Book Review of “The Green Collar Economy,” and Reading the Tea Leaves Related to National Energy Policy Changes

John Rawlins has a B.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He retired in 1995 from the Westinghouse Hanford Co. at the Hanford site in Eastern Washington. He retired again in 2008 from teaching physics and astronomy at Whatcom Community College.

The Green Collar Economy
How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems
by Van Jones, Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
HarperCollins Publishers, 2008
234 pages; hardcover; $25.99
ISBN 978-0-06-165075-8

I’ll begin by setting the context for this important, persuasive book by Van Jones. Readers of this column, which began innocently enough in the September 2006 issue of Whatcom Watch, are aware that the entire industrial world’s version of civilization rests on a house of cards that all sits atop a finite set of energy sources: cheap energy from fossil fuels.

When cheap becomes expensive, the entire structure becomes unstable; when fossil fuel production peaks and begins to decline, the structure will collapse — unless we start planning the transition to a different energy infrastructure at least 20 years ahead of the peak.

It appears increasingly likely that the least replaceable of the three main fossil fuels — petroleum (or oil) — is now at its world peak production rate, and that the decline could begin at any time, but probably not later than 2012.

Van Jones has correctly identified one of our biggest problems as the fact that we have not even started planning the transition as of the end of 2008. Several prominent people have made headline news with ideas for energy policy reform, as mentioned in this column in the September 2008 issue of Whatcom Watch: http://www.whatcomwatch.org/php/WW_open.php?id=984.

The second of the two biggest problems, also correctly identified by Jones, is of course that the carbon waste from combusting all those fossil fuels enters the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. The portion of gas that remains in the atmosphere contributes to global climate change (a.k.a. “global warming”), and the portion that dissolves in the ocean contributes to making the ocean more acidic (carbonic acid).

Observations relating to these ecological changes during the past two years strongly suggest that we have triggered some important and dangerous “tipping points” in both the atmosphere and in the ocean.

There are therefore many obvious (and some not so obvious) incentives to divorce ourselves from fossil fuels, and especially oil, as soon as possible — even if that means economic sacrifices that today are difficult to imagine.

Naturally, the purveyors of those same fossil fuels have vigorously resisted all attempts for changing our laissez-faire energy “policy” for the past three decades by arguing that we face a jobs versus the environment choice. In spite of the obvious fact that this is a false dichotomy, here we are in the worst conceivable situation, with petroleum at its peak production level and virtually all transport on the planet dependent on a fuel that is set for decline forever.

For the U.S., the estimate I trust the most comes from a combination of two factors:

1. experienced geologists’ predictions that world oil production will decline by 50 percent by 2030, with

2. an estimate that the amount of world oil exports will decline to zero around 2030.

The bottom line is that the U.S. could be facing a decline in the total amount of oil available to this country of about 80 percent in 2030 — or one-fifth of today’s supply. As we enter 2009, we have already experienced some decline. Unless we react by taking over selected foreign oil fields and claiming that production for our country, that is the sort of future we can expect and really should be planning on.

One way to look at energy policy upheavals (such as Jones advocates) is that the upheavals present a choice to stop engaging in expensive, destructive resource wars to solve our economic growth problems.

In the December 2008 Whatcom Watch article in this series I described one conceptual approach that some communities in the U.K. (and now in the U.S.) have developed for coping with the problem of energy descent at the most local, small community level.

The ultimate loss of cheap, available transport fuel will gradually reverse globalization, and by necessity life will once again gradually become more and more localized. Planning at the local level allows communities to choose early re-localization and thereby to preserve as much local wealth as possible through the transition.

One corollary issue that Jones faces up to is the painful realization that food production correlates with fossil fuel production in general, and oil and natural gas in particular. Natural gas is already in decline on the North American continent, and worldwide is likely to peak about a decade after oil (or 10 years from now). Natural gas is useful for several purposes including: electrical production, fertilizer production, transport (mainly in Europe) and direct space/process heating.

Decline of fossil fuels therefore implies a corresponding decline in food production by modern methods, which could in turn imply that world human population is in a high degree of “overshoot” — meaning it seems reasonable to conclude that a world without fossil fuels could become a world with vastly fewer humans.

Nevertheless, Jones argues that taking dramatic action at the federal level will result in some energy infrastructure improvements that will benefit the humans remaining after the worst of the transition. Or, in other words, he reasons it’s never too late to start a crash energy program at the national level.

