Breaking News

Green jobs include installing solar panels on homes like this one in Newburgh, N.Y. Solar power is still more expensive than fossil fuel, especially now that oil prices have crashed, but President Barack Obama wants to promote renewables as a way to provide domestic jobs, cleaner air and less reliance on imports.

WASHINGTON – Green jobs, where are they and how to get them, will be the focus when President Barack Obama’s task force on middle-class working families formally begins its work on Friday in Philadelphia.

The panel, chaired by Vice President Joe Biden, will hear from experts on the potential to create and fill these jobs.

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill Obama signed last week includes billions to help create such jobs as installing solar panels and building wind turbines, which also is part of his goal to nudge the country away from dependence on foreign oil and toward reliance on renewable forms of energy.  It is Obama’s belief that such jobs will help raise living standards for middle-class families, who didn’t fare well before the current economic downturn set in and are now feeling pinched along with millions of other people who have lost their jobs and homes, and watched retirement and college savings disappear.

Obama announced the panel last month at the White House. Its purpose is to recommend ways to boost the nation’s middle class. It also will evaluate new and existing policies to determine whether they are helping or hurting the middle class.

“Quite simply, a strong middle class equals a strong America. We can’t have one without the other,” Biden said at the time. “It is our charge to get the middle class, the backbone of this country, up and running again.”

$2,000 drop in middle-class incomes estimated
Jared Bernstein, the task force’s executive director, said middle-class incomes have fallen by about $2,000 in real terms since the start of the decade and that violates a basic American tenet: that you’ll get ahead if you work hard and your children will fare even better.

“Part of this election was about recognizing that a key part of any effective government’s economic agenda had to be reconnecting the living standards of the middle class to that of the expanding economy once it starts expanding again,” said Bernstein — Biden’s chief economist and economic policy adviser.

“We are fortunate enough to be here now and we have a responsibility to carry through on that,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

Green jobs, broadly defined as related to improving the environment, pay up to 20 percent more than other jobs, are more likely to be union jobs and likelier held by men, less so by minorities and city dwellers, according to a draft copy of a staff report to be released at Friday’s meeting at the University of Pennsylvania. Green jobs also are largely domestic jobs that cannot be shipped overseas.

Breaking down the billions
The stimulus bill provides $11 billion for investments in a new smart grid to create more than 3,000 miles of new or modernized high-tech transmission lines; $6 billion for a loan guarantee program to encourage banks to finance green investments; $5 billion to help people weatherize their homes, potentially saving them money on their utility bills; and $500 million for a “green job” training program to be run by the Department of Labor.

Labor unions welcomed the administration’s focus on the middle class.

Anna Burger, who leads the Change to Win group of seven unions, said the task force shows government understands that rebuilding the American Dream and fixing the economy means “creating good jobs with a wage that can support a family, benefits that can keep them healthy and a secure and dignified retirement.”

Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO’s director of governmental affairs, said the makeup of the task force increases its visibility, even though the panel is only advisory.

“This is a high-profile task force with someone in charge who is really committed to this and has been throughout his entire career,” Samuel said. “So we don’t see this as a flash in the pan.”

Biden will be joined at the meeting by several Cabinet members and others on the task force, including the secretaries of energy, transportation, education, agriculture, and housing and urban development, labor secretary-designate Hilda Solis and Melody Barnes, Obama’s domestic policy chief.

NASA launches a rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Tuesday.

(CNN) — A NASA satellite crashed back to Earth about three minutes after launch early Tuesday, officials said. “We could not make orbit,” NASA program manager John Brunschwyler said. “Initial indications are the vehicle did not have enough [force] to reach orbit and landed just short of Antarctica in the ocean.”

“Certainly for the science community, it’s a huge disappointment.”

The satellite, which would have monitored greenhouse gases to study how they affect the Earth’s climate, was launched on a Taurus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 1:55 a.m. PT (4:55 a.m. ET).

But the payload fairing — a clamshell-shaped structure that allows the satellite to travel through space — failed to separate from the rocket, NASA officials said.  The weight of the fairing caused the rocket and the satellite to come crashing down to Earth about three minutes later. A team of investigators will look into what caused the payload fairing to fail to separate.

