For some people, climate change is a tough cause to rally ‘round—even those who understand that it’s happening and that it’s human-caused get distracted by things like eating, working, having sex, watching TV, or watching people on TV have sex.

While social scientists ponder the best ways to get the message out and motivate the masses—and since we’re gearing up to cover December’s climate talks in Copenhagen—we’ve devised a Grist list of good reasons to care about this global crisis. Got reasons of your own? Let us know in the comments section below.

25. Because supermodels are stripping for the cause. If these lovely ladies are getting hot and bothered, shouldn’t you? At least watch the video. Call it your good deed for the day.

24. Because you don’t want your insurance premiums to go up. The sea level rise, severe weather, flash floods, and windstorms attributable to climate change have all got the insurance industry on edge. Some firms in the U.S. have already raised premiums in coastal areas, and rates in the U.K. are on the rise as well.

Dirt moguls just aren’t the same.Photo: Shay Haas23. Because you like to ski. Listen up, snow bunny: you’ll soon be consigned to schussing in an indoor dome if climate chaos has its way. Shorter winters and decreased snowfall are forcing big ski areas to ramp up their snowmaking efforts (a questionable scheme in the face of global water shortages) and leading smaller ski areas to close.

22. Because you’re a raging hypochondriac. Warmer temperatures mean happy, thriving insects, which might mean increased risk of West Nile, encephalitis, malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. Do you really need more to worry about? Isn’t that weird spot on your inner thigh enough?

Nothing to see here, folks.Photo: andedam via flickr21. Because it’s a good excuse to learn weird things about animal sex. OK, you don’t care about the plight of the polar bears. But admit it, you’re curious about polar bear penises, aren’t you? And why they’re larger in snowier areas? That’s nothing compared to the lengths sea turtles go to for reproduction, and the flip-flopping gender of the hot bearded dragon lizard. Go on, check it out —you know you want to.

20. Because you hate oil. If your soul still wilts at the thought of all those people in slickers cleaning slick-covered birds in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, if you’d rather ride a bike than participate in the auto economy, then climate change is your issue, man. Fossil fuels got us here, and ending our reliance on them can get us out. But you don’t need us to tell you that.

19. Because you love oil. So maybe you didn’t mind the oily birds and you love driving your car? You should be worried too: according to a report from the U.S. government, the severe storms that are becoming more frequent due to climate change threaten our infrastructure and transportation networks, including the ports and freight lines used to transport oil. The oil-rich Gulf Coast is, as was made painfully clear in 2005, a particularly vulnerable area. Stop climate change in its tracks! Save the oil distribution network!

18. Because you eat rice. It’s a pleasant side dish to you, and for 750 million people, it’s a life-giving staple: rice. But this crucial crop stands to wither in the face of climate change, thanks to rising temperatures, increased flooding, and rats. Yeah, rats—they scurry in after major storms, eat all the rice, and nibble on people too. Care yet?

He speaks truth.Photo: Martin Crook17. Because Stephen Colbert does. Need we say more?

16. Because the Christian Coalition does. Need we pray more?

15. Because it will create jobs. Talk about your silver lining: In the midst of the deepest recession this country has seen in decades, attempts to forestall this global climate scourge could create new jobs in clean-energy industries, weatherization, and other areas. The feds are already steering money toward job training for green professions, and clean-energy legislation now before Congress could create jobs and boost the GDP of every U.S. state.

14.  Because you live near water. Sea levels could rise as much as a meter or more by 2100. That’s enough to put places like Miami, downtown Philadelphia, and parts of Manhattan underwater. How many people live in such vulnerable coastal areas? Oh, just 53 percent of the U.S. population.

13. Because Kardashians interest you more than Katrinas. Who can forget the powerful images beamed around the world when Hurricane Katrina hit: the faces of the forgotten, houses crumpled like paper cups, water washing over everything. And who can forget how they beamed in during your favorite show! So inconsiderate. If this sort of prime-time interruption irritates you, you may want to get involved in the climate fight. Because we’re going to see a lot more storms, and that means a lot more unhappy people beamed in your living room.

12. Because you like breathing. Got lungs? Got a healthy apprecation for fresh air? Well, take a deep breath: warming-induced increases in ground-level ozone and particulate matter are expected to increase respiratory disorders including asthma, and a recent study says more children will be hospitalized over the next decade due to such respiratory problems.

11. Because colorful coral jewelry completes most of your outfits. Prepare to adopt a new accessory, or wear a lot of white necklaces: climate change has led to massive coral bleaching and die-offs. The real problem is the disturbance of the delicate relationship between coral reefs and the teensy organisms that build them and give them color. It’s the foundation of a healthy ocean, which is the foundation of a healthy planet.

10. Because you won’t be able to hold up your end of a conversation with Obama, Lucy Lawless, Glenn Beck, Evander Holyfield, or the Pope if you don’t. You can probably fake it with Miley Cyrus, though.

Fading to black.Photo: burnblue9. Because colorful fall leaves are so pretty. But warmer autumns—and pests that enjoy warmer autumns—are messing with the trees. Duller leaves means less for you to look at, and translates into an economic hit for places like New England that rely on tourism generated by the annual phenomenon.

8. Because you don’t want to serve embarrassing champagne. Rising temperatures are altering the world’s finest champagnes, making the alcohol content “embarrassingly high,” says one British wine critic. How fun! Uh, we meant to say how terrible.

7. Because you like lights to come on when you flip a switch. Remember that blackout in 2003? The one that left 50 million people in the dark? That happened on a hot, hot day when lots of people wanted electricity. Guess what we’re in for more of? Hot, hot days. Guess how much our power grid has improved since then? Not much. For a little bit of Jazzercise for the brain, check out this academic paper on climate’s potential impacts on our power grids and national security—including, oh, crippling our society.

6.  Because: “insect feeding frenzy.” Shudder.

5. Because you support the recycled-soda-bottle fleece industry. What will become of those cozy fleece jackets made from recycled soda bottles? Such an incredible innovation, such a wonderful way forward—but if our northern climes turn temperate and our southern climes turn tropical, no one will wear fleece. And those soda bottles are going right back in the trash.

4. Because you think it’s depressing when old people die alone in hot apartments. Heat waves are the deadliest natural disaster in the U.S.—and the probability of severe heat waves is increasing along with temperatures. If emissions are not reduced, heat waves are projected to double in Los Angeles and quadruple in Chicago. With an aging boomer population, that’s a recipe for one hot mess.

3. Because you think it’s depressing when little kids die. It’s happening. Now. According to Save the Children, 9 million kids die before their fifth birthday each year from diseases that are occurring more frequently because of climate change, which is also affecting access to food and water. What are you, completely heartless?

2. Because everyone at Grist cares. We’re a bunch of (fairly) normal people, with pets and kids and money woes and Twitter obsessions—but we all think this is big. Like, bigger than Elvis. A survey shows that our reasons range from the practical (I live near the coast) to the dire (it’s going to kill my unborn grandbabies). But on one thing we agree: we need to do whatever we can to reverse this course.

1.  Because if we stop climate change, we can stop earnest lists like this. Seriously. We’d rather be doing other stuff too. Like maybe watching that supermodel video again?

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So how did Cash for Clunkers work out from an environmental standpoint? You don’t want to know.

The $3 billion federal program was kinda sorta supposed to send inefficient, high-polluting, belchy vehicles to an early grave. Instead it put a lot of new large, inefficient vehicles on the road, according to an AP investigation of new government records.

The most common deals swapped old Ford or Chevrolet pickup trucks for new pickups that got “only marginally better gas mileage,” the analysis found. Old Ford F-150 for new Ford F-150 was the most common exchange. Buyers were 17 times more likely to purchase an F-150 (rated at 16 miles per gallon) than a hybrid Toyota Prius.

At least 15 owners of large pickups cashed them in for new Hummer H3 SUVs that get only 16 mpg. Excuse me, but why did the government even send claims forms to Hummer dealerships? Government officials are "investigating" out how these deals squeaked through, the AP reports.

About 1 in 7 of all deals went for vehicles that got 20 mpg or worse. If you think about it, though, 20 mpg really isn’t such a bad rate ... for 1979.

There were plenty of signals before the one-month summer program began that it was a poor method for cutting pollution (note our roundup of early warnings). There’s also a lively debate on whether it made sense as economic stimulus.

"If we're looking for the environmental story here, we're going to be disappointed," Jeremy Anwyl, of analyst firm Edmunds.com, told the AP. "It might have started out from the perspective of improving the environment, but it got detoured as a way to stimulate the economy."

That pretty much nails it.

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Norton hit Congress to testify about the value of green building in 2008.globalwarming.house.govA major investment in making affordable housing greener—a $4 billion investment, to be precise—was announced Wednesday. The injection comes courtesy of Enterprise Community Partners, a 25-year-old non-profit dedicated to community development and affordable housing. With heavyweight partners including NRDC, HUD, and the Home Depot Foundation, Enterprise—which was founded by the grandparents of actor Edward Norton, who sits on its board—has set its sights on overhauling the entire affordable housing stock in this country.

Well, in that pebble-in-a-pond sort of way. The actual $4 billion will be split, with $2.5 billion going toward the construction or retrofit of 75,000 units across the country, and $1.5 billion going toward research and systems reform work. Through its work with state and local governments, Enterprise Green Communities hopes to have an eco-influence on hundreds of thousands more units, and leverage lots of dough. If that’s not enough, its leaders are calling for the country’s entire affordable housing stock—around 30 million households—to be green by 2020.

It’s the kind of energetic, solution-y plan that makes you have real hope for a millisecond. Even if the 30 million households vision doesn’t pan out, there’s real progress to be made. As speaker after speaker pointed out in a conference call this morning (in which Norton was supposed to participate, but he wasn’t there, not that it’s the only reason certain people called in, ha ha, but where was he?), this isn’t greening merely for the sake of environmental progress—it has tangible effects on the health and quality of life of residents, as well as holding the potential for green job creation, energy savings, and significant carbon reduction.

In fact, Enterprise has just rolled out the results from its work over the last few years. In conjunction with its splashy announcement today, it released a report called Incremental Cost, Measurable Savings: Enterprise Green Communities Criteria. Not the hottest title, but it gets at the point that green builders and fans of retrofitting try to make day in and day out: choosing greener options doesn’t cost that much more, and it saves a hell of a lot over the long run.

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Making buildings more efficient: rationalizing retrofit markets

Our mismanaged world economy today has many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes payments from a broad base of investors and uses these to pay off returns. It creates the illusion that it is providing a highly attractive rate of return on investment as a result of savvy investment decisions when in fact these irresistibly high earnings are in part the result of consuming the asset base itself. A Ponzi scheme investment fund can last only as long as the flow of new investments is sufficient to sustain the high rates of return paid out to previous investors. When this is no longer possible, the scheme collapses -- just as Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion investment fund did in December 2008.

Although the functioning of the global economy and a Ponzi investment scheme are not entirely analogous, there are some disturbing parallels. As recently as 1950 or so, the world economy was living more or less within its means, consuming only the sustainable yield, the interest of the natural systems that support it. But then as the economy doubled, and doubled again, and yet again, multiplying eightfold, it began to outrun sustainable yields and to consume the asset base itself.

In a 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. As of 2009, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30 percent. This means we are meeting current demands in part by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for an eventual Ponzi-type collapse when these assets are depleted.

As of mid-2009, nearly all the world’s major aquifers were being overpumped. We have more irrigation water than before the overpumping began, in true Ponzi fashion. We get the feeling that we’re doing very well in agriculture -- but the reality is that an estimated 400 million people are today being fed by overpumping, a process that is by definition short-term. With aquifers being depleted, this water-based food bubble is about to burst.

A similar situation exists with the melting of mountain glaciers. When glaciers first start to melt, flows in the rivers and the irrigation canals they feed are larger than before the melting started. But after a point, as smaller glaciers disappear and larger ones shrink, the amount of ice melt declines and the river flow diminishes. Thus we have two water-based Ponzi schemes running in parallel in agriculture.

And there are more such schemes. As human and livestock populations grow more or less apace, the rising demand for forage eventually exceeds the sustainable yield of grasslands. As a result, the grass deteriorates, leaving the land bare, allowing it to turn to desert. In this Ponzi scheme, herders are forced to rely on food aid or they migrate to cities.

Three-fourths of oceanic fisheries are now being fished at or beyond capacity or are recovering from overexploitation. If we continue with business as usual, many of these fisheries will collapse. Overfishing, simply defined, means we are taking fish from the oceans faster than they can reproduce. The cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada is a prime example of what can happen. Long one of the world’s most productive fisheries, it collapsed in the early 1990s and may never recover.

Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, puts it well: “At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation.” The larger question is, if we continue with business as usual -- with overpumping, overgrazing, overplowing, overfishing, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide -- how long will it be before the Ponzi economy unravels and collapses? No one knows. Our industrial civilization has not been here before.

Unlike Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which was set up with the knowledge that it would eventually fall apart, our global Ponzi economy was not intended to collapse. It is on a collision path because of market forces, perverse incentives, and poorly chosen measures of progress.

In addition to consuming our asset base, we have devised some clever techniques for leaving costs off the books -- much like the disgraced and bankrupt Texas-based energy company Enron did some years ago. For example, when we use electricity from a coal-fired power plant we get a monthly bill from the local utility. It includes the cost of mining coal, transporting it to the power plant, burning it, generating the electricity, and delivering electricity to our homes. It does not, however, include any costs of the climate change caused by burning coal. That bill will come later -- and it will likely be delivered to our children. Unfortunately for them, their bill for our coal use will be even larger than ours.

When Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, released his groundbreaking 2006 study on the future costs of climate change, he talked about a massive market failure. He was referring to the failure of the market to incorporate the costs of climate change in the price of fossil fuels. According to Stern, the costs are measured in the trillions of dollars. The difference between the market prices for fossil fuels and an honest price that also incorporates their environmental costs to society is huge.

As economic decisionmakers, we all depend on the market for information to guide us, but the market is giving us incomplete information, and as a result we are making bad decisions. One of the best examples of this can be seen in the United States, where the gasoline pump price was around $3 per gallon in mid-2009. This reflects only the cost of finding the oil, pumping it to the surface, refining it into gasoline, and delivering the gas to service stations. It overlooks the costs of climate change as well as the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry, the burgeoning military costs of protecting access to oil in the politically unstable Middle East, and the health care costs of treating respiratory illnesses caused by breathing polluted air. These indirect costs now total some $12 per gallon. In reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it is cheap.

The market also does not respect the carrying capacity of natural systems. For example, if a fishery is being continuously overfished, the catch eventually will begin to shrink and prices will rise, encouraging even more investment in fishing trawlers. The inevitable result is a precipitous decline in the catch and the collapse of the fishery.

Today we need a realistic view about the relationship between the economy and the environment. We also need, more than ever before, political leaders who can see the big picture. And since the principal advisors to government are economists, we need either economists who can think like ecologists or more ecological advisors. Otherwise, market behavior -- including its failure to include the indirect costs of goods and services, to value nature’s services, and to respect sustainable-yield thresholds -- will cause the destruction of the economy’s natural support systems, and our global Ponzi scheme will fall apart.

Adapted from Chapter 1, “Selling Our Future,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

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This is part of a series of interviews with people working to make U.S. communities smarter, greener spaces. Got a suggestion for an interviewee? Send it our way or leave it in the comments section below.

Earlier this year, officials from sixteen U.S. cities gathered in Cambridge, Mass., to compare notes on a surprisingly hot topic: building retrofits. The meeting was held just as the Obama Administration announced the creation of a “Recovery through Retrofit” interagency working group, and hopes were high that federal funding, green jobs, and energy savings would flow forth. I dropped in on that event and spoke with Stockton Williams of conference sponsor Living Cities, a coalition of foundations and banks—including such heavyhitters as the Gates Foundation, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank—that aims to “improve the lives of low-income people and the urban areas in which they live.” Brimming with quiet confidence, he’s one of those people who leaves you feeling like good things actually can happen—and are happening. I decided to follow up with him to see what came out of the conference, what he thinks of Obama’s urban efforts so far, and what advice he has for the rest of us.

Q. Tell the good people: what is your occupation, and what does it look like on a day-to-day basis?

Stockton WilliamsA. I am senior advisor and director of green economy initiatives for Living Cities, a consortium of global foundations and financial institutions that invests in local efforts to expand opportunity for low-income people in U.S. cities. I work with cities and nonprofit organizations to design and implement building energy retrofit initiatives and other strategies to create clean energy jobs and foster more sustainable urban development. I also work with federal, state, and local officials to develop policies that will make the green economy work for low-income people and places.

Some of what we do involves making grants and loans, which is critically important to getting innovative efforts off the ground. Just as important, we think, is the role we play as a convener of leaders on various issues and source of unbiased expertise and real time market intelligence on the most promising approaches for strengthening cities.

Q. When we met earlier this year, you were at a “Boot Camp” for officials from several cities around the country. How was that experience, and what came out of it?

A. The Living Cities Green Boot Camp convened more than 100 senior local officials and their partners in the energy and workforce sectors from 16 cities for two days of discussion and peer networking on scaling up building energy retrofits. These cities are at the forefront of a growing recognition in communities across the country that building retrofits at scale can create substantial economic and environmental benefits, from progress on climate change to lower costs and new jobs.

At the boot camp we learned a lot about what cities are trying to do, and where they still face challenges. Ensuring that local retrofit initiatives create opportunities for low-income people is one of them. Since the Green Boot Camp, most participating cities have made a lot of progress. We are providing funding and technical support to a number of them individually and creating ways for all of the participants to learn from and support each other’s efforts.

Q. Which cities—either among those who attended the camp or in general—do you think are doing the best job of becoming smarter, greener places to live?

A new wind’s blowing in Cleveland.GCBL.orgA. There is an enormous amount of environmental innovation happening at the local level in all parts of the country. At Living Cities, we are focused on how cities are making the clean energy economy work for low-income people. On that score, Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis-St.Paul, Newark, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle are certainly among the national leaders.

Smaller cities like Babylon, N.Y., Charlottesville, Va., and Flagstaff, Ariz., are also doing leading edge work in the area of retrofits.

Q. We occasionally run a column called “Sexy Retrofits,” in which we take a look at high-profile buildings that are getting greener. What role does retrofitting play in fighting climate change, and do you think such splashy projects help the cause or are a distraction?

A. The homes, apartments, commercial properties, and community facilities all around us are a major opportunity for achieving greater efficiency and reducing global warming pollution. Buildings in the U.S. consume 72 percent of the electricity and 55 percent of the natural gas—and account for 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Off the shelf technologies and common sense construction practices can cut building energy use by as much as 40 percent. In the process, building retrofits save money, reduce carbon emissions, and create jobs. Critically, many retrofit jobs—from construction to audits to property management—offer opportunities to train low-income workers for long-term careers.

Splashy projects can be beacons of innovation and inspiration, as long as they are understood as such. But most of the climate benefit from better buildings comes from the less sexy improvements—unless you think a caulking gun is sexier than a solar panel.

Q. What are the biggest challenges that officials intent on creating more sustainable cities face?

Sign of the times.A. One set of challenges is related to the recession and foreclosure crisis, which has hammered city budgets, forced cutbacks in essential services, and limited many cities’ ability to make the progress they had hoped on climate protection plans. Another set of challenges flow from the reality that a true clean energy economy is only just emerging in this country, so local governments, like the rest of us, are still learning how to make the transition.

Finally, public policies are often a barrier to greener cities. These include federal transportation programs that encourage excessive road building and sprawl, housing policies that drive demand for larger homes on larger lots away from the urban core, and energy policies that underinvest in incentives for energy efficiency and renewable energy in the built environment. They also include local building codes, zoning policies, stormwater management procedures, and land-use requirements that undermine and sometimes prevent cooler, smarter, and greener growth and development. The good news is that public policy as well as consumer demand is clearly starting to shift; both are demanding greener cities, and as the economy recovers, we will see much faster progress at the local level.

Q. As you look at the current administration’s actions on urban and transportation issues so far, what jumps out as the most promising? What do you wish they’d put more emphasis on?

A. The administration has made a strong commitment to environmental sustainability as a central priority in its broader urban and transportation policies, stronger than any previous administration. We will see this reflected in the renewed debate this fall on cap and trade legislation and the forthcoming rewrite of the major transportation laws.

More broadly, there is an unprecedented degree of joint policymaking occurring between the federal departments of housing, transportation, energy, labor and the Environmental Protection Agency on sustainability issues. One example is the Recovery through Retrofit Interagency Working Group, which is developing a comprehensive blueprint for retrofitting the nation’s residential housing stock.

We are working with the administration to make sure policies to spur the clean energy economy also expand opportunity for low-income people. That cannot be an afterthought; it needs to be at the top of the list. The administration has very talented, dedicated people working on this, but prior experience and current budget and political realities underscore the need to be vigilant, relentless, and insistent on this point.

Q. If you could wave your magic wand and make one thing happen in every city right now, what would it be?

A. Cities would have the resources to meet the basic needs of their citizens, with a little left over—and more available from the federal government to reward the leaders—to accelerate their transition to being greener communities.

Q. Do you have any advice for how people can make change in their own communities?

A. Our economic and environmental future depends mostly on cities. Every citizen has a stake in their city’s plan—or lack of one—for responding to the catastrophic threat of climate change. Find out what your city is doing, ask how you can help, and send any message you can to your federal elected leaders that we can’t wait any longer to act as a nation.

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Chances are, the average U.S. citizen has no idea that their demand for electricity might require that a Mexican village be flooded for a hydroelectric dam. The question is: if the environmental and human costs were known, would we consume just a little bit less?

As part of my own personal battle against under-estimating people, I’m betting that a little bit of knowledge would go a long way. That high environmental cost, which goes hand-in-hand with a slew of human rights abuses, is not likely to sit right, even if that average U.S. citizen is comfortably sipping a Coke in an air-conditioned movie theatre.

Come for a quick tour south of the border to hear how the Mexican countryside is being flooded to beef up our grid and what Mexican grassroots organizations are doing about it.

Food Sovereignty: Resistance and a Way Forward

Just outside of the city of Oaxaca, I spoke with Aldo Gonzalez from the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO). He hikes through the Sierra Juarez mountains, lending a hand to Zapotec communities seeking food sovereignty. On the one hand, UNOSJO keeps an eye out for companies preying on community resources -- whether water, timber, minerals, or seed stock. On the other hand, UNOSJO promotes agroecological techniques so that families can grow adequate food for themselves and, in good years, sell surplus in local markets -- core principles of food soverignty. This work, supported by organizations like Grassroots International includes educating children and adults in simple terms about globalization’s threats, the policy environment that has eroded public support to small farmers and Zapotec techniques and traditions of caring for shared water and land.

Aldo was one of the first indigenous leaders in Mexico to detect genetically modified corn strains in Oaxacan fields and has seen firsthand that dams, mining, and maize don’t mix. “For the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, corn is our blood, our bones, our flesh,” Aldo told me. “Without corn, we’re nothing. For that reason, we’re not going to let anyone disfigure corn, rob it of its essence, kill it or kill us.” UNOSJO shares a vision of autonomy and sovereignty with other indigenous and peasant allies across Mesoamerica with which they work.

Increasing Pressures on Land and Territory

Judging by statistics of foreign direct investment, Mexico is “enjoying” a development boom. But who’s really enjoying it? The country’s economic upsurge is powered largely by transnational industries scouring indigenous lands for mineral-rich veins, windy plains and floodable canyons.

At a recent water and energy strategy forum, Professor Octavio Rosas Landa from the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), presented a global energy matrix to farmers seeking to learn about how worldwide energy consumption threatens their natural resources.

Among the 400 farmers in attendance was Carlos Beas, director of UCIZONI, a Grassroots International partner working on food sovereignty in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. “What do we get in exchange for our resources?” asked Beas, before he then answered his own question. “We get divisions in our community. Some people agree to rent their land. Other people are dead set against it. The government and the companies divide up our communities and where we used to live well together, now we fight.”

Raising questions about the costs of green energy, UCIZONI’s members are particularly concerned about the environmental impacts of a giant wind farm on Oaxaca’s isthmus that has ruined thousands of acres of agricultural land and provides meager revenue. As poor farmers that lead low-consumption lives, UCIZONI’s members have no need for increased energy supply.

Recent Mexican governments have chosen to put their increasingly imported eggs in the megaproject basket. Megaprojects are grand infrastructure works that tie Mexico into the global economy, offering a way for Mexico to sell its abundant natural resources and cheap labor around the world.

What broke Mexico’s farming economy and opened the floodgates to megaprojects?

Dammed if they Do…

Professor Landa described policies of the 80s and 90s, when Mexico was instructed by foreign creditors to abide by neo-liberalism and structural adjustment principles. The formula, replicated throughout the developing world, demanded that Mexico shrink its public spending by -- among other budget cuts -- removing public support for small farmers. Mexican farming families split apart when fathers and sisters had to leave for Mexican cities and the U.S. to seek work. In the 1990s, when constitutional reform broke up collective lands and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) inundated Mexican markets with cheap U.S. corn, even more farmers went broke.

