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Homegrown Energy Is Not Just A Pipe Dream

Posted on: Friday, 6 June 2008, 18:00 CDT

By Jeff Hawkes

My response to rising gasoline prices and lengthening gas lines in 1979 was to coast downhill with the clutch in and the engine off. Wheeee!

Probably didn't save much gas, but the spine-tingling, gravity- fueled ride was priceless.

President Carter's response to gas shortages that summer was a little more responsible. He went on TV and offered a plan for energy independence.

If only we had listened.

Carter called for a massive investment in conservation and alternative energy technologies funded through a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

He proposed cutting oil imports in half by 1990 (they've climbed more than 60 percent since 1979) and using the sun to meet 20 percent of our energy needs by 2000. (Solar power today contributes only 1 percent.)

People knock Carter's presidency, but he was right about energy security and courageous in calling for sacrifice.

We have the world's highest level of technology, he told a concerned nation. We have the most skilled work force, with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to win this war.

Carter said what needed to be said, but President Reagan's ideological shift, a decadelong oil glut and an innocence that preceded An Inconvenient Truth lulled Americans into a false sense of security that we now recognize as folly.

If there's good news, we seem to be making up for lost time. The United States is now the largest buyer of wind turbines in the world, according to Apollo Alliance, a clean energy advocacy group.

And with Pennsylvania and other states requiring electric utilities to tap into renewable energy sources, such as biomass and solar, we're discovering a side benefit: jobs.

Just as the rise of the auto industry a century ago spurred job creation, building a green energy network is likewise putting people to work.

Many so-called green-collar jobs pay family-sustaining wages to start and offer opportunities for advancement. One other thing: The work can't be outsourced.

Facing up to our oil addiction, then, isn't just about turning down the thermostat, easing up on the gas, doing with less. As necessary as some self-restraint may be, the switch to renewables is also about economic opportunity.

Some of the opportunities are small and untested. In Pittsburgh, for example, recent college graduates started a nonprofit organization that's reclaiming blighted industrial lots by cultivating sunflowers, switchgrass and poplar trees for the production of biofuel.

The pilot project can't pay anything like the wages now- shuttered steel mills paid, but it's a start.

Ninety miles east of Pittsburgh, however, Gamesa Corp. since 2006 has been building wind turbine blades on a 22-acre site and paying union wages. At that plant and another near Philadelphia, Gamesa employs a total of 1,200, about 900 of whom belong to United Steelworkers.

Michael Peck, labor relations director at Gamesa, said the company is committed to working with labor to develop the company together.

Peck told me that discussions with the union at a round table are like having a full-time, positively motivated, human resource consultancy inside your ranks that ... can give you unbiased feedback of how things can be improved.

Homegrown energy. Job creation. Labor/management collaboration. A healing planet.

President Carter had a glimpse of that future back in 1979.

Solving our energy crisis, he said, can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future and give our nation ... a new sense of purpose.

The disappointing thing is we're just getting started when Carter thought we'd be there by now.

E-mail: jhawkes@lnpnews.com

(c) 2008 Intelligencer Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Source: Intelligencer Journal

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