Jackie Roberts, Director of Sustainable Technologies for our National Climate Campaign, offers her perspective on the climate fight and the road ahead. |
With the U.S. Senate apparently giving up on its efforts to pass a strong climate and energy bill this year, we took some time to talk with several EDF experts to help provide a broader perspective and describe some of the other important ways we are fighting to cut global warming pollution.
In the fifth and final part of our series, we interviewed Jackie Roberts, Director of Sustainable Technologies for our National Climate Campaign. Jackie talks about green jobs and how our economic crisis can be helped by a green energy economy.
Question: So Jackie, you've been helping EDF map the green energy economies through your less carbon more jobs project. Can you give us a little update on where the work stands now?
Yes. I think that this has become a tool that's been increasingly used by a variety of audiences who are all important to trying to get momentum going around moving to a low carbon economy. Some of these are investors, some of those are obviously our initial target which is legislative folks on the hill. Going forward, our maps which highlight on-the-ground businesses that will win in the new economy will be advocacy tools for our work at the state level. We want to be able again to show that state climate initiatives, whether it's defending AB32 in California or a regional greenhouse gas initiative in the Midwest, much like one that's started in New England, can drive economic growth. Creating demand and sending new customers to the companies on our maps will translate into creating jobs. Of course, a big message in all of our work to date has been, that while global warming is a very serious issue we need to solve, there are ways to solve it that can create jobs at the same time and that's what we need to focus on.
I also think the work may be very important in helping to defend EPA. I expect that we will get the same kind of concerns on EPA's asking us to regulate greenhouse gases that we've got on proposals for national legislation; and that is, ti's going to kill jobs, our economy can't support this, we can't do this now. Of course, we look at the signs and we say we can't wait, we need to move now and we can do this and we can transition in a way that minimizes difficulties for our businesses, and also creates a lot of new market opportunities. These maps show people where and how we can create growth and which firms on the ground are going to benefit and are poised to grow.
Question: Has there been anything that's really surprised you in your findings recently? What states or industries have stood out?
I think one of the things that has been a very pleasant surprise is how aggressive Michigan has been, because it is a Midwest state that burns a lot of coal. I think transitioning to a clean energy economy is going to be more difficult for coal states. Because it has such a strong manufacturing history, I think Michigan has seen that they can be a state that benefits more than many other states. Michigan can use the transition to all of these new technologies, whether it be renewables or energy efficiency or new solutions for transportation, to revitalize their manufacturing – in particular, by participating in supply chains for many clean energy solutions. So, when you look at a wind turbine and you know that it has 8,000 different parts, many of those parts can be made in Michigan. Michigan has also built up a presence in a couple of different industries – wind, solar, batteries – very diversified.
Then there are pockets all across the country. For example, glass is a key material for energy efficient buildings (and solar panels). It's critical for the replacement of windows and creating different kinds of shells for buildings, surfaces that enable builders to put on coatings and manipulate the building in a way that takes advantage of the sun when you want to in the winter, but blocks it in the summer when you don't want the heat coming in, and other creative approaches to using natural light. All of that depends on glass. Virginia has a lot of glass making, a lot of flat glass businesses and window companies. But, then we realized this makes total sense because we established the first glass making factory in 1608 in Jamestown. That connection was a nice surprise, and made us realize that much like Michigan has its auto history and is going strong in advanced batteries, Virginia has its glass making history and a big opportunity with green buildings and the solar supply chain.
Question: Are there any sort of stand-out industries, or maybe even companies that are sort of surprising in their willingness to go in a new direction?
Well, you know, I hear stories every day. I'm actually in New Hampshire, we're just talking to a manufacturer who does steel fabrication and suddenly he's got a whole new market which is making the parts that attach solar panels to the roof with those steel clamps. His market has been a little hot and cold, but it's been better this year than last year. They are still getting some orders and hopefully we can figure out a way to keep that momentum going for folks that really want to move into alternative energy.
We've profiled on the web site a whole bunch of different companies that have. Whether it's SunRise Solar Inc., a company started by a roofer who found himself often replacing the wiring on attic fans, and he realized that if these were run by solar power, he wouldn't have to be up there all the time replacing wirings. He started a company that is doing very well, creating lots of jobs in Indiana and elsewhere, because he designed a solar powered attic fan. That's a solution.
There's auto suppliers that are out of work, auto suppliers that had a lot of experience with LED lighting because LEDs were used very early on in cars. These suppliers have realized that opportunities exist for them to start making LED lighting for commercial buildings, as an energy efficient lighting solution for the commercial sector. We have examples of people moving in that direction and auto suppliers are also moving into the wind sector, trying to figure out how to take their expertise in high speed manufacturing of large parts to make various wind turbine parts, such as blades.
Dowding Industries, a machining company near Detroit, has another great story. Not only are they making wind parts, but they've teamed with Dow to work on a carbon fiber wind turbine blade. The new carbon-based materials can prevent a lot of the breakage and cracking issues that have been happening right now in the industry.