The water and energy forum was held outdoors in a rural schoolyard in Aguacaliente, Guerrero, a community slated to disappear under the rising waters of the proposed La Parota dam. In the eyes of the visitors that had come from afar to the forum to sleep on the hard ground under tarps in a schoolyard, Aguacaliente’s community organization, the Council of Communities Opposed to the Parota Dam (CECOP) is an inspiration that has thus far held back construction of the dam.

What’s behind the interest in Mexico’s land and minerals? You can probably imagine that it has a lot to do with Mexico’s insatiable neighbor to the north. In the U.S., economics and the environmental movement have prevailed to tear dams down rather than construct new ones. “In the U.S., if they propose a dam, there’s nearly a riot,” Professor Landa explained. “Energy companies look elsewhere to fulfill U.S. energy demand. Free Trade agreements like NAFTA make that a lot easier.” Poor and marginalized indigenous communities with little political power are easy targets for the world’s energy and mineral companies.

Participants at the forum learned that Mexico exports 40 percent of the energy that it produces. Through megaprojects like the Plan Puebla Panama, the U.S. seeks to fulfill its energy appetite through a regionalized electrical grid, stretching from Mexico to Colombia,. Sarah Gonzales, a leader of a growing resistance to high electrical rates, traveled 25 hours from Campeche to participate in the form. She said, “I came here upset about my high energy rates. Now that I see that we’re giving up our lands and minerals to produce energy for the U.S., I’m more convinced than ever that our fight is right. We’re proposing a fair “social” price for electricity.” Increasingly, communities are withholding electrical payments to the Federal Electrical Commission and using the funds to maintain their local energy infrastructure.

Sarah’s grassroots organizing doesn’t come without high costs. For her activism work, she went into hiding shortly after the forum and at the time of this writing is under arrest. Similarly, in the state of Oaxaca, Father Martin Octavio Garcia Ortiz, a priest whose parish sits close to the San Jose El Progreso mine has been slandered in the press of subversively applying liberation theology to his pastoral work. That is, he has encouraged parishioners to ask hard questions of a Canadian mining company, La Fortuna, whose mining operation threatens parishioners’ clean water. Dozens of farmers were recently beaten and arrested for peacefully blocking the entrance to the mine.

Insult to injury to the indigenous communities pillaged for their resources is that they are often criminalized for what might be considered upstanding citizen watchdog work. There was a strong feeling at the forum that the flow of U.S. weapons to Mexico’s police and military forces for its war on drugs contributes to the repression and violence.

A Hopeful Alliance Emerges

Given the necessity to work together towards food sovereignty, Oaxacan organizations like UNOSJO and Ser Mixe, a powerful land rights organization serving Oaxaca’s Mixe peoples, have recently joined hands to form a “Collective for Defense of Territorial Rights.”  There was a hopeful tenor to their inaugural forum entitled, “Weaving Resistance”. People saw silver linings in the negative economic trends, which they feel acutely as family members working in the U.S. send home less help. What will happen to these megaprojects if worldwide consumer demand drops? People expressed interest in working closely with United States’ organizations like Grassroots International to pressure the Obama administration to put international human rights ahead of “the American way of life.”

A participant in the “Weaving Resistance” forum shared, “When we take on a transnational mining company, they call us crazy. But what else are we going to do? It’s a big sacrifice; we have less time for our kids and work. So we can’t leave here without beginning to construct our own government, without proposing laws that protect us and our natural resources, and without working together to grow food for our families.”

It’s a long process of resistance and proposal to create a global economic system in which a hot summer day in New York doesn’t mean that another nameless Mexican village is targeted for inundation. Bless the Mexican activists in their resource rights struggles that place tortillas above air conditioners.

Related Links:

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Learning how to count to 350

This post was co-authored by Center for American Progress Vice President for Energy Policy Kate Gordon, Senior Fellow Bracken Hendricks, and Policy Analyst Benjamin Goldstein. It was cross-posted from Wonk Room.

The United States is having the wrong public debate about global warming. We are asking important questions about pollution caps and timetables, carbon markets and allocations, but we have lost sight of our principal objective: building a robust and prosperous clean energy economy. This is a fundamentally affirmative agenda, rather than a restrictive one. Moving beyond pollution from fossil fuels will involve exciting work, new opportunities, new products and innovation, and stronger communities. Our current national discussion about constraints, limits, and the costs of transition misses the real excitement in this proposition. It is as if, on the cusp of an Internet and telecommunications revolution, debate centered only on the cost of fiber optic cable. We are missing the big picture here.

Let’s be clear: Solving global warming means investment. Retooling the energy systems that fuel our economy will involve rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure. We will create millions of middle-class jobs along the way, revitalize our manufacturing sector, increase American competitiveness, reduce our dependence on oil, and boost technological innovation. These investments in the foundation of our economy can also provide an opportunity for more broadly shared prosperity through better training, stronger local economies, and new career ladders into the middle class. Reducing greenhouse gas pollution is critical to solving global warming, but it is only one part of the work ahead. Building a robust economy that grows more vibrant as we move beyond the Carbon Age is the greater and more inspiring challenge.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avert dangerous global warming is an environmental challenge, but it is also an economic, national security, societal, and moral imperative. The “cap and trade” provisions, which will set limits on pollution and create a market for emissions reductions that will ultimately drive down the cost of renewable energy and fuel, represent a very important first step and a major component in the mix of policies that will help build the coming low-carbon economy. But limiting emissions and establishing a price on pollution is not the goal in itself, and we will fall short if that is all we set out to do. Rather, cap and trade is one key step to reach the broader goal of catalyzing the transformation to an efficient and sustainable low-carbon economy. With unemployment at 9.5 percent, and oil and energy price volatility driving businesses into the ground, we cannot afford to wait any longer. It is time for a legislative debate over a comprehensive clean-energy investment plan. We need far more than cap and trade alone.

Importantly, many elements of this positive clean-energy investment framework are already codified within existing legislation such as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, passed by House of Representatives earlier this year. But with all the attention given to limiting carbon, too little attention has been placed on what will replace it. These critical pieces of America’s clean-energy strategy should be elevated in the policy agenda and political debate as we move forward into the Senate, and used to help move legislation forward that advances a proactive investment and economic revitalization strategy for the nation.

Read the Center for American Progress report, The Clean-Energy Investment Agenda.

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Tom Friedman on “What They Really Believe”

“Where are you from?”  I was often asked that question while growing up in Southern Indiana in the 1970s.  I didn’t look like anyone else in my white hometown and people had a hard time believing I belonged there. I hated the question, but for them it was a polite way of dealing with their confusion over how the hell a biracial Asian girl ended up in their community.

“Where are you from?” is the question I thought people were thinking when I sat through a Western Climate Initiative stakeholder meeting last spring, once again in a place where I didn’t look or sound like everyone else. Sitting next to me was a white guy in a starched, button-down shirt representing the petroleum industry.  Then there were other corporate types right out of central casting vying for their stakeholder interests. And finally a small cadre of passionate environmentalists who spoke in terms I didn’t yet understand, like “greenhouse-gas emissions,” “carbon offsets,” and “cap and trade.”     

I had spent most of my career fighting for economic justice, working with people of color and those with lower incomes.  Their struggle is to keep food on their tables, a roof over their heads, and access to social services, while clawing at their chance for the American Dream.  Back in the mid-1990s, I founded what became Washington state’s largest anti-poverty organization.  We mobilized thousands of people with low incomes to raise their voices for change and won significant victories.  

So why was I in this room discussing carbon emissions?  Because climate change is an economic-justice issue. Regardless of how our government ultimately decides to handle climate change policy, poor people will be affected.  They can be included in the new clean energy economy or they can be further pushed out in the cold. 

What do I mean by that?  Doing nothing on climate will only make things worse for the poor and people of color in this country.  The result of decades of inaction on this issue has already dramatically affected the lives of people: from more intense hurricanes that disproportionately hit people who cannot escape the rising tide, to the higher cost of food in a fossil fuel–driven economy, to heat waves that often trap the elderly in stifling apartments.    

Even doing something, unless done right, can be harmful. Because climate legislation is intended to provide market signals to encourage energy efficiency and the development of clean alternatives to fossil fuels, any effective legislation will necessarily result in higher prices for fossil-fuel energy and energy-related goods. Those higher prices, if left unaddressed, would hit low- and moderate-income households hardest, because necessities like gasoline, food, and home-heating costs take a much bigger bite out of their pocketbooks than those of wealthy households.  Low-income families are also less able to respond to higher energy prices by conserving energy because they do not have the capital to invest in more energy-efficient appliances and vehicles. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that without consumer relief, low-income households would see their costs increase by an average of $425 per year as a result of climate legislation.  This is money that families earning $16,000 a year simply can’t spare.  Unless these costs are offset, the purchasing power and living standards of these lower-income consumers could fall significantly over time.

Fortunately, the opportunities for people living in poverty are abundant if we design an effective and equitable climate policy.  Doing so will improve the lives of many in the U.S. and will better position the Obama administration to be a leader as our nation engages in an international discussion on addressing global warming in Copenhagen this December.   

The House of Representatives has already taken the lead by designing climate policy that would not drive low-income households further into poverty.  The bill that passed in the House established a key principle that low-income Americans as a group must be no worse off because of the higher prices associated with climate legislation.  On top of the relief all households—regardless of income—would receive on their utility bills, the House bill includes a climate rebate for families and individuals in the lowest income quintile that would compensate for increases in energy costs as well as other necessities.  These provisions send a strong message about the importance of protecting low-income households from the costs of climate legislation. The House bill takes an efficient and effective approach to making sure we reach the right people by using two existing systems:

Neither approach on its own is sufficient; however, in combination, they reach the overwhelming majority of the lowest-income households.  This direct relief must be in addition to any indirect compensation that may be provided through electric and gas utility companies.  Because the majority of the additional cost for people with lower incomes would come from areas other than home utility bills, relief solely through utility companies is inadequate.

As the Senate begins to take action on climate, it is critically important that, at a minimum, it maintains the same commitment adopted by the House to fully protect the lowest-income people from net cost increases.

In addition to protecting low-income consumers, climate change policy also provides the opportunity to make investments that can move people out of poverty.  Along this vein, there’s been a lot of attention paid to the term “green jobs” in the climate debate. And this is an exciting possibility for real change in our economy and for workers in the U.S.  However, for green jobs to live up to expectations, the jobs created must be unionized and pay a living wage, with focus on training and employing people living in poverty and people of color. 

Passing climate legislation this year is a necessary and crucial step in controlling greenhouse-gas emissions and encouraging the development of renewable-energy technologies that will create these green jobs.  As people living in poverty in the U.S. and around the globe are increasingly and disproportionately harmed by global warming, the obligation is on the democratically elected representatives in our rich nation to act with courage. 

As leaders from around the world gather in Copenhagen to tackle the challenge of reducing global-warming pollution, an important question they will want to ask each other is, “Where are you from?”  And because of the shared risks of climate change, all the answers should be identical:  “The same place as you: planet Earth.”

Related Links:

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China, India, U.S. commit to seal Copenhagen deal

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The following is an interview with Jason Burnett, who worked in the EPA under President GW Bush. In it, we discuss efforts by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Burnett quit the EPA in protest in June 2008, alleging interference from the Office of the Vice President.

The interview is meant as a supplement to the story, "Everything you always wanted to know about EPA greenhouse gas regulations, but were afraid to ask."

What was your job at EPA?

I was brought in to lead the response to the Mass v. EPA Supreme Court case, and to develop the first federal GHG regulations.

Did you work on both the endangerment finding and the rules?

Traditionally, EPA has collapsed both of those into one rulemaking -- they have, in the preamble to the rule, the discussion about endangerment. That's the sequencing we were planning to have. We were, at least initially, on a very fast clock. There was political desire to get everything done by the end of the administration's time [in office].

So you felt like you could get the rules out the door fairly quickly?

There was a pretty large, impressive team put on this, up to 100 people.

There's no question there was a change of course -- for an understandable, if not justifiable, reason: Congress was in the process of passing the Energy Independence & Security Act (EISA), which did much of what we were planning on doing through regulations.