His book describes his vision for what that new energy world would look like, what political coalition could make it happen, and how actions at the national level connect with re-localization efforts at the smallest community level. Ideally, there will be only minor mismatches from top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Many grandiose energy policy proposals I’ve studied over the past few years ignore either the problems of climate change or peak oil, which increases the chances that some important aspects of the proposed changes will be missing. I reviewed in these Whatcom Watch issues one extremely comprehensive proposal for change — “Apollo’s Fire” by Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks.

(part 1) http://www.whatcomwatch.org/php/WW_open.php?id=938

(part 2) http://www.whatcomwatch.org/php/WW_open.php?id=949

(part 3) http://www.whatcomwatch.org/php/WW_open.php?id=959.

“Apollo’s Fire” did not mention energy supply as an issue, and the recommendations focused on dealing with climate change. That focus did result in some shortcomings, as pointed out in the review. However, aside from that nitpick, we should remember: any comprehensive energy policy that deals with climate change mitigation would work infinitely better than continuing with our present national course — which is no real policy at all (note: this has been a well-known problem for at least the last 30 years).

Still, I see Jones’ book as a significant improvement over “Apollo’s Fire” because Jones correctly identifies the entire suite of issues surrounding energy use and production in this country.

Several aspects of Jones’ book stuck in my mind as I pondered how influential he might be with the incoming administration of Barack Obama. One major part of the book details how diverse communities in Chicago, under the leadership of Mayor Daly, are working to increase the number of green jobs in that city in an effort to transition to a greener city — meaning a city less dependent on fossil fuels and therefore one that emits less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

One reason the Chicago efforts impressed me so much is that my distant memories of the city are not positive: it was one of the ugliest, dirtiest cities in the country. The other reason, of course, is that Obama comes from a background in Chicago politics — so he is probably familiar with the broad efforts to change the city’s energy profile.

Another inescapable aspect of Jones’ book is the title of the alliance he touts as the lead organization in the U.S. presently advocating for comprehensive energy reform: The Apollo Alliance. I wonder about the connections of Jones, who lives in the California Bay area, and the authors of “Apollo’s Fire” — Washington state representative Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks (who Jones mentions as having been involved in the Apollo Alliance).

The choice of the term “Apollo” in these two contexts may prove a bit unfortunate. The original Apollo program is of course the name for the U.S. manned moon missions — first announced by President Kennedy. That was a super-high-tech program of limited duration, but nevertheless a crash program designed to bring the U.S. space program on par with that of the former Soviet Union.

Any new U.S. energy program today will not be rocket science, but, in order to make any real difference in our future, would need to be of much larger magnitude and last for decades — as astutely pointed out by Jones.

Still a third strong (and positive) impression is that Jones, unlike Inslee and Hendricks in their book, does not support production of ethanol from corn — for most of the reasons I pointed out in my review of the book “Apollo’s Fire.”

Jones also emphasized that even a highly successful transition to a new energy infrastructure would leave U.S. citizens using far less energy than we do now — this is also much to his credit, for it avoids playing into that irrelevant and false jobs versus the environment dichotomy and is therefore a distraction for people who simply don’t understand the depth of the hole we are currently in.

The final impression is that Jones really doesn’t miss a lick that I could detect — either in logic, in technical details of the energy policy proposal, or in identification of the political coalition (minorities, workers, environmentalists) that could persuade Congress and the new administration to do the unthinkable — to do their job (at long last) in the areas of energy and climate protection.

Congress has already taken a first major step in replacing Michigan’s John Dingell with California’s Henry Waxman as chair of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over energy. (Are we seeing formation of a Chicago-California-Washington state axis of energy? If so, you read about it first here in Whatcom Watch.)

To his credit, Jones emphasizes that even the best efforts could result in little success at the national level because we’ve left the problems unaddressed for so long and until so late. He does, however, remain insistent that we really have no other moral choice but to try — for the sake of our children and their children, and all who follow.

I strongly recommend “The Green Collar Economy” to you if:

1. you care enough about your future to advocate for action to your national representatives,

2. you’re involved in local government and wonder where very local re-localization efforts might intersect (and benefit from) national initiatives,

3. you want to engage in community organizing in support of the Apollo Alliance, or

4. you just want to read superbly clear writing describing some very good logic on a very complex and urgent set of technical and societal topics (by a Yale law graduate, no less). §