Breaking News » wind power

Obama ready to hear ideas on green jobs

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:59:19 +0000

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.

zero emission research station: Alternative energy viable even in the coldest regions

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:38:01 +0000

If we can do it here, it can be done anywhere, Belgian sponsors say

PRINCESS ELISABETH BASE, Antarctica – The world’s first zero-emission polar research station opened in Antarctica and was welcomed by scientists as proof that alternative energy is viable even in the coldest regions.

Pioneers of Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth station in East Antarctica said if a station could rely on wind and solar power in Antarctica — mostly a vast, icy emptiness — it would undercut arguments by skeptics that green power is not reliable.

“If we can build such a station in Antarctica we can do that elsewhere in our society. We have the capacity, the technology, the knowledge to change our world,” Alain Hubert, the station’s project director, told Reuters at the inauguration ceremony Sunday.

Global warming, spurred by greenhouse gas emissions, has prompted governments to look for alternative energy sources. And renewable energies are gaining a foothold in Antarctica, despite problems in designing installations to survive bone-chilling cold and winter darkness.

Wind and even solar power are catching on — solar panels on the Antarctic Peninsula can collect as much energy in a year as many places in Europe.

Thomas Leysen, chairman of Belgium’s Umicore, a leading manufacturer of catalysts for cars who attended the ceremony, said it made good business sense for companies to help protect the environment.

“The global credit crisis is a result of unsustainable behavior. We can’t deal in an unsustainable way with our planet otherwise we will also face a crisis which will be even bigger than the credit crisis,” he said.

Water re-used

Constructed over two years, the steel-encased station uses micro-organisms and decomposition to enable scientists to re-use shower and toilet water up to five times before discarding it down a crevasse.

Wind turbines on the Utsteinen mountain ridge and solar panels on the bug-like, three-story building ensure the base has power and hot water. Even the geometry of windows help conserve energy.

Scientists monitoring global warming predict higher temperatures could hasten melting at Antarctica, the world’s largest repository of fresh water, raising sea levels and altering shorelines. If Antarctica ever melted, world sea levels would rise by about 180 feet.

That would impact some 146 million people living in low-lying coastal regions less than three feet above current sea levels, researchers said.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said failure to reduce emissions by 50 to 85 percent by the middle of this century could be catastrophic.

“Globally we will be in a temperature increase zone that the earth has not known for the past two to three million years,” he said.

Research focus on ice shelves

The $26 million base, which is run by the Belgian-based International Polar Foundation, sits on stilts on a ridge a few miles north of the Soer Rondane Mountains. It will focus on analyzing nearby deep ice shelves.

The station’s roof is covered by solar panels, designed to provide the bulk of energy needed to run the isolated post.

The base is expected to have a lifespan of 25 years and will conduct research in climatology, glaciology and microbiology. Teams of scientists, including glaciologists, are already at work there from Belgium, Japan, France, Britain and the United States.

Maaike Van Cauwenbergh, from the Belgian Science Policy Office, said the base is in an isolated area “where there has been little research done.” It is located in a vast 600-mile zone between the Russian and Japanese research stations. The Belgian government partially funds the public-private project. The prefabricated station took two years to move from Belgium to the South Pole, where it was rebuilt.

Visit the station here