There was never a strong desire -- I daresay, in many quarters outside of EPA, any desire -- to move on to the stationary sources, but the way the CAA works, after you touch the mobile sources you automatically and immediately have to deal with stationary sources. From the political perspective at the White House, it was an unfortunate side effect -- worth doing only because it advanced the goal of increasing fuel economy of cars and trucks and creating more volume for renewable and alternative fuels. After passage of the EISA, there was another way of accomplishing those same goals, and they didn't then need to deal with the stationary source ramifications, -- namely, the PSD/NSR challenge.

Did the Bush administration ever really think they could get out of it, or were they just kicking the can down the road?

There were some people who thought they could make an argument, which ultimately would lose. And other people who said, "we don't want to make superfluous legal arguments, we'll just figure some other way of delaying." Fortunately for the integrity of our court system, they did the latter, basically by saying, "this is really complicated and interconnected, and would benefit from public input, and therefore we're going to go out and talk about all the complications and interconnections."

How do you think the Obama EPA's rules will differ from what your team came up with?

I think they'll be different in two fundamental ways. One is, they're going to be more aggressive. Two, they're going to deal with the California waiver, because the Obama admin has now granted it, whereas the Bush administration denied it. Whether the California program is in force will affect how you design the federal program. So EPA need to make at least those two adjustments.

I'm not surprised we still haven't seen the proposed rule. They probably could have pushed it a little faster, but they probably wanted to give Congress time to work through legislation. Virtually everyone believes that legislation will be better.

I keep hearing that. Is it true?

It entirely depends on how good the legislation is. It would be very easy to improve upon what the CAA would do. I have at times pushed for very narrow CAA fix. You could address the most problematic or challenging parts of the CAA in a very surgical way. At the other extreme is to pass the comprehensive, 1000-plus page bill.

How could the CAA be made more suited to the challenge of regulating CO2?

EPA certainly has discretion, and I'm confident it's being quite aggressive in pursuing ways of making GHGs fit within the CAA. But that will be challenged in court. Pretty much regardless of what they propose, there will be legal vulnerabilities. Trying to make GHGs fit within the CAA, you're going to have to be fairly creative in how you interpret certain terms and how you sequence the program.

Can lawsuits stop the regulations?

They may not delay the effectiveness of the regulations but they may make it pretty messy. Parts of the regulations may be passed back to EPA -- either left in force and passed back to EPA to rectify legal deficiencies, or taken off the books and passed back to EPA.

Exhibit A in the challenges of the CAA is the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) / New Source Review (NSR) program. EPA has a proposed rule over at OMB for review on how to work through PSD -- I haven't seen it. I'm sure EPA's trying to deal with the volume thresholds in the CAA, which say that a "significant" source of pollution emits either 100 tons or 250 tons, depending on the type of source.

The Supreme Court gave the definition of pollutant such broad range, but the volume thresholds are weirdly specific. How could Congress know how many tons of some future pollutant would be significant?

The original ICTA petition and later the Commonwealth of Mass were smart to focus on Section 202 of the CAA, which works quite well for regulating GHGs. In fact most of Title II, the mobile sources title, works quite well. There wasn't much attention paid in that case to the other dominoes that would fall upon issuing a S202 regulation. Also, there was the view that if this is what a plain reading indicates, what Congress had in mind -- you're going to regulate sources that emit 100 tons -- then you've got to find a way to make it work. And if GHGs meet the definition of air pollutants, they meet the definition of air pollutants, no matter how inconvenient that may be for the regulators and the regulated community.

Conservative advocacy group CEI says that EPA either obeys the thresholds and destroys the economy or, unilaterally and illegally, changes them.

That is something we foresaw years ago. It's a legal question.

There is a huge advantage to Congress raising that threshold. It would be a one-sentence amendment: For the purposes of greenhouse gases, the CAA threshold shall be 25,000 tons. That would solve a large fraction of the challenges.

I wouldn't be surprised if the court put EPA on some kind of schedule, where they are allowed to start out with a higher threshold, but over time that threshold had to move down to 250 or 100 tons. I hope EPA is successful in defending its proposal to lower the thresholds There are very good policy reasons not to try to apply PSD to the very smallest sources.

CEI is wants to turn this into a regulatory nightmare, so they can then stand back and say, I told you so, EPA ruins everything they touch.

Explain PSD. Why is it such a problem?

PSD applies to either new or major modifications -- it requires any new or modified facility to install Best Available Control Technology (BACT). For other pollutants, there's a long history of determining what BACT is. So we understand for a petroleum refinery, BACT today is a low-NOX burner, for instance. But right now we don't have any precedent for what constitutes BACT for greenhouse gases. So that's one problem, but it's one we can get around. EPA can start establishing this precedent.

The NSR program has been hugely contentious as it applies to regular pollutants, because there's this question as to what constitutes a major modification. That issue would come back with a vengeance when greenhouse gases come into play. A very small modification can increase GHG emissions by 100 tons. Take a coal-fired power plant that is emitting several million tons of CO2 a year -- if they increase their operations by, say, 20 minutes over the coarse of a year, that emits a huge amount of CO2, more than 100 tons, certainly. If you do something that increases your emissions a fraction of 1%, that arguably could trigger PSD and require you to install BACT. The scare story is that that will cause facility managers for any large source of pollution to really just freeze up and not make any modifications at all.

What kind of modification would entail 25,000 tons?

It's in the eye of the beholder whether it's big or small. If you think of something emitting 2.5 million tons a year, then 25,000 tons is 1%. Doesn't seem all that large. On the other hand, from the perspective of the environment, 25,000 is in and of itself a large source. The challenge we're dealing with is, these large emitters just emit so, so much CO2.

There have been pollution control exemptions. So if you're going in and making a modification for the purposes of pollution control, that in itself doesn't trigger NSR for all the other pollutants. It's a mechanism to reduce that perverse incentive -- the incentive to do nothing at all.

There's no question that will be litigated.

Say more about the BACT problem. Could IGCC be BACT for a new coal-fired plant?

The question will be, what constitutes BACT for a new coal-fired power plant? Is it carbon capture and storage (CCS) or something else?

In fact, environmental groups have petitioned EPA to find that IGCC is BACT. One of the counter-arguments will be, the baseline analysis of BACT does not include modifying the source. So if you if you propose a coal-fired power plant, BACT can't tell you to build a gas-fired plant. The argument that industry will likely make is, if I'm coming in proposing a pulverized coal plant, BACT shouldn't switch types of sources over to IGCC.

The whole issue of what constitutes BACT will itself be litigated. There will be people arguing that CCS is not commercially available and therefore can't constitute BACT. Others will argue that IGCC is modifying the source and therefore can't be considered BACT. We've yet to really even start that debate in earnest -- it will be an ongoing area of employment for lawyers.

Also, BACT is supposed to be a case-by-case review, where you're looking at the best technology at that point in time. Even if we decide today that something doesn't yet meet the threshold, someone will argue tomorrow, well, now we do.

Can a cap-and-trade system for GHGs be set up under the CAA?

I may have as much experience as anybody in that question: My first assignment when I came to EPA was to develop a cap-and-trade system under Section 111 and 111d of the CAA.

Sec. 111 is new source performance standards (NSPS), but 111d applies to existing sources. I've been of the view that if you are going to move forward with the CAA, the way to do it is to cover stationary sources -- as much as you decide, largely as a policy matter, you want to -- under 111 and 111d. Whether or not you put in place a cap-and-trade system depends on how much legal risk you want to take.

When I was at EPA we developed a cap-and-trade system under 111d. It was the mercury emissions rule, much-maligned by environmentalists because they were worried about hotspots. But no one's concerned about hotspots for CO2.

You dust off the legal argument EPA made for using 111d for a cap-and-trade system, and you search and replace mercury with CO2. You'd put both environmental groups and industry in an awkward position. Environmental groups would want to support the rule, presumably. Industry would not want to but they're already on record saying EPA has authority to issue a cap-and-trade system under 111 -- they wanted to have that for mercury.

It would be, in some ways, a more cumbersome cap-and-trade system than what Congress, at least in theory, could do. 111d is fundamentally a partnership between EPA and the states; EPA can't set a national program, period, whether it's cap-and-trade or some other program. Rather, EPA sets out the overall goals and tells the states to figure out how to regulate to meet those goals. The way it would presumably work is, EPA would strongly encourage states to opt in to the national cap-and-trade system -- or whatever it develops. But there's no requirement for states to do that.

Would the US regional cap-and-trade systems qualify under that kind of program?

I think that's exactly what would happen. EPA would set emission reduction criteria for existing sources and states would be in charge of designing programs to meet those, and the states that already have cap-and-trade programs, like the RGGI states or the Western states, would either be able to argue that their program already meets the EPA requirement, or would have to modify their program in some relatively minor ways to fit the EPA program. But what it would do is force all the other states to develop something, or essentially opt in to the federal program.

The threat of EPA regs was supposed to drive conservatives and business to the table. It doesn't really seem to be happening.

Not to the degree I might have expected. Part of the issue is that groups like the Chamber of Commerce are positioning themselves as, Just Say No. They're going to Just Say No up to the bitter end. Then they're going to complain about the regulations EPA moves forward with, even though any rational person looking forward can see that this is a natural outgrowth of their strategy.

The US Chamber is doing a disservice to their own members, for two reasons: one, many of their members stand to do quite well in a carbon-constrained world; two, they are pretending they can say no to both, when in fact the choice is one or the other.

Is there anything conservatives or business could do to stop the EPA going forward, or put roadblocks in the way?

I don't think so, because there was a lot of work in the previous administration to figure out what that road block could be, and they didn't come up with it. And that was when they had a receptive administration.

This is after we had completed our work and then it was rejected. Then, all attention was paid to, how do we relieve EPA of its obligation to respond to this? CEI and the Chamber were putting a huge amount of effort into figuring out legal theories, because if they'd come up with a plausible legal theory, it would have been forced on EPA. No theory came forward that was even plausible, and I heard a lot of theories. None passed the laugh test. If there is one out there I think it would have been discovered during that process.

More and more you're going to see the Chamber and EEI and CEI trying to figure out either how to make this a real big mess that will then cause political backlash, or at least dragging in smaller businesses that realize their industry is going to be regulated and just want others to be in the boat with them.

Do you think EPA can do it?

What EPA will face is a very large challenge and some inefficiencies, but they'll make it work. It won't be what anyone would design if starting with a blank sheet of paper, but it won't cause the US economy to come to a grinding halt.

There will be cases where there's clearly unnecessary regulatory red tape, and those will be well-publicized by the Chamber and their allies, but by and large EPA has a lot of tools it can use and a lot of creative people that can come up with systems for getting around the big problems.

One of the problems people have been talking about is, this is going to require a mom-and-pop business to get a PSD permit. Well, one, EPA may successfully raise the threshold to 25K tons. Two, even if the program is applied to sources that emit 250 tons, EPA may be able to figure out a very simple way for people to comply -- for example, instead of needing a formal permit application, you send in a post card that says, for instance, if you're building a new building, you've used an Energy Star label HVAC. Some people would complain because they didn't want to use an Energy Star system -- but that's hardly regulatory red tape, it's just a regulatory burden some businesses don't want to face. It may make good policy sense to move small businesses toward using more Energy Star equipment.

What do you think of the progressive push to preserve EPA authority in the climate bill.?

It's my general understanding that EPA authority is preserved in certain areas, modified in others, eliminated in others. It's preserved by and large in the mobile source sections and eliminated in the case of the PSD nightmare scenario. Those are reasonable decisions.

Environmental groups need to be careful what they ask for. You have to make sure you're not going to create the sorts of problems that the US Chamber and CEI are looking for. You don't want to play into their hands. You don't want to create a political backlash 5, 10, 20 years from now. Presumably you want this legislation to be in force for a long, long time rather than only being in force when you have the votes on Capitol Hill.

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What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

On a frigid January night some years ago, a friend and I snuck into a Massachusetts state preserve, stripped naked, and charged into Walden Pond. For a few exhilarating, painful moments we swam, and I imagined some hard-to-name kinship with the pond's most famous neighbor, the 19th century eccentric Henry David Thoreau.

It was a climax in my relationship with Thoreau and his Walden. When I read the book for the first time at age 17, it reawakened the intellectual curiosity that I tried to bury in high school. (It didn't seem useful for attracting girls, not that anything else worked better ... ). Thoreau's reflections on nature inspired me to take a notebook out to the forest preserves that dot suburban Chicago, determined to think deep naturey thoughts of my own. Thankfully, that notebook's been lost.

In college I made my pilgrimage to Walden -- hence the dip. But somewhere around then Thoreau's uncompromising social critique grew tiresome. Like plenty of Walden readers before me, I came to see the great champion of American individualism less as a prophet than as a self-righteous crank. In praising the bright fire within each soul, I concluded, he failed to see the profound ways our lives are connected to others. The famous proof for his hypocrisy is that while philosophizing about self-sufficiency in his solitary shack, he would drop off his laundry at his mother's place back in town.

