(Cross-posted from Its Getting Hot in Here)

First, there was the Campus Climate Challenge, building  a base of action on campuses nationwide. Then, there was PowerVote, mobilizing youth across the country to vote for a clean energy future and shift America’s political landscape. Recently, there was PowerShift 2009, with 12,000 young people convening in Washington DC and continuing the effort in their local states to call for bold climate policy. And now …

As the youth climate movement forges ahead to deliver on its major short-term goals, we start to catch a glimpse of the long-term struggle still ahead – the one in which we must innovate and implement climate and energy solutions that also revitalize the economy and empower of communities. In this struggle, we must slowly wresting control of the economy from the fossil fuels that have run our society and putting it in the hands of millions of local innovators around the world who are harnessing the power of the wind, sun, and landscape to sustain their lives and their local economies. We must figure out how to make our buildings more efficient, our urban planning smarter, our agriculture sustainable, our grid system renewable, and our industries green. This is the epic economic, political, and social project, at least of our generation and probably of more to come – it will take decades, is global in scope, and must be participatory and people-supporting both if it is to be fair but also if it is to succeed.

Let’s be frank: as a movement, we have a pretty good idea of why this needs to happen, and a somewhat more vague idea of what needs to happen, but relatively little sense of how it will be done.  More news: our political leaders, scientists, and economists don’t really know what to do either. We are embarking on a societal process of figuring out how to create this new future, and as a warning, much of the planning is being done by those (supporters of “clean coal”, nuclear, tar sands suburban sprawl, agri-business, central station transmission, etc.) who prefer solutions that will lead us to dead ends.

If you want to spend your summer building your capacity and career as a creative leader helping develop the solutions we need to see, please join us for the Summer of Solutions. In 2008, we piloted a program in St. Paul Minnesota with 25 participants, and a sister program started in Portland Oregon – now we’re going nationwide.

The Summer of Solutions is a grassroots program led by pioneering youth innovators in 12 locations nationwide (Austin TX, Burlington VT, Corvalis OR, Eugene OR, Michigan, Omaha NE, Portland OR, San Francisco CA, Seattle WA, St. Louis MO, the Twin Cities MN, and Worcester MA). Each program will bring together a team of youth leaders from a wide range of backgrounds and skill-sets for approximately 2 months (length and dates vary) to accelerate and launch new initiatives around energy efficiency, community-based energy, sustainable food production, sustainable urban design, and green industry by creating innovative partnerships with existing local groups and structures for action that can sustain themselves over time. Program planners at each local area are forming existing projects, but participants are also invited to help create new ones through the collaborative process. The program fosters community-based innovation, peer-to-peer learning, and participatory leadership, and empowers participants to build and practice skills in community organizing, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable development. The Summer of Solutions teams will form creative communities that help participants:

1. Develop model projects that are “solutionary” – they integrate climate and energy solutions, economic revitalization, and community building, create the resources needed for their own emergence, and can be replicated broadly.
2. Build a growing “community of practice” with the skills and mind-set that prepare themselves to launch and build solutionary initiatives in their own communities while supporting others in the process.
3. Foster their careers by honing their interests, skills, and ability to support themselves.

As a follow up from PowerShift, we want to plug youth activists – newcomers and old-timers – into grassroots programs that will help create green jobs, foster local sustainability initiatives, and create model solutions campaigns that will model how to actually solve the climate and energy crisis while revitalizing the economy and fostering social justice.

If you are looking to experiment and build your skills as a grassroots innovator of the green economy leader, please apply to join us:

APPLY HERE

Regardless of whether you are personally available, please spread the word!

The true power of the Summer of Solutions is in its atmosphere and method. Part of it is just the incredible can-do attitude that drives our work, and increasingly builds legitimacy among local governments, business partners, and labor leaders. We are a national initaitive started and run by grassroots volunteers, often setting up programs amid classes and jobs, and training each other in the process. This essence is best captured by the blog post that Callista Perry wrote at the beginning of last summer’s program – she has since gone on to help start up the 2009 program in Worcester Massachusetts.

The method or approach to social change we are using is  far more about personal and collaborative creativity towards ways that work than it is about big bruising advocacy fights between grassroots power and big money. The solutionary approach does contest big power systems – in fact more systematically than a purely advocacy approach – but it does so quietly, through creating solutions that benefit the participants and invite other actors (whether community partners, labor, small business, faith groups, farmers, governments, or corporations to join in in doing things differently). My friend Tyler Magnuson (an activist from Omaha Nebraska going to school in Evergreen Washington) put it beautifully in his recent blog post on the emerging Solutionary blog: we’re about a sustainable activism that gives us life, creates tangible resources (financial, social, emotional) for ourselves and others, and builds itself through the collaborative process of creation. I sometimes think of it as fighting fire with water (instead of with more fire), or maybe like jujitsu. We use the strength of the system to change it.

