Clean Energy Works Portland is a groundbreaking new program that enables Portland residents to improve the energy efficiency of their homes and pay for the improvements over time through their utility bills.

A contractor performing a blower door test to identify air infiltration and leakage throughout a home.Energy Trust of OregonBut the most exciting and unique aspect of the program is the Community Workforce Agreement that was developed by representatives of labor unions, community groups, businesses, community colleges, and other stakeholders. It is a comprehensive plan to make sure that new jobs created by Clean Energy Works Portland are high quality, career-track jobs that offer family-supporting wages and benefits, and that they go to local residents from diverse backgrounds.

"We wanted to have this project reflect some higher set of goals beyond just retrofitting homes and reducing carbon emissions," said Derek Smith of Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, the city's go-to person on the Clean Energy Works Portland program.

The program uses $2.5 million in Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funds the city received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as seed money to start a revolving loan fund that will enable Portland homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their homes at no up-front cost. The energy improvements that will be available to homeowners during the pilot phase of the program, which will cover 500 homes, include insulation, air sealing, duct sealing, and improvements to space heating and water heating systems.

The Energy Trust of Oregon will schedule home energy assessments for interested homeowners and help them choose the energy saving options that best meet their needs. To pay for the improvements, homeowners will receive low-interest, long-term loans and will pay them off via their monthly utility bills.

Once the pilot phase is completed next summer, some 100,000 homes in Multnomah County, which encompasses the city of Portland, could qualify for the program.

A state law, Oregon's Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Technology Act of 2009 (HB 2626), made the Portland financing mechanism possible. "Portland is the first pilot project for this new statewide, low-interest loan program for weatherization work that you can pay back on your utility bill. That's how we're going to spread this idea around the state," said Barbara Byrd, who wears many hats in Oregon, including secretary-treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO and coordinator of the Oregon Apollo Alliance, which strongly supported passage of HB 2626.

Fifty-five direct jobs will be created by the pilot program, but many more are expected to be created after the pilot phase. In order to make sure those jobs will have good wages and benefits and be accessible to community members with previous barriers to employment, the city pulled together approximately 60 stakeholders to develop a Community Workforce Agreement that would complement Clean Energy Works.

Smith of the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability said he got the idea to bring labor and training standards and community benefits into the program from being part of the Green For All "community of practice." The community of practice connects people throughout the United States who are working on green jobs programs and helps them share their learning experiences with others in the field. Green For All is a partner in Clean Energy Works Portland, along with the Energy Trust of Oregon, Portland General Electric and others.

Maurice Rahming, president of the National Association of Minority Contractors of Oregon, participated in the Clean Energy Works Portland stakeholder meetings that culminated in the Community Workforce Agreement. "I think it's a tribute to the mayor that he got minority contractors involved early on, rather than having them involved at the very tail end. It shows he's looking to diversify the contracting pool," Rahming said.

"Construction isn't always the most diverse workforce that's out there, and we wanted to set up an understanding that let's have the workforce and the contractors reflect the city of Portland," he added.

In addition to minority contractors, the stakeholder meetings included many groups that offer pre-apprenticeship training to prepare people in basic work skills so that they can then enter training programs that teach skills specific to an occupation. These groups included the Native American Youth and Family Center, which offers employment training courses to Native Americans; and Oregon Tradeswomen, which offers women training courses to prepare them to enter the building and construction trades. Pre-apprenticeship training programs like these will funnel participants into weatherization technician training courses linked to Clean Energy Works Portland.

Many labor unions also participated in the development of the Community Workforce Agreement, including the Laborers union, which is about to begin offering training courses in weatherization that will be available to graduates of the pre-apprenticeship programs described above. "A part of what we wanted to see [in the Community Workforce Agreement] was that people were going to get quality training, because then they're going to come into the market with better skills, and that's a chance for them to get their wages up," said Al Davita, the training director of the Laborers Training Program in Oregon and southern Idaho.

Davita said the Laborers will be providing three levels of training in weatherization-an 80-hour entry-level class for weatherization installers/technicians that will require 80 hours in general residential construction to get into the class; a 40-hour weatherization supervisor training; and a 40-hour energy auditor training. This means that trainees who become weatherization technicians through Clean Energy Works Portland will be able to move into other careers with additional training.