Lately, trying to make sense of the deeply un-philosophical threat of climate change, I've wondered if Thoreau has anything to say to the movement to halt greenhouse gas emissions. Back-to-nature environmentalists of the '60s and '70s embraced Thoreau's skepticism toward technology -- he distrusted even the telegraph and the railroad. Organic gardeners approved of his bean field. His contemplative habits seemed to fit the spiritual strain of the era.

But now? Environmentalists have largely cast off their crunchy garb in favor of business suits, the better to woo lawmakers and venture capitalists. This is especially true of climate-minded activists. As Time magazine's Bryan Walsh wrote last winter about a renewable energy summit in Abu Dhabi, "There's little about trees or wildlife, nothing about environmental sacrifice -- this is about the business of getting the carbon out of our energy supply as quickly as possible."

All of that suggests the movement has outgrown Thoreau, just as I thought I had myself. I've been prompted to reconsider by Robert Sullivan's recent book The Thoreau You Don't Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant. Sullivan, who has written unusual "nature" books on rats and the Meadowlands dumping grounds outside New York City, tries to rescue Thoreau from the humorless image that turned off so many high school English students and the cloud of reverence cast by those who would see Thoreau as a patron saint of wilderness preservation.

I think Sullivan does a great job. In place of the crank Thoreau, he offers evidence for a dancing Thoreau, one who played ditties on his flute, got along well with children, and wrote with his tongue in cheek. In place of the wilderness saint (and hermit) image, Sullivan introduces a Thoreau just as interested in the peopled world as in the natural world, a distinction he didn't buy into anyway.

"Today, adults force high school students to read him, though he critiques the life-in-a-rut grown-up and might prescribe a little teenagerness," writes Sullivan. "He loved nature, but if we read him closely ... we see him cutting down trees, polluting ponds, working with land developers and miners."

It's not hard to see how the humor suffers over the years. Thoreau has a line about eating rice because he likes the philosophy of India. I misread it as deadpan until Sullivan pointed out the joke, uncovering a bit of Thoreau's mischievous streak.

The simplest reason to reconsider Walden's relevance might be its economic context -- Sullivan argues the book was written after a recession as bleak as our own. New England's dominant agricultural industry was unsmoothly giving way to the early stages of a manufacturing economy. Thoreau no doubt had money on his mind at Walden. For much of his adult life he casted about, struggling to make it as a schoolteacher, poet, lecturer, or in the family pencil-making business (where he gladly embraced advances in pencil-tech; it was the uncritical embrace of technology he opposed).

To miss the recession context of Walden is like reading the Grapes of Wrath without considering the Great Depression, Sullivan says. The United States had reached middle age, its political parties grown bloated, and a variety of reformers were grasping about for various fixes. "America needed a kick in the pants and a lot of people knew it," Sullivan writes, "though all those people had very different ideas of where and how to deliver the kick, resulting in no one effective boot."

With that familiar situation in mind, I'd suggest three reasons Thoreau is still worth engaging.

Key to Sullivan's interpretation is the idea of the Walden years as a stunt, with a book deal always in mind. Think No Impact Man, Julie and Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, even Supersize Me. These are undertaken as journeys of self-discovery, sure, but also out of full knowledge that the hero is on camera, so to speak.

Same with Walden. Thoreau's itemized list of costs for his hut -- with second-hand materials, it totaled $28.12 and 1/2 cents -- parodied the lists in house pattern books fashionable at the time. The hut's lack of ornamentation rejected the way housekeepers had begun to stylize their homes. In his writing at the pond, Thoreau could describe his own strange life and the reasons he chose it. He knew readers would listen.

The cheap lesson for climate change activists is something about being media savvy. Perhaps there's a bigger message: People look at how you live. Even a stunt shows some investment. That's why David de Rothschild builds his plastic boat. There's an undeniable power in preaching something by living like you believe it.

What first hooked me with Walden was the chapter on solitude and the author's story of returning to the pond after a late dinner with friends to paddle alone and fish. At 17, this deliberate aloneness seemed like an appealing alternative to lame old loneliness. Withdrawing from a society that was "commonly too cheap" felt more noble than tripping around awkwardly inside it. But Thoreau wasn't looking for zero company; he was looking for encounters that let him give and receive full attention: "We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another."

Dealing with climate change -- through legislation, international treaties, renewable energy projects, green entrepreneurship -- is all about playing well with others. Thoreau-as-misanthrope isn't much help. But the Thoreau who praised periods of contemplative solitude because they allowed him to present a more fully awake self when interacting with others -- there's something useful in that.

I haven't even mentioned "Civil Disobedience," the essay in which Thoreau explains why he went to jail instead of paying taxes to fund the Mexican War, seen in its day as an effort to expand the reach of slavery. Here lies the strongest proof that Thoreau's politics were about engaging, not escaping, society and government. "Let your life be counter friction to stop the machine," Thoreau writes in the piece that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. found deeply influential in the following century.

He is not demanding no government but better government: "I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."

Civil disobedience still finds some expression in the climate change movement, in demonstrations against coal power and nowhere in the country more than in Appalachia. In their appeal to moral authority, these demonstrators are saying something considerably more difficult than "we all win with green jobs." They're saying, if we don't do anything, some people won't win. They'll die.

I'm all for doing the easy stuff first. By all means, let's take the nearly painless gains to be gotten through weatherizing and retrofitting jobs and saving easy money through energy efficiency. There's money lying on the ground and we may as well pick it up. But once that's done, there's still Thoreau in his hut with his confounding instruction to "simplify" and his aphorisms:  "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

He spoke in glaring moral terms, and that's always a risk. It gets tiresome. It's like the wrong kind of song stuck in your head -- catchy and unrelenting both at once. Sullivan makes a good case that Thoreau wasn't quite as irritating as he's been made out to be. But he was still irritating. Still is. That's why he's hard to ignore.

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Mayor John FettermanPhoto: The Cap SolutionJohn Fetterman is not easy to miss. He's 6'8", 325 pounds, and usually dressed in a black work shirt and boots. He sports two large tattoos on his forearms, a shaved head, and a goatee. You might mistake him for a steelworker at first glance, but he's actually the 40-year-old, Harvard-educated mayor of Braddock, Pa.

Fetterman has become a poster boy for the clean-energy revolution, thanks to an Environmental Defense Fund ad campaign that features him calling for climate and clean-energy legislation to help revitalize former steel towns like Braddock. He's appeared before Congress twice to testify in support of the Waxman-Markey climate bill, arguing that a cap on carbon will help towns like his recover.

Braddock was once a thriving steel town along the Monongahela River, the place where Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in steel. The town's population was over 20,000 in the 1950s, but the bottom began to fall out soon thereafter. Steel jobs left, and with them, the town's prosperity and population. The town now has fewer than 3,000 residents, and empty houses and vacant lots line the streets. Unemployment runs about three times the national average, and the median household income is just $18,473.

Fetterman, a native of York, Pa., moved to the town in 2001 after graduate school at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, to start a program for young adults. He was elected mayor of the city in 2005, and since then has made revitalizing the town his top priority. He has Braddock's zip code, 15104, tattooed on one arm, and on the other are the dates of killings that have occurred during his time in office, along with the words "I will make you hurt."

In the past four years, the town has launched a green-jobs summer program for youth, created a green space for the community, and brought a small alternative energy company, Fossil Free Fuel, to the downtown area. Plans are underway for a community center powered by geothermal energy.

Earlier this year, Fetterman and his town were featured in a New York Times article; it caught the attention of the Environmental Defense Fund, which enlisted Fetterman in its ad campaign in support of the House climate bill. The ads show the abandoned streets of Braddock and unemployed steelworkers from the region, with Fetterman calling for "a cap on carbon pollution" to "create jobs making things like solar panels and wind turbines."

Grist caught up with Fetterman in Pittsburgh, Pa., recently to talk about his town and the hope for a green-job revolution. "At the end of the day, we need to build pragmatic solutions in environmental stewardship, of course, but we also have to make sure we're taking care of the other side of the socioeconomic coin, [those who] don't have the luxury of being able to care which kind of heirloom tomato they buy," he told Grist.

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Q. Tell me about Braddock.

A. Braddock is steel town a little bit outside of Pittsburgh. It was once an incredibly prosperous boomtown of 20,000 residents, and it's now under 3,000. It's a 90 percent loss in our population, and now 90 percent of our businesses are gone, 90 percent of our building stock is gone. It really grabs you. You can tell something really bad happened, but you're not sure what. You can't get 90 percent of the population to agree that the sky is blue, but 90 percent of people agreed that we need to leave here because things are in such a state that we don't have any other options.

Q. When did it start getting bad for Braddock?

A. This was well before I arrived on the scene. It started in the '60s. It was nothing really significant, but it was a trickle. And then it accelerated in the '70s, and then the mills started dropping rapidly, then it really descended into chaos. It's like the Warren Zevon song, "We were in the house when the house burned down." And the people that remained have really gone through this kind of economic apocalypse, where it's 28 days later and they're kind of like the survivors of this scourge that was beyond their control. There was very little they could do as an individual besides hold on and try to maintain some semblance of the life they knew growing up, when Braddock had 13 furniture stores, three movie theaters, dozens and dozens of bars, restaurants, department stores, all of these things. And now there's none. We don't have any.

Q. What do people who live in Braddock now do?

A. Well, many of them are unemployed. Many work in the service sector, in a large retail and lifestyle complex that's down the river. Some work in the hospital that's still in town, and some commute to Pittsburgh for other jobs.

Q. Where did the green-jobs idea come from? What was the inspiration for your work on that?

A. Braddock and Pittsburgh need to continually be progressive and advance that frontier. That's something that I've always been involved in and believed in strongly. Urban agriculture, for example. Braddock has this enormously large inventory of vacant lots. What's the best way to marry the needs of the community with the realities we have in town?

We have kids that don't have summer jobs. We don't have any grocery stores in town, and we've got this large number of lots. Well, let's build a small-scale urban farm. That way we create jobs. We create fresh organic produce. We use and beautify a lot that looked like it was a research-and-development lab for different weeds -- they were waist high! It serves the community, and also does it in a way that is consistent with a sustainable, more progressive lifestyle. So from my perspective it's a win-win.

It's not a matter of having this fetish saying, I compost, so I can pat myself on the back. It's saying what can we do as a community that improves the quality of life for our residents -- and that we're able to do it in a way that's sustainable and adheres to these principles, that's just icing on the cake.

Q. Tell me more about the green-jobs summer program in Braddock. What kind of projects are young people working on?

A. Well, it started when I took office, and this summer we hired close to 100 kids. [They're] working on the urban farm, creating a green space. Prior to us taking over, our community did not have a green spot for children to frolic, people to just kind of relax. So we have that now. We got a grant from the Heinz Endowment, which is a major local foundation, and we're working on installing the first green roof in the area too. This is the last building of its kind, an eight-story building, that if we didn't put a new roof on it eventually, it would go under. So we said, OK, we can put it as a green roof.

That's the recurring theme for us in Braddock -- it has to work with the framework we're in. It's not green at the expense of Braddock, it's what's right for Braddock, and thankfully I think it drives home why a lot of these principles really do make sense and it's not just a bunch of "weird treehuggers" who care about these things. They are important principles not only for the environment but for helping communities as well.

We started [the green-jobs program] in 2006, with a limited number, and we scaled it up. It was 35 the first year, 50 the second, 70 last year, and now it's 100. And each year we've had completion rates well into the 90s. And this year, again, it was 100 percent. I know that's hard to believe. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it myself. None of the corresponding stereotypes of bad movies that star white folks that come in and change a poor school -- we didn't have the fighting, none of these things.

Q. How did you get involved in the national debate about the climate bill?

A. When The New York Times did a story, I guess I caught the attention of the Environmental Defense Fund. They had ideas, and they were good. But I really wanted to make it much more authentic, because you see a lot of these cheesy environmental ads, where it's the guy who looks like a model putting on a hard hat. It's not real. He's got manicured hands.

The people that are already in your corner are obviously the ones you don't have to convince. It's the working-class folks that might get their news from Fox, or may have grown up in more conservative circumstances. Say, look, you don't have to consider yourself an environmentalist. You can drive your pickup truck, you can live your life the way you want to. But wouldn't it make sense to not only care for our environment but also create and replenish the critical mass of blue-collar jobs in this community, this country? We still have to make things in this country. I'm very much a believer in that. You can think that global warming is a myth and the sun revolves around the earth, but here's how it could benefit your community through this very common-sense approach.

