[Mb-civic] William Greider: Apollo Now

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/123005E.shtml

Apollo Now
    By William Greider
    The Nation

    02 January 2006 Issue

    The tragedy of New Orleans provides Americans
with an ominous metaphor for understanding our
future. We did not fix the levees, though we were
warned. That is a simple way of expressing the
national predicament in this new century. As a
society, we are engulfed by similar
vulnerabilities-forms of ecological and economic
deterioration that are profoundly more
threatening than an occasional hurricane. And we
have been told. Yet we are not "fixing the
levees." Preoccupied with current desires and
discontents, this very wealthy nation has lost
sight of its future.

    The levee metaphor, vividly dramatized by the
Gulf Coast disaster, has the potential to move
the country in a new direction-to inspire a
generational shift in thinking that could launch
a new era of fundamental reforms. But the
imperative to act requires nothing less than a
reordering of American life-a result that seems
most unlikely. Given the corrupted condition of
representative democracy, politicians are seldom
punished for keeping the hard truth from voters.
The mass culture marinates American citizens in
false triumphalism.

    Events, nevertheless, have delivered a
teachable moment-an opportunity to reframe and
reargue many long-neglected matters. The wheels
are coming off the right-wing bus. The President
of Oil and War is no longer much believed. The
vast suffering and physical destruction in New
Orleans have made all too visible what ecologists
and social critics have been trying to explain
for years. Their warnings once seemed too
abstract or remote to require public action. New
Orleans announced, for those who will listen,
that the future is now.

    Oceans are warming, the Arctic ice cap is
shrinking. The deep topsoil of Iowa is draining
into the Mississippi River, leaving behind
chemical swamps. Good drinking water, once freely
available to all, has become a scarce commodity
for commercial exploitation. Much of the
population, dispersed farther and farther from
urban centers, is pole-axed by soaring gasoline
prices. Meanwhile, the gorgeous abundance of
consumer goods continues to poison earth, air and
water. This year, Americans will throw away
something like 100 million cell phones, pagers,
pocket PCs and portable music players, interring
their toxic contents in the "dump" called nature.

    Should we blame the farmers? The oil and
chemical companies? The teenagers who love their
gadgets? The politics of blame-and-shame was
brilliantly perfected thirty years ago by the
environmental movement but gradually lost its
effectiveness, partly because it framed the
contest as a righteous struggle between good guys
and bad guys-virtuous citizens versus dirty
industrial polluters (and often their workers).
It felt good to identify the culprits, but moral
indignation eventually loses its power to
enforce. Plus, the enormity of what we face is
too all-encompassing. Not many of us can truly
claim innocence.

    The predicament is fundamental and universal:
It is the collision between industrial society
and nature. Politicians and environmental
activists can be forgiven for not wishing to take
on the "American way of life," but essentially
that is what's required. Eliminating this
collision, before it destroys the very basis of
modern prosperity and life itself, calls for
nothing less than the transformation of the
American industrial system and mass-consumption
economy. Among other things, it means reinventing
the processes of production and redesigning
virtually every product. It means taking
responsibility for what we make and
consume-recovering what is now discarded in
landfills, dumped in rivers or vaporized in air
and atmosphere. It means remanufacturing
components and materials into new products.

    Daunting and radical as that all might sound,
the good news is that these great changes are
technologically feasible. The transformation will
take decades, even generations, to complete, but
industrial experts affirm that it is doable.
Starting promptly on this historic commitment
will avoid (or at least mitigate) the larger
catastrophes ahead.

    The real obstacle is political, not
scientific, because reform depends on the choices
society makes (or fails to make). Who is the "we"
responsible for these choices? One way or
another, it is all of us. Virtually every
institution of capitalism-manufacturers and
merchants and, above all, the financiers who
discipline them-will be compelled to alter
routine functions in deep ways. But so will
consumers and workers. As with other aspects of
American life, the burden will not fall evenly on
every citizen. Sacrifices and disruptions are
typically maldistributed downward on the ladder
of income and status. The goals of
environmentalism often sound preciously elitist
because the most severe costs usually fall on the
working class or poor, people with limited
margins. Not surprisingly, they sometimes resist.