"Our plan is to recruit people who are out of work, give them quality training so they can go out and do this work, but also give them a career pathway so that they can potentially stay in weatherization for the next 20 years or may be able to move into commercial building construction or demolition, where the wages are higher. So we're looking to give people the chance to change their lives," Davita said.

After five weeks of meetings, the stakeholders came to consensus on a Community Workforce Agreement for the Clean Energy Works Portland pilot program that lays out requirements for worker training, wages and benefits, local hiring, contractor standards and more. Key goals and targets of the agreement, which was passed by the Portland City Council on September 30, include:

Local hire: at least 80 percent of employees used in the pilot program will be hired from the local workforce.

Family-supporting jobs: workers will earn no less than 180 percent of the state minimum wage.

Diverse workforce: historically disadvantaged or underrepresented people, including people of color, women, and low-income city residents, will perform at least 30 percent of total trades and technical project hours.

Diverse business participation: twenty percent of the dollars that flow through the project will go to businesses owned by historically disadvantaged or underrepresented people.

Prevailing wage: contractors will pay wages that are at least 180 percent of Oregon state minimum wage or the prevailing wage for weatherization work, whichever is higher.

Worker training: contractors will hire 100 percent of new weatherization employees from designated training programs until 50 percent of the contractor's non-supervisory work hours are performed by these training program graduates.

Labor peace: contractors will sign a labor peace agreement that includes a majority sign-up provision (meaning that contractors will respect the will of the workers if a majority of them signs up to form a labor union).

The Community Workforce Agreement also sets up a system of "best value contracting," which means that contractors wishing to join the pool of qualified contractors for the Clean Energy Works Portland program will be scored on a range of attributes. They will earn points for having a successful track record of hiring and retaining historically disadvantaged people; having a plan for establishing sub-contracting relationships with businesses owned by people of color and women; and hiring graduates of pre-apprenticeship training programs, among other criteria.

Clean Energy Works Portland's criteria for qualified training programs requires the programs to have at least three defined partnerships with state recognized pre-apprenticeship programs or signatory community organizations that service underrepresented populations, and to make sure a majority of trainees are women, people of color, low-income people or people from disadvantaged communities.

"In Oregon, a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, Clean Energy Works Portland stands to provide a scalable national model by leveraging federal recovery dollars to put people back to work and achieve significant carbon reductions," said Portland Mayor Sam Adams. "With our community workforce agreement, we have the ability to promote social equity in a measurable way, providing an opportunity for under-employed youth and adults to gain career training in the sustainable building industry, and ensure that Portland stays at the forefront of the green economy."

For other cities that are considering designing programs similar to Portland's, several of the people who participated in the process that created the Community Workforce Agreement emphasized the importance of involving stakeholders early in the process. "My bottom line advice is that if you want to do this, you have to involve the stakeholders from the very beginning of the process," said Barbara Byrd. "It's not something the city can put together and ask people to sign on to. It was the involvement of the stakeholders that not only created the workforce agreement, but will also make sure it works."

Rahming said that the early involvement of minority contractors will help them be able to participate in the program. "In contracting, time is everything," Rahming said. "A lot of times, larger companies can put proposals together more quickly, because they have more staff. This time, because the project was presented to my contractors at the front end, it will allow them to be able to meet the wage and benefits and training requirements."

Now that the Community Workforce Agreement is in place and the pilot program has already begun converting loans for homeowners, some of the same people who were involved in the stakeholder process will oversee how the program is run.

"The side benefit of this whole effort is energizing a community," Smith told Oregon Live in a recent interview. "People are really interested in this. It's good for the economy. It's good for their home energy bills and (the environment). It seems like one of the promises of the new clean economy could be realized here."

For more information about Clean Energy Works Portland, go to www.cleanenergyworksportland.org.

Read the Community Workforce Agreement.

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The oil lobby's latest astroturf concoction is "Energy Citizens." Its website practically looks like it's a group pushing clean green jobs, with its green-tinted USA map and call to "support American jobs and affordable energy." Its attempt at a grassroots rally was rightly deemed nothing more than a "company picnic," just another ruse to kill the clean energy and climate protection bill which passed the House and should be taken up by the Senate later in the year.

As we've seen in the health care debate, the conservative movement and their corporate backers still have the ability to spread lies and warp debate. If the climate bill is tagged as a job-killer, that will be a bill-killer.

