Complete Interview: The Temperature Transcends Race
(Page 4 of 7)
Mar-.Apr. 2008
interview by Hannah Lobel
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Going back to green jobs, the new energy act has a provision that allocates $125 million toward green job training. Is that enough?
It might be enough for job training, it’s certainly not enough to create a new clean-energy economy. A group of energy scientists and energy experts just sent an open letter to the presidential candidates and Congress calling for an investment of $30 billion every year. Other analysts have called for something closer to $80 billion a year.
Creating a whole new energy economy is an enormous undertaking, as is overcoming concentrated and entrenched poverty. I’m sure that everybody involved in that $125 million job-training program sees it as a good first step. The challenge now is to go and create the kind of political movement that we’re going to need in order to secure much larger investments to do things like buy down the price of solar, so that there is a viable economics for installing solar on homes and businesses.
One of the interesting areas that we’ve been thinking about lately is: How do you tie together both a working class green-collar jobs program, focused on solar-panel installation or retrofitting buildings for greater efficiency, and a more professional, scientific agenda for investing in clean energy R&D, inventing new technologies, and achieving technological breakthroughs that bring the price of clean energy down dramatically.
You’ve called for a massive government investment on the scale of the space program in the 1950s.
The thing to remember about the U.S. government is that it’s the biggest buyer. In the late 1950s microchips cost about $1,000 each. The federal government decided that it needed microchips for the space race with the Soviet Union, and it literally bought so many microchips over less than 10 years that the price came down to just $20 a microchip.
There’s a very similar situation today with another silicon-based product, and that’s solar panels. Every time you double the production of solar, the price comes down 20 percent. We ought to spend what experts suggest will be between $50 billion and $200 billion to buy down the price of solar so that it’s cheaper than coal. If we’re going to deal with global warming we’ve got to have clean energy sources that are cheaper than coal in places like China, for whom energy costs are fundamental to sustaining high levels of economic growth.
So, we look back at those past investments in technology. We also look back at the past investments in infrastructure, when the United States government created the interstate highways. We’re going to need a whole new energy grid to bring wind, for example, from windy places to cities. We’re going to need a whole set of investments, and we think that we’re better off looking for models to past investments in technology and infrastructure than we are to past efforts at pollution control.
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