    It will be essential to recognize that
inequality is an ecological issue. If this
sweeping transformation proceeds, the impact on
work, wages and living standards has to be a
central component of the reform agenda-not just
necessary for political support but also to
insure that a healthier society emerges from the
deep changes. In fact, the logical promise of
industrial transformation is that it will lead to
better lives for all-improved circumstances and
health, greater economic security and brighter
prospects for the future. Every ordinary American
wants that, and every ordinary American is
entitled to expect it.

    Making it happen requires a new progressive
perspective that fuses the ecological imperative
with economic outcomes. We need a synthesis that
replaces fear with hope-not as rhetoric but
bolstered with proof that this goal is attainable
for all. Inventive minds are already working on
it.

    The Apollo Alliance offers one positive model
for reshaping the future. It started from the
premise that American politics will not undertake
a serious agenda on global warming and
alternative energy sources until labor groups and
environmentalists come together on the objective.
"When Apollo started, political progress on
energy was mired in the jobs-versus-environment
debate," says Jeff Rickert, Apollo's acting
executive director. "In order to break that
deadlock, we proposed a new way of thinking-a
plan that removed the wedge between
environmentalists and labor unions by focusing on
the job-creating aspects of a clean-energy
investment policy."

    Packaged and tested with rigorous economic
analysis, the Apollo proposal calls for a
ten-year, $300 billion investment agenda-federal
financing to foster development of alternative
fuels, innovative eco firms and energy-conserving
reforms in housing, green building codes,
transportation and other realms. These
investments, analysts estimate, would generate
3.3 million new jobs. One strategist noted a
resemblance to John F. Kennedy's moon-landing
initiative in the 1960s-an endeavor that also
created high-wage skilled jobs and new tech
sectors. Overcoming the ecological threat could
become this generation's Apollo project. Hence
the name.

    The public capital would be invested-some
directly, some as subsidy incentives-in new fuels
(solar, hydrogen, biomass, wind); in
high-efficiency vehicles as a transition to
post-petroleum transportation; in rebuilding
urban infrastructure for "smart growth"; in rapid
transit and regional rail networks like the
high-speed Maglev trains; and in a modernized
electrical system that reduces carbon emissions
and increases efficient transmission. These and
other ventures, Apollo analysts estimate, would
generate $1.4 trillion in GDP gain for the United
States, and nearly $1 trillion more in personal
incomes. The investments would be accompanied by
stronger regulatory protections to make sure the
subsidies produce real results.

    As an organizing device, the Apollo concept
has worked brilliantly. Some twenty-one labor
unions and the AFL-CIO, nineteen environmental
organizations and fifty-eight business leaders
have signed on, along with civil rights and
equal-justice groups that recognize that
retrofitting buildings and other projects can
bring good jobs back to inner cities. Nine
"Apollo governors" are pushing variations on the
concept as state legislation. In Pennsylvania, a
coal state, Governor Ed Rendell passed an
Advanced Energy Portfolio Standard stating that
18 percent of retail electricity must come from
alternative fuel sources. A new wind-power
factory is set to open that will bring 1,000
jobs, with more jobs to come. Virtually every
Democratic presidential candidate in 2004
endorsed Apollo. Democratic leaders in Congress
recently embraced the plan and say they will run
on the theme in 2006.

    Washington isn't going to enact such a bold
program while oil-based Republicans remain in
power. But the Apollo agenda is generating
forward momentum on state and local levels,
field-testing the politics of fusion as
blue-green partners argue out their differences.
In California a plan for homeowner tax breaks to
finance a "million solar roofs" temporarily
stalled (and rightly so) on labor's demand for
prevailing wage rates for the workers who will do
the installation. When Washington State was
enacting its green building code, the paper
industry initially persuaded machinists and
carpenters to oppose the higher standards for
timbering as a threat to local jobs. But the
unions reversed themselves when the alliance
demonstrated that the industry's job claims were
false. (In fact, the legislation gives preference
to regionally produced lumber.)

    "We have a lot of examples where we have
gotten rid of the wedge, a few cases where we
failed," Rickert said. "It's still the beginning,
but I think we've gotten past the toughest
patch." In one notable example, the United Mine
Workers Union, whose coal miners are the most
directly threatened by climate-change reform, has
officially acknowledged that global warming must
be addressed. That might seem like a small step,
but it puts the UMW out in front of ExxonMobil.