While the entire enterprise of averting a climate crisis by capping carbon emissions is sure to launch a vibrant green jobs industry, we must take extra steps to ensure that the American component of any global warming strategy creates good-paying American green jobs, not sends even more jobs away to other countries. This is our best chance to revitalize America's manufacturing base, and we'll likely lose political support to address the climate crisis if we don't also seize this economic opportunity.

The House bill does seize the opportunity, although it did at the very end of the legislative process, when language from Sen. Sherrod Brown's "IMPACT" legislation was inserted with little fanfare into the final climate bill. The provision provides critical investment: $30 billion to states, in a loan program, to allow factories to retool for the green economy and invest in energy efficiencies.

It's great that it's there, but it's not so great that it wasn't part of the bill to begin with, because we don't have the assurance it will stay in the bill once the Senate is finished.

On a recent conference call led by Apollo Alliance to support the IMPACT provisions (check out the presentation here), I asked who is fighting Sen. Brown on this. The answer: nobody.

Everyone generally supports it. There's no grand fight about it drawing media attention.

It's just treated as an afterthought. So without a strong push, the language could be foolishly left off the table.

The investment in manufacturing shouldn't just be in there when the Senate introduces its version of the climate bill. It should be front and center to strongly counter the false claims from Big Oil's front groups like Energy Citizens.

Just this week in Ohio, the Blue-Green Alliance and Repower America kicked off a Made In America Tour to support the House climate bill. The Akron Beacon Journal reported on it, noting what factory retooling for clean energy means for the local economy:

We need more of those stories to be told. We need potential opportunities to be cited, if we are to energize support in swing states with Senators who have not committed to supporting the bill.

Originally posted at OurFuture.org

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Clean energy opportunities

Seeking to have an IMPACT on climate policy, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) formally introduced legislation this week to strengthen America's efforts to cut emissions and build a prosperous clean energy economy. The Ohio Democrat's efforts to advance new investment in clean energy technologies and manufacturing are critical, and are consistent with the Breakthrough Institute's recommendations to make clean energy cheap.

By Jesse Jenkins and Johanna Peace

Recently, Sen. Sherrod Brown refused to accept a climate bill that would simply send both emissions and U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas -- inaccurately earning him a label as a "threat" to the passage of federal energy and climate legislation. This week, the Ohio Democrat formally introduced legislation to strengthen America's efforts to both cut emissions and build a prosperous clean energy economy: the Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology (IMPACT) Act of 2009.

"We can revive American manufacturing through investments in clean energy," Brown said. "This bill will help our manufacturers retool, put our auto suppliers back to work, and produce clean energy technologies."

The bill would create a two-year, $30 billion revolving loan fund to help small and medium-sized American manufacturers to improve the manufacturing process and increase their production of clean energy parts and systems. The IMPACT Act would also directly invest $1.5 billion over five years to help guide manufacturers into clean energy markets and streamline their implementation of new manufacturing technologies and methods through the Manufacturing Extension Program, a division of the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As part of a crucial block of swing legislators in the Senate, Brown has long been a vocal supporter of effective climate policy that would make clean energy cheap by directly investing in new technologies, accelerating the deployment of existing clean energy sources--and most importantly to Senator Brown, creating new clean energy jobs in the American Heartland along the way.

Senator Brown's efforts to advance new investments in clean energy technologies and manufacturing are critical, and IMPACT is consistent with Breakthrough's recommendations to make clean energy cheap. As Breakthrough advocates:

In its April "Green Manufacturing Action Plan," the Apollo Alliance laid the foundation for IMPACT by outlining a series of aggressive steps to boost American production of energy systems and components.

According to an Apollo press release, "70 percent of America's clean and efficient energy systems are currently produced abroad, including half of the country's existing wind turbines and all transformers for the electrical grid."

Apollo Alliance Chairman Phil Angelides joined Brown at the announcement of IMPACT, saying:

It's true: America is lagging in the heightening global clean energy race -- and it's not just our competitors in Europe that are gaining the upper hand. The US now lags behind several East Asian nations on clean energy manufacturing as well.

In 2007, the U.S. manufactured just one-third of what China produced in both wind turbines and solar PV. And a full 85% of the world's lithium ion batteries are produced in China, South Korea, or Japan. That's a disturbing picture for those like Senator Brown, who worry that valuable jobs in the clean energy manufacturing sector will be created overseas, and stay there.

