Daily Score Blog

Someone recently said “energy efficiencies aren’t low hanging fruit, they are the fruit lying on the ground.” Then why don’t people retrofit their homes? There are a lot of reasons, but one of them is finding the money to pay for efficiencies up front. While innovative financing tools (like my favorite bond financing) can help, they are only part of the solution.

An article in the New York Times this week called “A Stimulus That Could Save Money” traverses a well worn path in the discussion of energy efficiencies, asking the question “what will make people retrofit their homes?” The article doesn’t have any shockingly new ideas, but the discussion does surface the concept of Property Assessed Clean Energy financing—or  PACE. 

Now, sidestepping for a moment the obvious answer, “you can sell the energy efficient home for more money,” PACE is an interesting way of paying for the retrofits as part of regular property taxes. This is another version of “on bill” financing that puts the payments back on the owner’s property tax bill rather than on their utility bill.

Eureka! I have discovered a huge new source of clean energy in Alaska that can create green jobs too. Well sort of.

I’m not the first to strike gold, but lately I’ve been describing the potential of energy efficiency like hitting the jackpot. Efficiency is a clean, domestic energy source that would add, in the next decade, $1.2 trillion dollars to the economy. The big numbers (like saving 9.1 Quadrillion BTUs in Two Minutes) get people’s attention. If the kind of economic impact we could gain from energy efficiencies was a natural resource buried in the ground, you can bet that every level of government would be trying to dig them up.

Last Saturday, two stories about green jobs caught my eye. One was in the Washington Post and the other in the Seattle Times.  The Post article was a hand-wringing affair about the failure of energy efficiency efforts funded by stimulus dollars to create any of the promised green jobs. The Times article was a bit more positive, reporting about a training program I wrote about in a post titled Labor Sees Green Job Opportunity. The Times piece highlighted the first graduates of the program, created by the Laborers' International Union of North America (LiUNA) to train weatherization workers. But the Times piece also asked the crucial question of one of the graduates, “will you be able to get a job?”

The graduate, Ahmalik Claiborne, answered, "I'm sure I can get a job . . . We are at the start of something good." Not everyone is so optimistic. But it is important for our region’s problem solvers not to give in to pessimism. The fact is, our region is ahead of the rest of the country and getting green jobs right is better than getting them right now.

More and more cities in our region—and in the world—are developing plans to reduce carbon emissions. Both Vancouver and Seattle have plans, and Portland just passed the latest version of their plan last week.

To me the importance of these moves lies more in the substance of the plans than in their passage. Portland’s plan is big (literally), with 93 specific actions on 70 printed pages. It’s worth highlighting its focus on the importance of pedestrian infrastructure to curb climate change. Portland’s plan weaves them together into a strategy that will pay off in more ways than one.

Take walking. The Portland Daily Journal of Commerce recently highlighted one neighborhood, Powellhurst-Gilbert, as a place where a higher incidence of obesity correlates with lack of sidewalks. The Northwest Health Foundation has given a grant to the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to further study the link and to work on improving pedestrian infrastructure, making it easier to walk rather than drive. This pushes the climate reduction agenda while at the same time promoting health.

Over the last week there has been quite a bit of discussion in the media about the number of jobs created by stimulus dollars. Some argue the money is being wasted and others that the amount of money allocated were never enough in the first place. Paul Krugman suggested that “the really bad news is that “centrists” in Congress aren’t able or willing to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that we need a lot more federal spending on job creation.”

Either way, as I wrote in a post called Color of Money, a lot of money has been allocated and has yet to be spent. The facts seem to agree that moving funds (and allocations for bond and tax credit programs) out to local governments and into broader circulation is taking a long time.

But, when it comes to energy efficiency in general and stimulus funding in specific, the Northwest is getting high ratings. In their 2009 state ranking of local implementation of energy efficiency programs, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) ranks Oregon 3rd and Washington 7th among the top ten states for implementing energy efficiency policies.

