efforts, Rejeski advances a seven-point plan. Unlike several competing proposals -- which appear to ignore the nation's current fiscal crisis -- this plan will not cost billions of dollars to implement. Most of the recommendations in the plan would require no new money, just a realignment of existing resources behind a new, high-level commitment to get serious about our environmental future, lest we and our neighbors in the Northern Hemisphere one day confront a spring where all our robins, seeking cooler climes, have taken flight.