Legislation like Brown's IMPACT bill is a critical component of any federal climate and energy strategy and contrasts with the House's Waxman-Markey climate bill, which as currently drafted, would invest little in building America's clean tech production capacity. Direct public investment is necessary to jump-start a robust clean energy manufacturing sector that will ensure the US gains a secure foothold in a burgeoning (and lucrative) global industry. Otherwise, our wind turbines and solar panels -- like so many other products that sustain our economy -- will continue to bear the label "Made in China."

If you'd like to support the IMPACT clean energy manufacturing investment bill, our friends at the Apollo Alliance have an action opportunity here.

Follow Jesse Jenkins and the Breakthrough Institute on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JesseJenkins  www.twitter.com/theBTI

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By now the mission of the two-year-old D.C.-based Apollo Alliance -- to mobilize a grand-scale federal commitment to energy independence, with the triple-whammy promise of creating good jobs with new technology, bolstering national security with energy independence, and saving the planet from carbon emissions -- has become something of a cliché.

Apollo: No longer shooting for the moon?

That's both a creditable triumph and, some argue, a concerning liability. On the one hand, thanks to Apollo and other like-minded organizations, the virtues of energy independence are now almost universally applauded in the theater of American politics, as likely to be extolled in The Wall Street Journal and The National Review as on this website. On the other, the Apollo agenda may be suffering from its sheer agreeableness: It's attracted coalition partners from a broad spectrum, but consensus among those partners centers on general concepts rather than specific, hard-hitting policy proposals.

Named after President Kennedy's visionary moon shot, which launched America's space-exploration program, the Apollo Alliance is a coalition of labor, business, and environmental advocates that aims to unify the country behind a 10-year, $300 billion program of investment in clean-energy technology. The alliance claims its proposal would create more than 3 million new jobs, eliminate American dependence on Middle East oil imports, lead to 15 percent of U.S. electricity coming from renewable sources, and reduce national energy consumption by 16 percent.

Apollo's vision has been endorsed by every major union in the AFL-CIO (even before this summer's defections) and many environmental groups, as well as nine Democratic governors, including Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and Bill Richardson of New Mexico. Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel recently heralded it as "one of the best progressive ideas of the millennium."

"Apollo has been an absolutely integral force, if not the key force, in helping shift the framework of the energy debate from environmental space into economic ... and national-security space," said Peter Teague, director of the environment program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a lead funder of the Apollo project. It was Teague who brought framing theorist George Lakoff in during the development stages of the Apollo Alliance to help achieve this very goal.

"At almost every meeting of progressives I go to, people point to Apollo as the prime example of how we should be doing our politics differently. It fundamentally reorients our message away from doom and gloom and toward inspiration and solving multiple problems simultaneously," he said.

Apollo was publicly unveiled in June 2003, having evolved alongside a handful of other organizations proclaiming similar goals, some spearheaded by hawkish conservatives concerned about national security. Frank Gaffney Jr., a former policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. and founder of the Center for Security Policy; C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel; and Robert McFarlane, former national-security adviser to Reagan, are active in the Energy Future Coalition and an organization called Set America Free. These groups champion efficiency and renewable-energy agendas in the name of national and economic security, and have intermittently collaborated with Apollo. "All these organizations evolved in parallel on the heels of Sept. 11," said Apollo Alliance founding director Bracken Hendricks, who has been an adviser to the Energy Future Coalition and is a member of Set America Free.

According to Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition, "Apollo was the first out of the box in articulating the idea that this is a job-creation and economic-development engine as well as good for energy and the environment. Those of us coming from the security angle have definitely embraced that message."

Bill Clinton is another believer in the vision. "We've got to make [energy] a national-security argument, and we've got to make it a jobs argument, and we've got to make the price of oil irrelevant," he said in July at an Aspen Institute gathering that included heavies ranging from Hardball's Chris Matthews to Amazon's Jeff Bezos to Jordan's Queen Noor. He argued that the U.S. could create millions of jobs if clean-energy projects got just a fraction of the tax incentives that go to dirty energy.

Even Karl Rove seems to be adopting the rhetoric, if not the substance. In May, President Bush made an appearance at a biodiesel manufacturing facility in Virginia to talk up alternative-fuel subsidies in the energy bill. And in June, during a speech at the 16th annual Energy-Efficiency Forum in D.C., Bush proclaimed, "Here in America, we have become too dependent -- too dependent -- on the increasingly limited supply of foreign oil for our own energy needs."