Q. You testified in support of the Waxman-Markey bill. What do you think that would do for a place like Braddock?

A. I don't know how much it will do for Braddock directly. I think as a whole, it will be a necessary but not sufficient first step to help bring regions back from what they've suffered through. It's not like when you pass it, suddenly it's going to be hunky-dory. Hopefully it will have the same effect as [the invention of] the internet -- the same kind of investment that gave rise to Silicon Valley and Seattle can come back to these manufacturing regions, because we as a nation can't lose that edge.

Q. Are folks in Braddock receptive to talk about passing a climate bill?

A. Most people are like, "What the hell is cap-and-trade?" It's kind of like derivatives, where these economists can't explain what it is. So there's a lot of esoteric things involved. But when you explain that this is the kind of thing that helped get lead out of paint and acid rain and these other things, and how it can create the demand for steel, they get that. There are 250 tons of steel in a windmill. If we build a million windmills, that's 250 million tons of steel. They understand that, that gels for folks.

When you say global warming in 75 years will raise the average temperature by a degree and a half, that doesn't mean anything to me. I've got to eat. My house is falling apart. So not playing to people's concern for the environment, but [being] pragmatic -- you want a job again, let's pass this bill.

And as an added benefit, whether you care about it or not, it's going to reduce our carbon footprint and make us a leader in the world, as we should be, in terms of reducing our carbon output, and also make us the leaders in technology that we can export to these countries like India and China that have no sustainable manufacturing principles.

Q. Are you seeing any signs of growth yet for Braddock?

A. Sure. There are plenty of green shoots. And first and foremost, it's enhancing the quality of life in the community and making sure that I don't put any more dates on my arm. There's definitely reason to be optimistic, but I'd also be crazy if I suggested that this was something that could be remedied in 5, 10, 15 years. This is a long-term kind of project.

The good news is if things in Braddock can change, if things can get better, if it can be safer and kids have better opportunities, I think that's a good harbinger for towns where they've had nothing as severe as what we've gone through.

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Fetterman made Grist's list of badass greens. See who else is on the list.

Watch Fetterman in an EDF ad:

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Photo: billadayThe "Cash for Clunkers" program has been so successful that it will have to be wrapped up earlier than expected, the Obama administration announced on Thursday. Folks looking to turn in their fuel-hogging old cars will need to get their deals finalized by this Monday, Aug. 24, at 8 p.m. EST in order to cash in.

The program was supposed to run through Labor Day, as it received a $2 billion extension earlier this month after exhausting its initial allocation. But the Department of Transportation said on Thursday that overwhelming demand has forced the program to end early to ensure that there are enough funds to make good on already-promised rebates.

While the program's green credentials are at best dubious, it's obviously been popular. An Obama administration official speaking to reporters on background called the program an "overwhelming, overnight success," arguing that it has been good for car buyers, who get more efficient vehicles, as well as for automakers and car dealers.

So far, the program has received more than 457,000 applications for rebates of $3,500 or $4,500, valued altogether at $1.9 billion. A total of $3 billion was allotted for the scheme.

“This program has been a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump-starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a statement. “At the same time, we’ve been able to take old, polluting cars off the road and help consumers purchase fuel-efficient vehicles.”

One of the challenges thus far, according to the administration, has been making sure that applications for rebates are complete. They estimate that only 40 percent of applications have been processed, largely due to inadequate or missing information. While they encouraged dealers to submit complete applications by Monday's deadline, they said there will be opportunities to rectify flawed applications.

The official called Cash for Clunkers "one of the most successful stimulus programs in the history of our country," but said the administration had not considered seeking another extension of the program.

Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) have introduced legislation that would make a clunkers-like program permanent, rewarding citizens who buy fuel-efficient vehicles with a tax break.

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The Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund is bashing representatives who voted against the House climate bill as "villains" and lauding reps who voted for it as "heroes" in a new campaign.

With TV and newspaper ads and a website, the campaign is aimed at states whose senators are on the fence about passing a climate bill this year -- Indiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

"We really felt like now is the time for us to draw a line in the sand," NRDC Action Fund director Heather Taylor told Grist. "What we want to do is make sure the Senate understands that we are going to be clearly identifying who's part of the problem and who's part of the solution. Hopefully it's going to immediately influence the Senate vote."

The ads will air on local TV for the next two weeks, and print versions are running in local papers on Wednesday and Sunday. They tout the House climate bill's potential to create green jobs, and urge constituents to call their senators and ask them to support a similar bill this year.

Taylor pointed to specific senators the campaign hopes to sway: Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Jim Webb (D-Va.). "We definitely think those are swings, and we think there were very good examples of heroes and villains in [their] states for us to draw upon," she said.

The half-a-million-dollar ad buy is the first of its kind by NRDC Action Fund, which has not in the past weighed in on specific candidates nor waged such a public campaign. The action fund's parent organization, NRDC, focuses on inside-the-Beltway policy making, working closely with legislators to shape environmental law. NRDC was one of the key groups involved in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the enviro-business coalition that played a significant role in shaping the House climate bill.

"We thought it was so important right now to be active not only inside the Beltway but also outside the Beltway," said Taylor. "We hope we can be more frank in our messaging."

Of the representatives targeted in the ads, Taylor said, "I think these members knew. They completely and clearly understood that this was the highest priority of the environmental community ... This is when it counted. This is when there really were going to be repercussions. It's very important that constituents know that their members are not listening to them."

Here is the TV ad praising Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) for voting in favor of the House bill:

And here's the ad criticizing Virginia Reps. Frank Wolf (R) and Glenn Nye (D) for voting against it:

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Want to get really angry about health care and global warming? Not the ginned-up rage of the Obama-was-really-born-in-Kenya crowd, but an anger that fires you up to take action in the name of justice? Anger like the rage felt by so many white Northerners and Southerners in 1963 when they saw Birmingham's fire hoses turned on patriotic African-Americans, a rage so profound that they too joined the civil rights revolution?

Well I invite you, in a brief audio and video tour, to bear witness to what's happening in Wise County, Virginia. This Appalachian region, only a few hundred miles from the policy fog in Washington DC, clarifies what the health care/climate policy fight is all about. And if you're not angry enough to take action after hearing these voices and seeing these images, blame yourself when powerbrokers like Don Blankenship (more on him later) once again have their day.

Let's start with what's good about Wise County: its hard-working families. Taking a look at this community calendar, you'll see all that is right with rural American communities and their urban counterparts. From January to December, the citizens of Wise County celebrate the legacy of Dr. King (January 19), perform plays (March 17), honor our country and its veterans (July 4 and October 8) and get involved in all of those glorious community, spiritual and volunteering activities that capture the essence of the American experience. In Wise County, it's not hard to find the best of ourselves.

But one item on the same calendar reveals what is not right: the July 24-26 "Remote Area Medical Health Fair" at the local fairgrounds. Sound innocuous? Well take ten minutes to listen to this recent report from NPR on the event, hosted in Wise County, which served 2,700 "tired and desperate" people from 17 different states. In the words of NPR, it was "a Third World scene with an American setting." It's heartbreaking: entire families waiting in line overnight to get just some of the basic health care that they cannot afford. Hear about the young boy with a battered nose and an oozing ear; the single mom with a gallbladder so enlarged it's about to kill her; and the many patients gettingall of their teeth pulled. That's right -- for over 20 years, while DC politicians have been promising a better health care system, your fellow Americans in and around Wise County have been suffering. Angry yet?

And take a guess what industry dominates this part of Appalachia. No surprise: it's coal. Like in so many parts of the country, excessive reliance on coal means high levels of poverty -- the kind of poverty that creates the need for this health "fair." A recent study out of West Virginia University puts it clearly: "Coal-mining economies are not strong economies. [Coalfield communities] are weaker than the rest of the state, weaker than the rest of the region, and weaker than the rest of the nation." There's no doubt that the thousands of employees of the (increasingly capital-intensive) coal industry are hard-working, admirable people; the problem is that in the 21st century, coal helps them at the expense of others.

The second part of coal's legacy in this area is mountaintop removal. Take this extraordinary virtual flyover of Wise County to view its devastation:

The human effects of this destruction are captured in the words of Wise County's Kathy Selvage. Listen to her speak about the "terrible injustice' created by coal, literally in her backyard:

And memo to the Birther crowd: if you think the fight against mountaintop removal is some godless liberal conspiracy, see this testimony from Kathy: "It was my Mother's custom to have her early morning Bible reading on her front porch. [Because of mountaintop removal,] she was forced to move inside because she could no longer stand the noise, dust, and smell that was invading her 'Morning with the Lord'."

In Wise County, poverty, environmental destruction and powerlessness come together, and the result -- despite the resilience of hard-working Americans who call it home -- is sick families, destroyed mountains, a dysfunctional economy and at least one good lady who finds it harder to pray.

Now there certainly are winners in all of this: take Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Coal, a modern version of Daniel-Day Lewis's ruthless oilman in There Will Be Blood. It's hard to know where to start with this guy:

So climate warriors, let's get angry: about inexcusable poverty, the destruction wrought by coal, and the lobby-laden system that helps Blankenship thrive while too many of the good people of Wise County suffer.

And if you are angry, what are you going to do about it? Will you be willing to get arrested standing up to Massey Coal, like Jim Hansen? Lead civil disobedience against Dominion Power, right there in Wise County? Or at least, show up to your elected officials' town meetings and speak loudly and clearly in support of health care and climate change legislation? With some hard work, maybe we can reveal Blankenship and his ilk for what they are: the Bull Connors of the dirty-energy age. There's no time to waste.

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American retail is riddled with cheap, fall-apart merchandise. We know this. Sales are a ploy to get a shopper to spend, as opposed to a boon for penny pinchers. Right. And how much mileage do we get from that old, overused adage, "You get what you pay for"? More than we'd like to admit.

So why is Ellen Ruppel Shell's new book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, so shocking?

Shell deftly weaves a compelling, cautionary tale out of disparate strands: the psychology of manipulating shoppers, the environmental costs of our lust for inexpensive things, the deskilling of the retail industry, and the loss of appreciation for "quality." Tracing the history of discount culture from the yesteryear excitement over brown paper packages to today's ambivalence about crammed plastic bags, Shell shows us why we feel we've been ripped off if we pay "full price."

She pushes readers to ponder the strange circumstances that make an item shipped from thousands of miles away less expensive than something homegrown. And how a major furniture retailer can convince a customer to get attached to a piece just enough to buy it, but not enough to keep it long. And, most disturbingly, just how expensive our bargain hunting is turning out to be.

_____

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Q. What audience did you have in mind when you wrote Cheap?

A. This grew out of my own curiosity about my own behavior. Since I have a science background, and I try to be a very rational person, I was startled by my own shopping behavior. So if that was happening to me, I figured it was happening to an awful lot of people. As someone who is socially conscious, I was making purchasing decisions that didn't reflect that social consciousness sometimes. I wondered what was behind that.

I'm trying to reach a thoughtful audience, and I'm particularly interested in reaching younger people because I think they have the spirit and the opportunity to change. Interestingly, it seems to resonate with young people quite a bit.

Q. Why do you think your message is resonating with young people, especially considering how inclined they are to move around and not get attached to their property?

A. I don't want to speak for all young people, but there are all sorts of ways to get value without playing into this con game of cheap.

You go to a place we have in my town [Boston], called the Garment District, which is second-hand, third-hand kind of clothes, and you can get really good stuff there for very little money. You can be creative with it -- dress it up or dress it down, do what you want with it. It's not a cookie-cutter piece out of H&M that everybody's wearing that week. You're the boss of that thing, it's not the boss of you. It's style rather than fashion.

The idea that you can go to IKEA and get good deals -- it's really not a good deal. You can't ever get rid of it, it's not something you can resell. You don't really own it; you're kind of renting it. So that's something that young people who are thinking about moving can think about. What you want to do is to be able to put it on craigslist, or maybe get your friends to help you move your stuff. You want your stuff to [have] resale value if you really want to save money. You're not being cheap, you're being smart. They're two different things.

Q. How does the psychology of marketing inhibit the ability of consumers to see an item in terms of its entire lifespan?

A. IKEA names all its products to make stuff seem cute, but then they're telling you, "You're not really attached to this, are you crazy?" They're getting you to laugh at and make a mockery out of the idea of durability. They make durability seem like an old-fashioned, passé idea. And it works. I think it's really juvenilizing: "Oh, come on, you want a new toy. You always want a new toy."