There are great stories all the time. Even companies that you wouldn't think of as necessarily having a big play in the clean energy economy can surprise us. 3M, for example, specializes in advanced materials many of which I think will be the key to advanced, low carbon products and technologies. Already, some of the more exciting things I see are where the US has come up with innovative materials that transform technologies. Technologies that have been around for a while, but were either too slow or too expensive or too inefficient, getting an entirely new level of functionality when the new materials are built in. Suddenly, they can compete with more traditional energy sources or products. Other than the obvious standout industries that will do well in the clean energy sector, I think companies that specialize in material science such as Dow or Dupont or 3M doing very well.
Question: You did mention a lot of great manufacturing sector stuff that is going on and EDF is working on identifying energy savings in the manufacturing sector with less carbon, more innovations. What's the goal of that project?
We started that project because we were having more-and-more success persuading people that there were jobs to be created in this new energy, concerns remained that traditional businesses could not make the transition. Less Carbon More Jobs may show lots of businesses in the clean energy sector poised to do very well, but what about traditional industrial facilities or manufacturers?
I felt very strongly that based on my 20 years of experience working with companies on the ground to reduce their environmental footprint – often involving suppliers and even going back to basic commodity materials like paper and plastics and steel and aluminum and refineries – that there were ways to transition. In particular, I see a huge amount of untapped energy efficiency that has not been used as a business strategy to reduce costs – and these efficiency opportunities offer a strategy for responding to new state or federal legislation on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If facilities can reduce energy consumption, then claims that low carbon mandates will trigger job layoffs are overstated or even unfounded.
Lots of great data exists from independent parties, but we wanted to make that information more readily available to folks. There's information from the Department of Energy, because they've done a lot of audits where they go in and they actually find energy efficiency and they publish the results of those audits. They publish the fact that only about half of the recommendations have ever been implemented. And, that's only for the companies they've already audited, which is probably no more than 15% of all manufacturing or energy intensive authorities in the US. The National Academy of Sciences has looked at this area, McKinsey – a management consulting firm – has their assessment of how much energy efficiency is available, and everybody is coming up with the same consistent numbers, that they're anywhere from 20 to 35% of available energy efficiency.
We also wanted to make that information available sector-by-sector. You can click on the "steel" tab and see case studies of steel facilities that have implemented energy efficiency. You can see the results of audits that have been done. you can see the results of academic studies that have looked at what is available, what could be done. You begin to get a sense that while many facilities may feel they've done everything, we've seen every time there's a third party auditor coming in to look for energy efficiency, they find many opportunities, and the figure often seems to be in the 20 to 30% range.
Question: When talking to people in the industry directly, have you found their reactions to be positive?
I'll tell you who has been extremely positive; it is the unions. One of the strategies I think that we will be focusing on as we move forward is trying to work both with the unions and with investors, people who own stock in these companies, because both of these groups have a stake in seeking cost savings from energy efficiency implemented.
In Denmark, they do something very creative. They have programs in many of their manufacturing facilities where the energy efficiency initiatives that have been identified by the work force are measured, and then the savings are shared between the company and the union. So an individual worker may end up with an extra $100 in their paycheck every month. If somebody on the floor of the factory is going to walk away with an extra $100 a month, that's going to be an incentive to get some of the stuff deployed.
Question: That's great. So what will the effect of the failure of the US Congress to cap carbon pollution have on the growing green industry?
Well, we're concerned that it's going to be devastating. In particular, we're very worried that a lot of US capital sitting on the sidelines is going to start to go overseas, it's going to start to go to China and Europe and places where there are customers and markets. When that happens, you start to get the new factories being built over there and then you get the next generation of innovations discovered outside the US, and you get the factory expansions and new jobs elsewhere, and then the supply chains tend to locate near their large customers, and it's just a whole domino effect.
We are going to do everything in our power to try and keep those dollars here in the US. One of our programs that's so important is our Corporate Partnerships Program, where we work to try to use large corporations like Wal-Mart to create demand in the US, and then use that demand to keep manufacturing here. State initiatives can do the same. I think it's all about local demand. We can keep jobs in manufacturing here, if those firms have customers, if they have people who want to buy their product.
National climate legislation would have obviously created huge markets here overnight. Now, I think there is a much bigger burden on EDF and entities that are involved in fighting climate change, to find creative ways of matchmaking – persuading some companies that they're going to have enough customers to make it worth it to stay in the US, persuading other companies to purchase lots of clean energy products and technologies.
Question: What would be your advice to EDF activists and donors, how can they help make a difference, how can they be part of this demand?
They are critical as customers themselves, but also making sure that whether it's their church or their employer or their school or whatever, that all types of institutions also look for ways to purchase clean energy products. It's all about creating customers. That's where I think our activists and our network can make a difference, because you can do a lot of good with your dollars and with getting those organizations you are involved with to also be customers.
My one word would be, be a customer in every venue that you can be.