But in practice, of course, Bush has mainly pushed for more drilling and more tax breaks for extractive industries -- even as fossil-fuel developers are enjoying record-high oil and gas prices. Indeed, the same goes for many others who pay lip service to energy independence. The presumed bipartisan consensus on the issue falls apart as soon as specific policies get debated.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who sits on Apollo's advisory board, proposed an amendment to the energy bill in June that called for a 40 percent reduction in U.S. oil imports over 20 years. The measure was summarily defeated. Similarly, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) failed to even get a vote on his plan to replace the energy bill with a New Apollo Energy Act. That act, which has since been introduced as stand-alone legislation, includes ambitious measures ranging from a mandatory carbon cap to $49 billion in loan guarantees for the construction of clean-energy facilities. (The Apollo Alliance was not involved in developing the Cantwell initiative, despite her allegiance to the group, and though the alliance worked with Inslee as he crafted his bill, it did not endorse the final product because it included fuel-economy proposals that were objectionable to one of Apollo's member unions.)

Of course, the energy bill that eventually reached Bush's desk, and that he gleefully signed in early August, was quite limited in its assistance for clean energy technologies -- of the $14.5 billion in subsidies it earmarks for the energy industry over the next decade, only 20 percent will go to renewables and energy efficiency. Far more prominent in the bill, and in the Bush energy strategy as a whole, are big subsidies for the nuclear-power industry and a big push to drill for oil and gas on public lands and in offshore waters. Critics of all political stripes argue that the bill's grand giveaways to oil and coal producers will, if anything, increase America's dependence on fossil fuels, not lessen it.

In essence, what we've now got at the federal level is lots of talk about promoting a clean-energy economy, and lots of action that's leading to anything but.

Apollo's leaders have had their own differences over how to parlay their widely talked-up vision into concrete policy making. Hendricks resigned from the executive director position this spring, though he remains on the steering committee. He stresses his continued commitment to the organization, but raises questions about its efficacy. "Apollo has not only recontextualized the climate-change and energy-independence debate [but] created an opening to pursue solutions," he said. "The question is: How do you capitalize on that opening? It may be through Apollo, or a different set of strategies."

It seems Hendricks is betting on the latter since he now divides his time between his new fellowship at the Center for American Progress, founded by Democratic strategist John Podesta, and his role as a strategic consultant at the Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus -- aka, The Reapers -- authors of the controversial "Death of Environmentalism" paper that assailed the green movement's political irrelevance.

Leaders of the Apollo program, who spent great effort trying to build practical coalitions among environmental and labor groups, were embarrassed when The Reapers singled out Apollo for lavish praise while savaging the rest of the environmental movement. "Our phone started ringing from friends wondering why we were working with people who attacked our coalition partners," said a leader of the initial Apollo plan. "We didn't know the paper was coming. We were completely blindsided."

Within six months of the paper's release, Shellenberger and "Death of" ally Adam Werbach, both of whom were among Apollo's founding members, distanced themselves from the alliance. "Given our differing visions for how to advance Apollo, and lingering upset over 'Death of,' we all agreed it would be better for Adam and me to leave the Apollo Alliance and seek other ways to advance the vision, values, and ideas at both the national and state levels," Shellenberger said.

"I felt like we needed to articulate concrete political proposals and get them out there in the world," he continued. He argues that the alliance's current focus on moving small state and local initiatives yields only "incremental" policy change, and it has not designed or endorsed new federal-level legislative initiatives. "We're more interested in finding ways to introduce big, bold, and inspiring legislative proposals that may not pass anytime soon, but serve to frame the debate and create political momentum," he said.

Apollo leaders might argue that their call for a massive public investment to advance clean-energy innovation is just such a bold vision -- one that has little chance of becoming a legislative reality anytime soon, but nevertheless challenges the energy status quo and acts as an organizing and educational tool. But Apollo has outlined only vague legislative strategies to substantiate its $300 billion plan. In 2003, it issued a 40-page white paper that explored broad categories of investment for these funds, but since then has not grounded this vision in legislative detail, nor developed other, more detailed federal-level objectives.

