In my piece for the Prospect's December issue, posted online today, I write about how all the green-jobs training programs the stimulus helped fund are a little ahead of the curve: We're training workers for green jobs, but we haven't passed the nationwide policies that would stablize green industries, especially renewable energy. I wrote:
The major source of the financing problem, however, isn't the recession. It's that the fossil fuels America depends on are still incredibly cheap, and no one wants to see energy prices rise. Alternative-energy industries are marketed as rapidly growing, but in fact, they've stayed incredibly small. We get less than 5 percent of our energy from renewable sources.
That's been a problem for private investment, but it's complicated action on the state level as well. The New York Times has a story today about how states are cancelling or rejecting renewable-energy projects because they could raise the price of energy for consumers. The comparison between cheap fossil fuels and more expensive renewable-energy sources is a frought one, of course: Cheap oil, coal, and natural gas bear devastating costs we're paying as a society, and switching to renewable energies would reap benefits that we wouldn't necessarily feel now, especially on the individual level.
But the appetite for policies like a national renewable-energy standard, which would promote the switch, is probably completely gone in the future Congress, in which Republicans will have more power. Unless some climate scientists do something about it:
Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday's election.
It's unclear whether that will work. The threatened investigations are real: Republicans want to investigate the "fraud" behind global warming. It's clear that most Americans understand that climate change is a real problem, but inertia is a powerful force, and it'll take an entirely different kind of leadership to spur change.
-- Monica Potts