Early this week, President Obama gave a speech touting the $3.4 billion in grants the federal government has awarded to local companies, utilities and cities working to improve the country’s aging and outmoded electric energy grid. The awards will support “smart grid” technology that enables easier and more effective transmission of electricity from one region to another. One of the recipients is Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative (PNGC), a Portland-based electric generation and transmission cooperative owned by 16 Northwest electric utilities. The grant will fund installation of “95,000 smart meters, substation equipment, and load management devices that will integrate electric cooperatives across four states using a central data collection software system hosted by PNGC.”

But will all the smart grid money create green collar jobs?

Unfortunately—and surprisingly considering unemployment rates—according to a recent report by the National Commission on Energy Policy, smart-grid investment will require trained workers who aren’t yet available in large numbers.

Do people notice small changes in gas prices? I've been wondering about this lately -- which gave me an excuse to download historical gas price data -- and I learned a couple of things in the process. Consider:

Gas prices changed by 7 cents per week, on average, during 2008 and 2009. Sometimes prices went up and sometimes they went down, but they rarely stayed constant. What's more, the price changed by very different amounts each week. 

Much of the most intense volatility occurred during 2008 when gas prices broke the $4 barrier and then subsequently collapsed as the economy unravelled. But even in 2009, gas prices are changing 5 cents per week, on average.

Is 5 cents a lot? The answer depends on what you mean.

A study released over the summer found that there are some great opportunities in Washington state for green jobs in the renewable energy sector. But it also pointed to some problems ensuring adequate training for those jobs.

The study confirms what Professor W. Norton Grubb found: work force training needs to be better integrated with education. Training is about learning tasks or work related skills that allow immediate employment while education is grounded in more broadly applicable skills like reading, writing and organizational skills.

The education training dichotomy is one aspect of the fragmentation that plagues work force training and by extension training for green collar jobs. Grubb’s ideas, creating better connections between education and training, are still relevant today more than a decade after he wrote about them in his book Learning to Work.

Very few of the stimulus dollars allocated for energy efficiency -- and the green jobs they can create -- have been allocated or spent by governments. At first this might seem a bit discouraging. Lots of money allocated but caught up in the bureaucracy of federal, state, and local governments. However, a look at green stimulus funding in the Northwest is more encouraging, with some cities and local agencies starting their work off on the right foot. 

A recent report by London-based New Energy Finance has found that less than 10 percent of green stimulus money allocated worldwide has actually been spent by governments this year. That’s about $177 billion spent so far on supporting energy efficiencies, renewable energy and green jobs out of more than a trillion available. (The report found that the United States government has spent about 12 percent of its stimulus allocation thus far or about $7.92 billion dollars.)

It caught my attention when I heard State Treasurer Jim McIntire saying he won’t be supporting I-1033 because he is concerned that if it passes, it could hurt Washington State’s bond rating, increasing costs for the state to borrow money.

My dad has an annoying saying about borrowing and debt: “Neither a borrower or a lender be.” The quote is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and is given as sage advice by another father, Polonius to his son Laertes. I’ve never liked the quote because I have always been a fan of the creative use of public financing options, especially bonds. I wrote about Qualified Energy Efficiency Bonds (QECBs) and a proposal in Washington’s last legislative session as great opportunities to use public financing, or public debt, as a tool to create large scale energy efficiencies for cities and schools.

British Columbians have one more thing to be thankful for this holiday. September employment figures for British Columbia are in and the news is good.  BC employment increased in September by 31,000 jobs with the unemployment rate dropping 0.3 percent to 8.4 percent. This is the first monthly decline in unemployment since the collapse of the global economy last fall.

Manufacturing businesses hired 5,900 people and the construction industry, especially hard hit by the recession, created 4,000 new jobs.

There have been a couple new developments since I last wrote about the US Chamber of Commerce and its whacked out stance on climate change (basically, denial and roadblocking important legislation):

First, Nike stepped down from the Chamber board of directors while keeping its membership in the group.

Second, Apple split with the Chamber.