Jeff Rickert, the acting executive director of Apollo, acknowledges that because his top priority is holding together a coalition of diverse organizations, there are limits to how specific and controversial Apollo can get in terms of its legislative proposals. "We have to steer clear of anything that looks like CAFE [corporate average fuel economy standards]," Rickert admits, in order to keep allies in the labor movement on board. Gasoline taxes and caps on carbon dioxide pollution are also anathema to some of Apollo's labor partners.

Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America, who is on the Apollo advisory board and was instrumental in rallying support for the alliance among labor unions, declined to address the regulatory picture altogether. "I'm not going to get into a discussion about regulations," he said. "That torpedoes the debate. My interest is in advancing the principles, advancing the fight, not dissolving into arguments about divisive regulatory strategies."

Gerard stressed that Apollo must be careful not to alienate business interests: "We're the dominant union in the petrochemical industry, and we're not at all saying, 'Put them out of business.' We're saying we want to keep a strong economy within America's control. We're saying, 'If China runs around and buys up most of the world's resources, what will we do? If the world starts demanding hybrids and Japan dominates that market, what will we do?'"

Gerard's comments highlight the fact that the debate within the labor community over clean-energy policies is still in its infancy, and that blue-green alliances are still fragile.

If success at the federal level seems out of reach, though, the Apollo Alliance is making strides in the states, in many cases simply by bringing environmentalists and labor together.

In Pennsylvania, Apollo pushed a renewable portfolio standard -- backed by a coalition including both steelworkers and enviros -- that requires 18 percent of the state's electricity to be generated from clean sources by 2020. Spanish wind company Gamesa cited the state's adoption of the standard as one reason for its plans to build development offices and a manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania, a venture that could create up to 1,000 new jobs over five years.

In California, Apollo worked to get two huge state pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, to adopt a Green Wave investment plan under which they will invest some $450 million in eco-friendly technologies. And in New York City, the organization worked with the city council on a recently passed green-building measure requiring that new and expanded municipal buildings be certified with the equivalent of a LEED silver rating or better.

Rickert says that Apollo plans over the next three years to maintain only a low-level involvement in federal initiatives, while growing its local and regional efforts, with an emphasis on 10 states including California, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Washington, and Wisconsin. "We believe the best way to pave the way for sound energy initiatives is demonstrating their success at a state level," he said.

Hendricks applauds these successes, but believes the federal battle can also be fought more directly. The Breakthrough Institute, for example, has been collaborating with the office of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on a bill it hopes he will propose later this year known as the Automotive Competitiveness and Accountability Act. It would relieve the pressure on U.S. automakers to bankroll the rising costs of legacy health insurance -- an expense that doesn't burden their foreign competitors -- and, in exchange, obligate them to invest heavily in energy-efficiency technologies and comply with substantially more aggressive fuel-economy standards.

It represents a new way of thinking about environmental policies, says Hendricks -- "offering a bailout to the [auto industry] from these hugely debilitating health costs they're grappling with, but linking it to an accountability for achieving public purposes."

Shellenberger insists that these types of edgy proposals are precisely what progressives need right now -- "devices that will prompt battles that may be lost legislatively, but won at a cultural and political level" because they would force conservatives to take a position at odds with the pursuit of energy independence. The greater goal, in other words, is not to create frictionless coalitions, but constructive controversy. "We want to catapult the fuel-economy issue into contested political space," as Nordhaus puts it, which would compel opponents of fuel efficiency to justify their positions.

The hope is that Obama and other progressive leaders could characterize anyone who votes against the Automotive Competitiveness and Accountability Act as an opponent of national security, job creation, and public health -- just the way conservatives used the issue of gay marriage in the 2004 election to characterize liberals as opponents of traditional family values.

But the useful strategy of smoking out opponents doesn't negate the importance of building and protecting the common ground between once-competitive interests, says Hendricks. "The challenge of jumping into the fight and pushing wedge issues is going to move the debate further and faster," he said. "But holding together the blue-green coalition has real value. Keeping allies together and focused on what they can agree on is critical. We have to define and protect a safe, positive space for accord between people that have only recently begun to see their common cause."

Apollo has certainly demonstrated its ability to attract and maintain broad backing for a compelling vision. Perhaps there's no need for the alliance to do anything more than what it does best: forging consensus and pushing incremental policy measures at the state and local levels. This work can only help the activists and innovators who want to make waves -- and eventually sea change -- at a federal level.

A version of this article was published in The American Prospect, part of a special report on the "death and rebirth" of environmentalism.

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