Particularly in the marketing of cell phones. You have a cell phone that works really well for you, and then you have a friend who has a cooler one, and you want it. That's kind of 4-year-old behavior. When you have 3- or 4-year-olds, they want the new shiny thing. But as you get older and a little more mature--and I don't mean 50, I mean 16 or 17--you learn that that's not what it's about. It's about what works for me. Marketers obviously don't want you to think that. In the case of the cell phone, they assume you're going to use it for a year or less, and it's not durable. Even if it is, they assume you're going to junk it. I say, "Screw them!" If it works for you, hang on to it. Don't buy into that, because basically, it's all about them making a profit. It's not about you and what you really want.

Come hither -- cheap goods for sale!Q. Do you see similarities between the psychology of marketing cheap goods and of greenwashing?

A. Yes, I do. There's a mnemonic device that's used by marketers in terms of discounting. The mental shortcut is, "Lower price, good deal." And those two things don't necessarily follow. Something that's low price triggers the impulsive side of our brains and causes us to make decisions without much thought. The same thing is true for some of this green marketing. We're told that something is green, or it has the aura of green, and that makes it OK to buy it.

That's actually why I [focused on] IKEA instead of Wal-Mart. Most of us think, "IKEA's the good guy." IKEA has taken some tiny, baby steps towards environmentalism. For example, they started charging for their plastic bags. When you charge for plastic bags, it's reasonable to question if it's really a green step or just a way to make profit. They use low-wattage bulbs in their stores. But those are cost-cutting measures. There's nothing wrong with cost-cutting measures, but they don't take environmental steps that cause them to reduce their profits. People think, "Oh, it's a green store." But the whole story that they tell of clean living and the outdoors is a mnemonic to get you to buy. When you look under the hood, and you look at something that is essentially being sold as a non-durable product, something that won't last and isn't necessarily marketed to last, that's not an environmentally sound product.

Q. What do you say to those who believe the way discounters do business is essential to the American spirit of capitalism?

A. If you reconsider Adam Smith's arguments, in light of today's realities, he would not say what a lot of people think he was saying. He was concerned about greed and morality. He was a moral philosopher. When we talk about a free market, Adam Smith could have never anticipated the free market that we have today, which is a global market of supply chain that depends on instant messaging across the globe and transportation costs being so low that they're essentially negligible.

That's why the invention of [shipping containers], which has severely lowered transportation costs, is so important in the story. In [Smith's] days, if you shipped something from Japan or China, it was costly. Now, it really isn't. It completely changes the argument about what works and what doesn't. And when you're talking about a global economy and you have workers who are completely out of our sight, who we use as a labor source--and the resources in those countries as well--and costs are so low because transportation costs are so low, it's a completely different equation.

Q. Do you foresee a change in our perception of cheap if transportation costs are driven up through climate legislation?

A. There's no question [about] that, if we actually taxed for carbon use around the globe so that we can't just outsource our pollution--which is what we're doing now to the developing world. In terms of pollution, it was pretty shocking to see the levels of particle pollution of areas in China. We're talking huge amounts of carbon being burned, toxins in the air and the water, which is all to keep prices low, because when you put in environmental protection it costs money. If the price of oil went up substantially and environmental restrictions were made globally so that we couldn't outsource our environmental costs, I definitely think this could have a big impact on cheap.

Q. So there are two ways to frame the rejection of cheap: from a personal, psychological standpoint and also an environmental standpoint.

A. And also sociopolitical impact, because as we pursue cheap goods, we also pursue lower wages, less benefits, and worse working conditions because that's what makes things cheaper and cheaper. If wages go up in Mexico, plants close up and go to China, and if wages go up in China, the plants move on to Vietnam. We're basically pursuing the least regulated cultures, where the rule of law is the weakest when it comes to enforcing the kinds of things we in the United States really value.

Q. Do you think the general public is shocked when they make the connection that their cheap habits are supported by deregulation?

A. Some of the critics have said the book is shocking in the sense that it kind of opened their eyes. And it was shocking to me; I didn't know this stuff before I did the book. I think with knowledge comes power and you get to enact change in people.

Q. Is a rejection of cheap goods and food sustainable on a global scale?

A. In the book I quote World Bank economist Michael Morris because I don't want people to think that this is going to be easy or that we're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is a world of many billions of people. In talking about agriculture and small farms, there's this notion of happy peasants--which is a myth. It's true that small farmers can flourish, but it's also true that in many places in the world, the small farmers are the poorest of the poor. We do need to feed this world, which has so many more people than when we had these small farms. We do need to have large agricultural systems.

What I call for in the book is a middle way. I don't think we necessarily need factory meat farms, for example. I think that's actually a very costly system in many different regards. If that's something that the local-food movement and the slow-food movement pushes against, it's probably a good thing. Do we need large fields of gain? I think we do. [Fields of corn] to be fed to livestock is an unfortunate thing, but, as my background is in science, I do see the positives there, and I don't want to sell them short. For people who are starving around the world, they need a source of readily available food.

To feed the world, we're going to have to keep some of that in place, but we're also going to need a lot of local farmers, and we need more diversity in what we subsidize. We subsidize the grain growers, and the corn growers, and the soybean growers--anything that has to do with the meat industry. But we don't subsidize very much fruit and vegetable growers, which, if you're going to have a healthy diet, that's what you need. We need to really rethink our agricultural system, but the way to do it, I believe, isn't just to tell everyone to shop at their local farmers market--it's too expensive for most people, and it's unavailable to most people. I take more of a middle ground than a lot of other folks, people who I very much respect, but who I think are looking through a very narrow lens. I think we have to be careful not to oversell or oversimplify.

Q. In Cheap, you talk about the role that corporations and politics have played in how we've gotten to where we are, but you also place a significant part of that burden on individual consumers. How do we get to a sustainable middle ground in the retail landscape?

A. Consumers need more information. When you go to New York City and you go to a coffee shop, they tell you the calories of what's in the food. You can make better decisions; you change your choices.

I didn't write this in the book and I wish I had, but some kind of labeling so that consumers know the origins of what they're buying, and how it's made, and what it's made of [is important]. And eventually you should be able to go on the web and find out what company made this, where's the supplier, and [if] are they acting responsibly. Suppliers in the developing world are notorious for labor abuses. The way you make these changes is to make the labeling at the point of purchase where the buyer can see, right then and there, what he's buying. And that changes behavior.

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In shocking news, water is still wet, the sky is still blue, and the National Association of Manufacturers is still predicting economic catastrophe if the United States acts against climate change.

NAM, in partnership with the American Council for Capital Formation, released a new study on Wednesday of the climate and energy bill that the House passed in June, better known as Waxman-Markey. They predict that the "anti-energy, anti-growth, and anti-jobs bill" will "destroy growth."

"Higher energy costs are bad for manufacturers and the 12 million Americans who work in the manufacturing sector," said Jay Timmons, executive vice president of NAM, in a call with reporters. "After all, manufacturing uses a third of all the electricity generated in the United States."

Their report predicts that, under the Waxman-Markey bill, the U.S. would lose between 1.8 million and 2.4 million jobs by 2030. The bill would increase costs for each household between $118 to $250 by 2020, and $730 to $1,248 by 2030. And it would cost the economy up to $3.1 trillion dollars over the period of 2012 to 2030, with annual gross domestic product dropping between $419 billion and $571 billion by 2030.

The study also includes state-specific data for 15 industrial and fossil-fuel-dependent states -- many of which happen to be represented by senators who are considered swing votes on a climate bill this year, including Arkansas, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The state numbers were similarly grim, predicting the loss of up to 97,500 jobs in Pennsylvania and up to 59,260 in Indiana.

NAM plans to use the figures to "educate policy makers" over the next few months, said Timmons. "We want to make sure those members of the Senate that represent states that benefit from a strong manufacturing base have a full understanding of the impacts of this bill," said Timmons.

Scary, eh? Problem is, the NAM/ACCF numbers don't gibe with the analyses of Waxman-Markey done by government agencies. The Energy Information Administration says that the bill would increase household costs just $83 per year, or less than 23 cents per day. The Environmental Protection Agency put the cost slightly higher, at between $88 and $140 per household per year, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated about $175 a year by 2020 -- but both would make the bill cheaper than a postage stamp per day.

The NAM/ACCF report relies on some assumptions that skew the numbers. For instance, it claims to use data from the EIA, but cherry-picks its figures. The NAM study predicts that just 10 to 25 gigawatts of new nuclear power would be developed under the bill. But the EIA estimates that 11 additional gigawatts of nuclear power would come online by 2030 without a cap on carbon, and up to 135 gigawatts under the Waxman-Markey bill.

There are also some dubious assumptions about offsets. While the Waxman-Markey bill allows for up to 2 billion tons of offsets -- half domestic, half international -- the NAM study assumes that 95 percent of those offsets would be domestic. Domestic offsets are far more expensive than international offsets.

Margo Thorning, senior vice president and chief economist for ACCF, indicated on the groups' press call today that they believed the nuclear projections were "quite generous," and that they "tried to be very transparent about what the assumptions were that were underlying these results."

Still, it's hard to tell what assumptions were plugged into their study. In a footnote in the executive summary [PDF], Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the group commissioned to conduct the study, makes clear that the "input assumptions, opinions and recommendations in this report are those of ACCF and NAM, and do not necessarily represent the views of SAIC."

NAM has been an outspoken opponent of climate change legislation, and has lobbied heavily against action for many years. The association sponsored a similar study last year of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act; it was also skewed by cherry-picked data.

Environmental groups are already pouncing on the NAM numbers. Even before the official release, Environmental Defense Fund issued a statement arguing that NAM's study is largely based on "make-believe."

"NAM's numbers are about as trustworthy as the forged letters sent by their allies to members of Congress, which faked opposition to the ACES bill from local community groups," said EDF national media director Tony Kreindler, referring to the scandal that erupted earlier this month over fake letters sent on behalf of coal interests.

Conservative anti-climate-action forces are already latching on to the report. And NAM is co-sponsoring anti-climate-bill rallies in 20 states over the next month, where you can be sure these new numbers will be a hot topic.

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New ads from Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection are pushing swing-vote senators to back climate and clean-energy legislation, touting the job-creation angle.

The TV and radio ad campaign is targeted at moderate Democratic and Republican senators from fossil fuel–dependent, manufacturing-heavy Midwestern and Southern states: Blanche Lincoln (D) and Mark Pryor (D) of Arkansas, Evan Bayh (D) and Dick Lugar (R) of Indiana, Kit Bond (R) and Claire McCaskill (D) of Missouri, and Kent Conrad (D) and Byron Dorgan (D) of North Dakota. ACP plans to roll out ads in four additional states later this month.

"These senators represent the heartland of America, states hardest hit by our economic downturn but with the most to gain from jump-starting our economy and creating jobs with a new clean energy policy," ACP spokesperson Brian Rogers told Grist.

The TV ads feature a generic-looking white suburban father talking to the camera. "The folks in Washington need to stop arguing and help people get back to work," he says in the ad targeted at Bayh. "Take clean energy jobs. Now America talks about 'em, yet China's creating 'em. Are we forgetting we need those jobs in Indiana?"

"Look, the future's in clean energy -- wind and solar," he continues. "The question is, who's gonna to build it?"

The group is also running radio ads targeting the senators. One aimed at Pryor tells voters to call his office and "urge him to stand up for Arkansas jobs, clean energy and our nation's security." It highlights a 2005 quote from Pryor in which he said, "We need to take ambitious steps to reduce our country's increasing dependence on foreign oil. Fortunately, the solution will result in Americans manufacturing and using cleaner, healthier energy sources. We're talking about a win for national security, the environment, our children, and the economy."

In a more general ACP ad being run on national cable, entitled "Family Values," the same folksy dad argues that families would benefit from climate legislation that would provide new jobs, a cleaner environment, and decreased dependence on oil.

"Reading about Washington these days, I gotta ask, 'What's in it for me?'" the dad says. "I'm not looking for a bailout -- just a good paying job. That's why I like this clean energy idea."

"I hope our senators are listening," the ad concludes.

ACP would not say how much it's spending on the ad campaign, other than to acknowledge that the investment is "substantial." The ads will run through Labor Day, right up until senators return to Washington following their August recess.

Here is video of the Bayh ad, followed by the national ad:

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This post was written by ProPublica's Marcus Stern and Jake Bernstein.

To supporters, the “cash for clunkers” program miraculously jolted the moribund car market back to life, engendering hopes that it might help revive the broader U.S. economy.