And as Grist points out, the Chamber has tried to do damage control, without changing its opposition to clean-energy legislation. And, the New York Times editorial page pronounced that “no organization in this country has done more to undermine [climate] legislation.”

Furthermore, hundreds of business executives descended on Washington this week in support of a clean energy economy, including Starbucks, HP, Ebay, Duke Energy, Levi Strauss, Cliff Bar, Avista, Exelon, PG&E and many others. Calling for investment in American jobs instead of global warming pollution, the CEOs participating in the Business Advocacy Day for Jobs & Competitiveness -- an effort organized by the new We Can Lead coalition -- are telling the Senate to take action with strong climate legislation like the Clean Energy Jobs Act introduced last week by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

So, our question remains...Which Northwest company will be the next to step up and condemn the Chamber's heavy-duty lobbying against smart climate and energy policy? Lobbying being done in members' names?

Ahem, Microsoft...? Grist's Jonathan Hiskes met with Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, Rob Bernard.

Microsoft has never been considered an environmental leader, but it’s got a decent climate policy on paper. It opened an energy-efficient data center this summer that could lead to significant energy savings, particularly if the company finds ways to use the innovations in larger server labs.

Given all this, why is Microsoft a Chamber member? Bernard told me Microsoft takes climate change very seriously and tried to distance the company from the Chamber’s climate shenanigans. “The views expressed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce do not reflect Microsoft’s position on climate change and we are not participating in their climate initiatives,” he said in a followup email.

Kudos to Hiskes for asking the tough questions. I would think Microsoft employees would be asking those too--or employees at Amazon, Boeing, or Costco for that matter.

Meanwhile, as part of SEIU’s ongoing campaign to shed light on the extreme positions of the US Chamber of Commerce, they put together this video highlighting the recent high-profile exodus for the Chamber’s "backwards position on climate change."

We'd like to see some Northwest business leaders willing to leave the Chamber with an achy breaky heart too.

If you didn’t know what blackmail is, David Letterman has probably made you familiar with it by now. Blackmail can be criminal or it can be something as simple as a kid a grocery store saying “if you don’t buy me cookies I’ll scream.”  But what about when business or industry uses the threat of lost jobs to persuade legislators to support or oppose legislation? We’ve heard this kind of thing before; “if this legislation passes, thousands of jobs will be lost.”

In doing some ongoing research on green collar jobs (check our primer) I discovered a new book, Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities by Brian Mayer. The intro of the book is online and worth a read. In it he takes on the topic of “job blackmail.” The term caught my eye. Mayer, citing an earlier study of the beneficial economic impacts of environmental legislation, defines job blackmail as:

A bit of a kerfuffle has broken out over a recent car advertisement between the new Hard Drive commuting blog at the Oregonian and the Bike Portland blog. Here, for your consideration is the ad:

Very funny. The ad shows people crowded in a bus and one guy negotiating his Segway down a crowded sidewalk. The car being sold passes an old Volvo with a “Powered by Vegetable Oil” bumper sticker. Yes, the very fact that Sightline’s now jumping into the fray might mean we’re doing the devil’s work, spreading the advertisement further into the blogosphere. But setting that aside for a moment, let’s examine what this argument is all about. Does this advertisement hurt efforts to promote more sustainable behavior? Is it an aggressive promotion of cars as a better and more fun way to travel than more sustainable alternatives? Do ads like this contribute to a social norm that promotes driving over taking the bus? Or is it just a funny ad?

As I have been researching energy efficiency something has bothered me about energy and poverty data. I wanted to see actual income numbers next to energy use, kind of the way we would look at prevalence rates in public health. That would help me wrap my head around the connections between climate policy and fairness. I want to be able to say something like “people who earn less than $15,000 a year pay x percent of their income in energy costs while those who earn more than $50,000 pay much less than x percent.”

I did find a chart on the Department of Energy website that indicated that the average family pays 5 percent of its income in energy costs while low income families pay 16 percent. Pretty good information; but I wanted more. The chart was based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) from 2001. So I looked behind the chart and found data from the most recent survey in 2005.

Here is a snapshot.