Next week we expect Climate Change legislation to be introduced in the U.S. Senate. The legislation will move our country to significant investment in green energy generation and conservation creating as many as 2 million new, good jobs.
My new book, Getting America Back to Work, available now connects the need for new job creation to our chance to create a whole new industry, green energy.
We have more to celebrate this Earth Day than we've had in recent years. Finally, we have broken down the false walls and barriers between workers and unions on one side and environmentalists on the other side.
Working with and through the Blue Green Alliance eight of America's most important unions and two of America's most respected and important environmental organizations are working closely together to build support for and pass climate change legislation to reduce America's carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, reliance on fossil fuels, and to create as many as two million good-paying, family-sustaining jobs.
As I say in the book, "More and more Americans realize that unless we maximize the use of sustainable, domestic sources of energy, our future is threatened. At the same time, it is very hard for the average worker to care about the environment if she or he is worried about how to provide dinner for the family or pay the rent on Friday."
It took too long, but we have finally figured our that sustainable jobs, a sustainable economy, and a sustainable environment are mutually interdependent. A healthy American future requires all of the above. In fact, if we are to do what a potentially healthy environment requires we will install scrubbers on coal fired power plants, weatherize our homes, retrofit our commercial and industrial buildings to save energy, harvest the wind that never stops blowing on our great plains from North Dakota south to Texas, harness the unbelievable power and energy of the sun, and the incessant pull of the oceans' tides.
All of that requires skilled, productive workers--workers that America's unions can provide.
To get the electricity from wind turbines in North and South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma to population centers like Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, St.Louis will require thousands of utility workers to run the power lines and upgrade America's electricity grid. To get the electricity created by the sun's rays striking solar panels in Arizona to Los Angeles will require thousands of utility workers.
Likewise, weatherization, retrofitting, and other electricity saving will require thousands of workers in domestic jobs, jobs that cannot be off-shored.
The most difficult hurdle to cross for our economy to recover is to generate consumer demand. That requires the creation of good paying, family-sustaining jobs, like the jobs that will be created by climate change legislation.
So now at last what's best for the economy is best for the environment.
Please check out "Getting America Back to Work" for an easily accessible critique of what the Financial Elite has done to our economy over the last 30 and for answers to how we create more consumer demand.
Advertisement