Skeptics saw it differently: The automotive industry had hijacked an environmental bill and turned it into a bailout for itself with the help of the Obama administration and a Congress besotted with wishful thinking and a hair-trigger for stimulus spending.

Both views may turn out to be correct. But one thing is certain. The sight of car buyers back in showrooms these past two weeks has raised hopes that U.S. consumers are ready, primed by government stimulus, to spend again. Those hopes gained momentum by the release Friday (8/7) of employment data showing a reduced pace of job losses in the overall economy.

The idea, in concept, anyway, was simple: Bring in a clunker – a used car with lousy mileage – and collect up to $4,500 in government money against the purchase of a new car with a government-approved mileage level. The clunker, or more properly, its engine, is destroyed. Pollution and oil imports go down by at least some amount, not just this year but by many years into the future – because many of the clunkers otherwise would have remained on the road. And inventories of new cars are cleared from dealers’ lots, allowing dormant factories to restart. Some dealers are even saying  that potential buyers whose used cars don’t turn out to qualify for the program are ending up taking a more normal trade-in and buying a new car anyway.

Questions, of course, remain. Having been broadly revamped at the behest of the powerful National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), will the program deliver, along with economic stimulus, a meaningful increase in the fuel efficiency of America’s automotive fleet? How necessary was the $2 billion expansion of the original $1 billion program that Congress passed with stunning speed last week? And what about the increasingly frustrating paucity of believable, well-sourced data about the program?

“I am completely infuriated by the lack of information,” said Therese Langer, director of the transportation program at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit research organization promoting energy security and environmental protection. “We asked for the transaction-by-transaction data, but (the Transportation Department) refused to give it.”

By knowing the mileage rating of the turned-in clunkers and the mileage rating of the new cars bought to replace them, analysts can get a better idea of the actual gas savings likely to be realized. The Transportation Department is releasing those numbers in summary form, but not the raw data that analysts like Langer seek.

“All of this information is being gathered and will be made public as soon as it’s available,” said Eric Bolton, a press officer for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is managing the clunkers program.

The problem, added NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson, is that the rebate vouchers the agency had received as of last Friday contain personal information that must be redacted before the data can made public.

“It will happen, we just don’t know when,” Tyson said.

A brief timeline underscores the rapid pace of developments.

In January, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, joined by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, introduced a bill to fund a national program to stimulate the economy and get gas-guzzling vehicles off the roads. Similar programs had been successful in several states and countries.

The auto industry opposed the bill’s tight fuel-efficiency standards. But instead of simply resisting the measure, NADA, a key lobbying group, seized the idea and converted it to its own purposes. In June, the House approved an industry-backed bill with looser fuel-efficiency standards. A similar industry-backed bill was introduced in the Senate.

Under the Feinstein bill, consumers would receive $4,500 only if they purchased a passenger car with a fuel efficiency rating of at least 13 miles per gallon higher than the clunker they were dropping off. In the bill passed by the House, the rating difference was lowered to 10 miles per gallon or more.

That NADA could bring off this change is no surprise. Its enormous clout begins with its universality – there are car dealers in nearly every House district. The association made more than $7.5 million in campaign contributions to House members in the past six years and $773,000 to senators, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Separately, it spent almost $3.2 million on lobbying in 2008 alone, according to a database maintained by the U.S. Senate.

At first, the environmental proponents behind the original version were outraged. “The truth is, the House bill and its Senate counterpart are another big bailout,” Feinstein and Collins wrote in an opinion piece called “Handouts for Hummers,” published by the Wall Street Journal. “These bills are expertly designed to provide Detroit one last windfall in selling off gas guzzlers currently sitting on dealer lots because they’re not a smart buy.”

The bottom line, they argued, “is that fuel-efficient vehicles should be the main focus of any ‘cash for clunkers’ bill.”

But the competing legislation never went before the Senate for a vote. Instead, the industry-backed version was slipped into a completely unrelated war-spending bill that Congress approved on June 18.

Moreover, even Feinstein and Collins acquiesced after getting an oral commitment from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that the Senate would consider increasing the bill’s fuel efficiency standards if more money was needed for the program, according to Senate sources.

Thirteen days later, on July 1, the industry-backed version of the legislation became law with the formal name of the Car Allowance Rebate System, or CARS, and the weaker fuel efficiency standards. The $1 billion program was expected to provide rebates of up to $4,500 each for 250,000 auto sales.

For the next 24 days, the Department of Transportation hammered out the program’s rules as sales-starved dealers around the country began lining up deals.

The Transportation Department completed the rules and waved the green flag to start the program on July 24. Dealers across the country immediately began promoting the program and making deals.

Six days later, on July 30, trade publications reported that the money was running out. Unattributed reports said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood would suspend the program at midnight for lack of funds.

The LaHood reports proved erroneous, but the media that evening began a brief shift in attention away from the health care debate to the delicious story of cash for clunkers, a government program that was so successful it had burned through $1 billion in stimulus funds within days.

The news reports were based on NADA’s spot survey of dealers, which estimated that 250,000 clunker sales already had been completed or were in the pipeline less than a week after the program began. Nobody, including the NADA and its dealers, was prepared for the popularity of the program.

Just 24 hours after the first press reports that the program was running out of money, the House hastily approved a $2 billion extension designed to underwrite 500,000 more sales. The money was taken from a renewable energy loan program.

Last Monday, after a briefing by the Transportation Department, Feinstein and Collins reversed themselves and agreed to support the $2 billion extension of the program, even with its lower industry-favored fuel-efficiency standards.

“The original intent of the clunkers program was to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, and the data so far tells us that’s exactly what’s happening,” Feinstein said. “So, I believe the right decision at this time is that the program should be extended.”

Environmental groups such as the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy also ended up backing the additional money for the program.

The Obama administration, waging a full-court press, clearly was gaining support for the costly extension of the rebate program through the week, despite some Republican opposition. On Thursday, the Senate approved the $2 billion extension. A week after the media frenzy about the program had erupted, the Senate forwarded the legislation to a president eager to sign it into law.

Calling it a “proven success,” President Obama responded to the news with a statement claiming that the program is “getting the oldest, dirtiest and most air polluting trucks and SUVs off the road for good,” and “businesses across the country—from small auto dealerships and suppliers to large auto manufacturers – are getting people back to work as a result of this program.”

Ultimately, the nation will have to wait months or even years to find out whether government got it right this time.

Has the program actually revived the traditional “animal spirits” among American car buyers, and jump-started an economy that needed a jolt, or has it simply borrowed sales that would have been made by this fall anyway? How truly clunky are the clunkers destroyed by the program, and how much better are the mileage ratings of their replacements. How much will gasoline use be reduced after a year, five years, 10 years?

Meanwhile, the nation’s new-car showrooms, for the first time in a long time, are buoyant and busy, despite some severe computer glitches during the first week of the program that delayed rebates and soured some dealers.

Sales employees at Shottenkirk Chevrolet in Quincy, Ill., appear pleased overall with the cash for clunkers program, even though it took them as long as 10 hours to log one deal on the government computer system at one point.

“Everyone is running out of cars,” Rich Poe, the dealership’s general manager, told the Quincy Herald-Whig. “Ultimately, the program has done what it was designed to do—sell more cars and get better gas-mileage cars on the road.”

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Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus, discusses the Green the Block partnership. In the background (L-R) are Dept. of Energy Undersecretary Kristina Johnson, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan. Kate Sheppard / GristEnsuring that low-income communities and minority youth benefit from green jobs programs is the goal of a new partnership between the White House and two grassroots organizations -- Hip Hop Caucus and Green For All.

Two Cabinet members and leaders of the grassroots groups unveiled the Green the Block initiative Tuesday at a White House press conference, describing the partnership as as both a campaign and a coalition that is designed to build political support for greening efforts in low-income and minority communities..

"The 20th century was defined by civil rights and The 21st century will be defined by clean energy," said Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus. "Future generations will measure us by our success in transitioning from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy economy, and in the process building opportunity and prosperity for our most economically disenfranchised communities."

"We have to convince our generation that this truly is our lunch-counter moment of the 21st century," said Yearwood, referring to the sit-ins held at segregated diners during the Civil Rights era.

The initiative will officially kick-off with a day of service on September 11, 2009 -- part of the White House's already announced United We Serve program. The Green the Block website has more information on local initiatives taking place around the country.

"September 11 is about bringing people together to recognize that change happens not in the corridors of Washington, DC, but it happens in the streets of Detroit, Cleveland, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and cities across the country," said Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of the Oakland-based group Green for All.

The cabinet members -- EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan -- touted some of the investments that the Obama administration has made to assist low-income Americans through greening efforts. In the economic stimulus package, $14 billion is designated for housing upgrades, including $5 billion to make low-income housing more energy efficient. Noting that the government currently spends $5 billion a year providing monetary assistance for energy bills to low-income households, Donovan said investments like those in the stimulus plan will help offset costs for families and the government in the long run.

Jackson noted the EPA's Tuesday announcement of $61 million for brownfields revitalization efforts. The funds will go toward job training programs.

Jackson also touted the climate and energy bill that passed the House in June as another potential means of growing the green economy and creating new jobs. Green for All's Ellis-Lamkins praised the House bill for including provisions that help ensure jobs will be created in low-income and minority communities, which include local hiring requirements and devotes a portion of pollution permit revenues to job training programs. She said it will be important to get these communities engaged in the debate as the bill moves in the Senate, in order to ensure that this type of provision is included in the final bill.

"If communities of color aren't engaged, you won't see provisions like that," said Ellis-Lamkins.

Video: Green jobs adviser Van Jones talks about green jobs efforts and how the Obama administration can work with underserved communities to ensure they have access to the benefits and opportunities of a clean energy economy.

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I was not a big fan of the final version of "Cash for Clunkers" because its mileage improvement requirements were so inadequate, as Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) explained here.

But in the real world, the public has mostly turned in gas-guzzlers in exchange for fuel-efficient cars - which perhaps should not have been a total surprise since oil prices are rising, gas guzzlers remain a tough resell in the used car market, and most fuel-efficient cars are much cheaper than SUVs.  In fact, the AP reports:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the average mileage of new vehicles purchased through the program is 9.6 miles per gallon higher than for the vehicles traded in for scrap. Buyers of new cars and trucks that get 10 mpg better than their trade-ins get the $4,500 rebate. People whose cars get between 4 mpg and 10 mpg better fuel efficiency qualify for a smaller $3,500 rebate.

LaHood said some 80 percent of the traded-in vehicles are pickups or SUVs, meaning many gas-guzzlers are being taken off the road. The Ford Focus is a leading replacement vehicle. General Motors Co., Chrysler Group LLC and Ford accounted for 47 percent of the new vehicles purchased.

A 9 mpg gain translates into annual savings of 3.8 million barrels of oil per year and nearly $1,000 for consumers at the pump -- not to mention that it will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 660,000 metric tons a year.  Okay, not a cost-effective emission reducer, but still, given the multiple benefits of the program, pretty darn good.

Indeed, the environmental gain is even greater because the trade-ins are not resold to the public or shipped to the developing world - but recycled.

The economic gain in this depressed economy and even more depressed auto market are pretty big for such a small program:

Ford said its July sales rose 1.6 percent in July from the same month last year, its first year-over-year increase since November 2007, while Chrysler Group LLC posted a smaller year-over-year sales drop compared with recent months, helped by "clunkers" deals. Other automakers showed gains, giving ammunition to supporters of the car rebate program.

But the Senate GOP, of course, opposes all government programs no matter how successful (see The Audacity of Nope: The GOP channels Groucho Marx, "Whatever it is, I'm against it"):

Senate Republicans appeared to be in no hurry.

"We were told this program would last for several months," GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said. "It ran out of money in a week, prompting the House to rush a $2 billion extension before anybody even had time to figure out what happened to the first billion."

Yes, the GOP argument is that it's too damn popular a government program, so we have to figure out how to slow it down long enough to kill it.

McConnell said, "It's not a bad idea to look for a second opinion. All the more so if they say they're in a hurry."

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate's second-ranking Republican, suggested lawmakers "take a time-out" so they could receive more details about the program before providing more money. "I'm concerned that somebody's going to have to pay for this...."

Uhh, yes.  Someone has to pay for  successful government programs....

Unlike conservatives, who can't be moved by the evidence, even the moderate Dem skeptic Feinstein has been persuaded by the data and program success:

"The best solution is to continue and extend the program as it is," Feinstein said. "The program appears to be running very well."

The bottom line is that the program seems to be a shot in the arm for the auto industry, while achieving better energy and environmental gains than expected.  Senate conservatives will bloviate, but I can't imagine them being dumb enough to filibuster it.

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