“We’ll get back to flying at a pace that allows us to do so successfully,” said Chuck Dovale, NASA Launch Director, at a press briefing after the failed launch.

The $273 million satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, would have collected global measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere to help better forecast changes in carbon-dioxide levels and their effect on the Earth’s climate.

Carbon dioxide is considered a greenhouse gas because it traps heat, which scientists believe contributes to the warming of the planet. Carbon dioxide also absorbs wavelengths of light, and the NASA observatory would have measured levels of the gas partly by using instruments to analyze light reflected off the Earth.
advertisement

The OCO also would have provided information about CO2 “sinks” — areas, like oceans or landfills, that absorb and store carbon dioxide. NASA officials said all measurements would be combined with the findings of ground observation stations, providing a more complete account of the human and natural sources of CO2.

The OCO project took eight years to develop, said Michael Frelich, director of the NASA Earth Science Division. Its failure is a great loss for the science community, he said.

A New Zealand frigate patrols past the Ross Ice Shelf in the Southern Ocean in Antarctica.

Professor David Vaughan has an infectious enthusiasm, even when he’s issuing dire warnings about the future of Antarctica. That’s where he is right now, at the Rothera Research Station. He’s just returned from a flight to the Wilkins Ice Shelf – which juts out of the western tip of the Continent. It will probably be his last.

An Englishman whose home is among the dreaming spires of Cambridge, where the British Antarctic Survey has its headquarters, Professor Vaughan has been visiting the world’s coldest places for twenty years. He was surprised to find that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which began disintegrating a decade ago, hasn’t yet disappeared. But he says it’s in its death throes.

Last year, AC360° reported the Survey’s finding that a slice the size of Manhattan had broken off the ice shelf. Vaughan says the whole shelf is now connected to the rest of Antarctica by a strip of ice just a few hundred meters wide. It’s like looking at an hour glass. This huge slab of ice –11,000 square kilometres (the size of Jamaica) – is about to collapse into the sea. Maybe within weeks, maybe later in the year, says Vaughan.

In the last year, a sequence of images taken by NASA and the European Space Agency has shown fissures opening up – like fault-lines across the ice. I asked Vaughan what they looked like – close-up. “Huge, absolutely huge,” he says. “The cracks in the Wilkins ice shelf and the chunks of ice that are splitting away from the ice-shelf….they’re kind of shopping mall chunks of ice and some are floating off into the ocean.”

In what could irreparably change our global map, the WILKINS ICE SHELF in, Antarctica is about to collapse. Holding on by a sliver of ice, it could be the latest casualty of Global Warming.

Scientists have a clearer view than even a few years ago about the rate of climate change in the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches north like a thin finger into the south Atlantic. In the last fifty years, average temperatures there have risen more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit – faster than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere. Vaughan says the evidence is now “quite strong” that emissions of greenhouse gases have influenced the Antarctic climate, just as CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons) have damaged the ozone layer. The process may have been further accelerated by the warming of the sea – gently cooking the underside of the ice-shelf.  Wilkins is not the first to collapse. “It s about the ninth in the series that s been lost,” says Vaughan…”and at least one of those ice shelves that’s been lost had been there continuously for 10,000 years.”

The collapse of the ice shelves does not in itself much influence sea-levels, but many of them play an important role in holding back the huge Antarctic glaciers. Were they to accelerate toward the ocean, melting on contact, there would be an impact on sea levels. Vaughan has a scientist’s caution in peering into the future. “ The big ice sheets – Greenland and Antarctica – are now the major sources of uncertainty in predicting sea level rise in the future. What’s happening on Wilkins and deeper in the Antarctic continent are major concerns for us.”

A new study published in ‘Nature’ magazine suggests that other parts of Antarctic – far from the Wilkins Ice Shelf – have also been warming, though less fast. U.S. scientists reviewed a half century of satellite and weather records for Antarctica, which showed that temperatures had risen by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit. The study concluded the process was “difficult to explain” without linking it to greenhouse gases.

Vaughan is a member of the United Nations Panel on Climate Change which predicted that sea levels could rise anywhere between 18 and 59 centimetres (7 to 23 inches) over the next century. Now, as he contemplates the gradually warming Antarctic summer, he wonders whether that assessment was too conservative.