In the Summer of Solutions, we learn by doing and teach each other: together we figure it out. That process starts from day 1 of involvement, when you start considering how you could be involved in the program. One of the most regular questions I get about the program is whether the program costs money, is volunteer, or they get paid for it. It’s an understandable question in a program where you are both working for two months and getting intensive, practice-based training to build your career as a green economy leader.

We start with a different question: what do you need to participate this summer, and how can we work together to fill those needs? Applicants and program planners work together to raise the funds to cover costs of living and provide a summer stipend for their participation (or link with related jobs/ internships) – its sort of like collaborating with other youth leaders to create your own summer job. Those of us on the national and local teams are working intensively to secure funding for stipends, but particularly in today’s tight funding climate, we won’t be able to cover everyone alone. Based on what you need as an incoming participant, we’ll help you identify ways you can help raise those funds through the grassroots to complement whatever sources of support we do manage to secure.

I think we’re used to having the way forward be clear cut and simple, with the way forward clearly laid out supported by an economy founded on familiar and reliable, if ultimately disastrous, power sources. As we take charge of our own future, and help lead a green economy founded on power and economic activity that is currently uncertain and not-yet created, we have to innovate. Figuring out how to piece together financial support for your dreams is a valuable skill, particularly in the tight job market of a falling economy – it’s just the start of the solutionary process. The programs themselves explore how we can make sweeping change in an entrepreneurial manner, sustaining ourselves through the process.

If we can’t support ourselves through our activism, our vision for the world isn’t very sustainable. Let’s create some solutions.

There is a long way to go. This is just the beginning!

Minnesota is slated to receive about $131.5 million in federal stimulus funding for weatherization and energy efficiency to be spent over the next 18 months, plus about another $54 million in conservation block grants for the state. That’s a lot of money coming in quickly, and energy efficiency is just one small part of a series of investments in renewable energy, job training, infrastructure improvements, and economic aid in the recent federal stimulus package.

This is all very good news. Major investments in efficiency and weatherization are an excellent idea (I explain why at a note at the end of this blog post). The problem is that current market barriers are keeping energy efficiency, which ought to be a no-regrets, win-win-win solution, from being adopted at scale. No one in their right mind would let a 20% low-risk financial return go by, especially these days in a falling economy, yet we do exactly that every day by throwing money out the cracks in our doors and the cold drafts that blow through our un-insulated walls. There are many reasons that we are missing these opportunities – lack of information, lack of access to capital, obscure and complex auditing and contracting services, and little feedback as to how much energy, money, and carbon one is wasting. If we can solve these barriers, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment will flow towards this sector on a sustained basis, helping all Americans cut their energy costs and carbon emissions while creating long-term sustainable jobs. If initial investments (even the roughly $200 million dollars that the stimulus package might provide to Minnesota) only go towards paying for efficiency in some more houses, we will have just scratched the surface and end up with the same stunted efficiency market we have right now. The stimulus funding will only help solve that problem if it is deployed rightly.

Part of the problem is the speed at which the money must be spent – within the next 18 months. For efficiency, this scale of funding means a factor 5 or more expansion of the workforce, meaning that several thousand new efficiency contractors will need to be trained and employed in record-breaking time (this also risks low-quality works). The problem is that unless funds are invested strategically to change the way the market works, in 18 months the funding will be gone, demand for efficiency will drop, and those thousands of people will be back out of work. $200 million just scratches the surface of the changes we could make in Minnesota alone.

What we need to make the efficiency market work is:

1. The creation of financial mechanisms that allow us to cycle funds and even generate a return. I did this at a small scale ($100,000) as a student at Macalester College through the Clean Energy Revolving Fund. There are a number of technical and policy strategies to do this at a much larger regional scale.This is the step necessary to make sure that funding is not a one-shot deal, and to attract much larger amounts of capital from the private sector over time.
2. Build the capacity for growth and sustained interest through enterprises that do outreach through community networks – efforts that engage large numbers of people at the local level through peer-to-peer engagement strategies and relationships with existing community partners such as churches, schools, local business associations, and community organizations have been shown to create economies of scale, allow quality control of work, and create the motivation for sustained engagement.
3. Create training programs that produce quality work at low cost, are accessible to new workers without advanced skill-sets, and focus on creating employees capable of not only insulating your walls, but helping you walk through and understand the process.
4. Empower residents and neighborhoods as leaders of the clean energy economy by pursuing policy changes that make information more accessible (ie energy bills that are understandable and interesting), provide feedback through home smart meters and social norms, and encourage collaboration and innovation at the local level (advancing a smart-grid where all of us can manage, produce, and sell energy similarly as information flows in the internet).