    Meanwhile, a new coalition of Christian
conservatives-Set America Free-has launched its
own campaign to reduce US oil consumption with
reform ideas that parallel the Apollo Alliance.
Unfortunately, both left and right efforts are
embracing the utterly illusory, soothing-sounding
goal of "energy independence" within the next
decade or two. But the two efforts demonstrate
the potential for new alliances that leap across
the usual barriers of party and ideology.

    While our government remains indifferent, the
European Union has launched a coherent, long-term
strategy for industrial transformation-nothing
less. The EU is forcing industry, sector by
sector, to undertake the redesign of products,
production processes and packaging. These
industries have resisted the specific costs, of
course, but they do not argue with the goal or
complain about "bad science."

    Starting next year, European auto
manufacturers will be required to "take back"
their old vehicles and recover 85 percent of the
content, reformulating the materials for use in
new cars or other products. Consumer electronics,
computers and cell phones are next in line. This
program leaps far beyond the recycling of old
newspapers or bottles familiar to American
consumers, because the Europeans put the
ecological responsibility directly on the
manufacturers, not individual consumers. Forced
to recover value from their discarded consumer
goods, companies will have a strong incentive to
design the toxics out of their products and to
make them easier to disassemble and
remanufacture.

    Ford and General Motors will have to comply
with the EU rules, since they make cars in
Europe. But imagine how Detroit would react if
Congress or a future President dared to propose a
similar "take back" law for the United States.
The usual naysayers-the Business Roundtable and
Chamber of Commerce-would unleash their dogs (pet
scientists and economists) to explain why this is
impossible. Ford and GM would wail about massive
job losses. The United Auto Workers would likely
side with the companies, as it generally has in
the past, when reformers demanded greater fuel
efficiency and auto safety, or less tailpipe
pollution. (No matter that the US auto industry's
resistance to change is a major reason it
continues to lose customers.)

    Washington regulators decided long ago, with
heavy-handed advice from corporate lawyers and
lobbyists, that supposedly trivial amounts of
toxic pollution should be tolerated. But science
marches toward the opposite conclusion. The
prevalence of toxic industrial chemicals in the
environment, even at extremely low levels of
exposure, is being implicated in rising cancer
rates and also in disabilities and deformities in
children. That shouldn't surprise us. The
chemicals are, after all, poisonous. But
corporate-driven propaganda has often overwhelmed
science in the United States.

    Even so, the struggle for industrial
transformation advances here on many fronts.
Activist campaigns are encouraging American
companies and sectors to adopt higher ecological
standards in their products and purchasing,
covering everything from wood to hamburgers.
Other efforts are developing enterprises that
embrace the new values.

    The concept of take-back laws is slowly
gaining traction at the state level for consumer
electronics and packaging, though not yet for
cars. Local governments, which bear the financial
burden of waste disposal, are beginning to think
seriously about shifting some of the cost to
manufacturers, through fees or taxes on
sales-giving companies a strong reason to produce
less waste in the first place. Xerox and other
industry leaders are developing take-back and
reuse programs, anticipating the legal
responsibility that will someday be the standard.
The ultimate goal is producing waste-free
products.

    California-first in the nation as usual-has
enacted a take-back law for computer monitors and
television sets; the customer pays a fee of about
$10 up front, financing the eventual recycling
and recovery costs when these items are
discarded. Maine's new law on recycling
electronics is much closer to the European
approach, however, because it compels the
manufacturers to internalize these costs on their
balance sheets. The companies, not the consumers,
will either pay pound-for-pound for recycling
their worn-out products or do the work
themselves. Either way, the cost pressure is on
them to reduce waste and harm-a concept known as
"extended producer responsibility."

    A potential breakthrough exists in a
consortium of legislators from ten Northeastern
states. The consortium members are developing a
model state law based on the Maine example. If
they get it right, we could see rapid political
advances at the state level. (Bush's
Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile,
studied the matter for four years-and then
punted.)

    When industrial transformation does finally
come to our shores, Americans will discover a
wonderful wrinkle-it creates jobs, many millions
of them. The consuming public will be more
enthusiastic about serious reform once folks
recognize that industrial reordering delivers
good jobs with good wages for Americans-not more
bucket-shop employment that exploits workers.

    If the United States takes the high road,
every level of our society can benefit from the
economics of doing what we need to do anyway. The
metaphor of the New Orleans levees poses the
question: Will we decide to reshape the future in
positive terms, or sit back and let the bad stuff
happen to us?

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