Shooting for the Sun
Conniff, Ruth
Shooting for the Sun Political Eye Ruth Conniff President Bush strapped on his safety goggles and toured the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, on February 21....
...Chaudhuri points out that the Apollo Alliance drive for energy independence helps answer all the major problems of the day: an American economy that is losing good jobs, a crumbling infrastructure, and, internationally, rising inequality and extremist anger...
...So for now, the seventeen million people in Apollo's member organizations are looking to the states, producing research, pushing petition drives, and reaching out to local legislators to help craft forward-looking policy in four major areas: renewable electricity, oil savings, appliance efficiency standards, and public funding for clean energy...
...If Americans are serious about getting on a program to break our oil addiction, there are better places to go for rehab...
...Bush's budget cuts have brought much of the nation's renewable energy research to a halt...
...California, for example, passed a law mandating that 20 percent of its electricity must come from renewable sources like wind and solar power by 2017...
...Take the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, environmental, business, and community organizations dedicated to energy independence within the next ten years...
...Apollo has been involved in progressive efforts in the states that are a blueprint for a big, national push for energy independence...
...We need national leadership, Ringo said...
...Lo and behold, the President used his State of the Union to call for energy independence, in Carteresque language that surprised members of his own Administration...
...Named after JFK's Apollo Project, which put a man on the moon in less than a decade, "an Apollo project for energy freedom must be big, bold, and fast," the group's website declares...
...But he held out a flicker of hope, entitling his column "Bush's Moonshot Moment...
...Citizens can get involved by contacting their local chapters...
...It was part of his tour to promote energy proposals that are supposed to end our "addiction to oil," as the President put it in his State of the Union address...
...Investing in energy efficiency and clean energy can generate good jobs, reduce our trade deficit, clean up the air, and address global warming, he points out...
...As Representative Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, told AP, the 2005 budget funded only a third of the paltry renewable energy provisions of Bush's energy plan...
...One of the interesting things about Apollo is how it brings people together...
...He needs to do more than study the problem," Chaudhuri says...
...The President is missing his "moonshot" opportunity...
...Instead, Bush is talking up ethanol, another program whose funding he has cut...
...America needs to dream big again," says Toby Chaudhuri, Apollo's communications director...
...Just before Bush's photo-op at the lab, the Energy Department quickly restored $5 million in funding the Administration had cut from the very programs the President was there to tout...
...The group also works with members of Congress to push its ten-point plan for energy independence within the next ten years...
...Clean energy is no longer just 'an environmental program.' It is the best way for America to revitalize its economy and make us a safer nation," says Apollo steering committee member Andrew Beebe, president of Energy Innovations...
...As the President continues his ridiculous act, promoting conservation programs even as he cuts their funding, and decrying our addiction to oil while continuing to coddle the oil industry, Apollo's message is more compelling than ever...
...Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive...
...The lab rehired the thirty-two workers it had laid off the day after the State of the Union speech...
...Other states, from New York to Kansas to North Dakota, are using tax credits to encourage hybrid cars and help farms run on wind and even manure power...
...But we're constrained by a lack of imagination, and an unwillingness to roll back subsidies to companies that are already enjoying record profits...
...And candidates who hitch their stars to the Apollo idea in 2006 and 2008 may just find a winning political platform-not to mention a truly hopeful program for dramatic, positive change...
...What do you expect from the guy who let oil industry lobbyists write the nation's energy policy in the first place...
...In a TomPaine.com piece he wrote right before Bush's State of the Union address, Ringo conceded that a "patchwork of state initiatives isn't enough to move our nation to energy independence...
...And that leadership is not likely to come from George W. Bush, or, as Ringo put it, "a White House beholden to big oil and gas producers" that has done nothing to address our looming energy crisis...
...He needs a bold plan to unite the country behind an Apollo-style program...
...Like the moon landing, Apollo aims to bring together American industry, educational institutions, technological know-how, and public investment to make a giant leap for mankind...
...In state and local chapters, labor and environmental leaders are moving beyond the jobs-versus-environment debate...
...We're calling for a movement fueled by moral outrage, but animated by hope," he says...
...If nothing else, Bush's rhetoric shows how much demand there is in the public for a bold energy plan...
...He became an advocate for environmental justice during his many years as a union worker in Louisiana's petrochemical industry...
...The group's president, Jerome Ringo, was the first African American board chairman of a major environmental organization-the National Wildlife Federation...
...The group released a study by Noble Prize-nominated economist Ray Perryman that shows how tax credits and investments in alternative fuel technology would create more than three million new high-wage jobs and clean up air quality...
...But as Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, told the Associated Press, the $5 million represented only a fraction of the lab's $28 million shortfall...
Vol. 70 • April 2006 • No. 4