Basically, the stimulus should do more than throw money at the problem. It should invest strategically in the infrastructure that will provide a solution in the long term. A solution that will be many times larger than the quick infusion of funding provided by the stimulus, and that will put us on track for a revitalized economy.

As my recent blog posts mention, I have been working with hundreds and thousands of young people for these types of solutions at both the state and national policy levels. In the realm of residential energy efficiency in particular, I have been going much deeper, working over the past year and a half to launch a start-up phase co-op (Cooperative Energy Futures) working with residents and neighborhoods to improve energy efficiency using a model that seeks to transform the energy efficiency market as described in the 4-point plan above. Recently, this adventure has taken me to the state legislature as the stimulus allocation plan is being developed, which is when I started to worry about the short-sightedness of the quick-fix stimulus approach.

If you are interested in linking up with Cooperative Energy Futures to start applying this emerging approach with your neighbors or any group of interested friends, or want to work with us to figure out how to implement efficiency at scale, please contact us through our Interest Form.

Here’s why major investments in energy efficiency make so much sense:
America’s 112 million housing units make up 35% of our electrical consumption, about 1.145 trillion kilo-watt hours per year. If you multiply that by the 11.47 cents per kilowatt hour that the average American paid for electricity in 2008 (according to the DOE), that’s $131.3 billion that residents are throwing to the coal industry, the nuclear industry, and other big energy providers (incidentally the fossil energy sector is the sector of the economy controlled by the fewest, biggest companies that have virtual control on the market, and create fewer jobs per dollar than most sectors of the economy while causing massive negative costs on society through air and water pollution, land degradation, and the wide economic impacts of climate change). And this isn’t even counting small businesses, or other sectors of the built environment, or natural gas and other sources of home heating. If the big numbers make your eyes glaze over, go look at your energy bill for a reminder of how much money you are losing. For most Minnesotans, it is upwards of $2,000 per year – much more for very large homes. The impacts of this energy cost disproportionately affect lower-income Minnesotans, both because their energy bill takes up a larger percentage of a smaller paycheck, and because low-cost housing tends to be inefficient and poorly insulated – making it high on energy costs. Similarly, the long-term impacts of burning all of this fossil fuel hurt people without the resources to compensate the most – like lower-income residents of New Orleans or places you are less likely to hear about, like flooded Bangladesh or drought-stricken areas in Africa.

The reason that investing so much stimulus money in efficiency is a great idea is that simple improvements (with paybacks less than 5 years) in home energy efficiency can cut energy usage in the range of 20-30%, helping keep money in our communities and reduces our collective investment in energy dependency and global warming. Deeper investments, with paybacks on the range of less than 10 years, can cut home energy usage by over 50%. The dramatic increases in home improvement trades like energy auditors, insulation contractors, and furnace replacers is also a huge boon for job creation – efficiency improvements yield far more jobs per dollar than any other source of energy (renewable energy creates several times more jobs per dollar than fossil fuels, and efficiency creates even more). It makes excellent sense to invest federal funds in this sector – it saves money for those who are struggling most in a tight economy, creates lots of job, improves our built infrastructure over the long term, and helps us start the journey to a post-carbon economy.

The Marshalltown plant was the last remaining proposed coal plant in Iowa. In early January, LS Power/Dynegy decided to discontinue efforts to build a new coal plant in Waterloo.

In early 2007, Interstate Power and Light spokesman Scott Drzycimski announced a plan to construct a 600 MW coal-fired plant outside of Marshalltown, IA. The project was to be headed by Alliant Energy, one of IPL’s subsidiaries, and would create 65 permanent jobs and 1,000 temporary ones over the span of its construction.  Alliant’s announcement today cited the current economic climate, a recent ratemaking decision by the Iowa Utilities Board, and impending federal future greenhouse gas regulations.

I’d like to draw attention to a few things.  First, Governor Culver said this morning that he did everything he possible to make the coal plant succeed.  I can tell you that Culver pretty much stayed out of the decision-making process and allowed the Iowa Utilities Board to conduct its business without interfering.  Although Culver is no friend of coal, he is also trying to navigate the jobs vs. environment argument that is now surfacing in Marshalltown.  If you read through the comments, it becomes apparent that the support for the plant in Marshalltown was more because of the economic development than the energy the coal plant would produce.

Here’s the kicker – coal plants are a single source of jobs that people can point to and say we will have X jobs because of this facility.  Jobs in the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors are dispersed across companies and regions, which makes it more difficult to define the number of jobs that will be created.  And yet it is exactly the geographic distribution and broader benefits that make jobs in these sectors more desirable.  Add this to the fact that more diverse investments make these green jobs more resilient in a time of economic turmoil than further in fossil technology.

The multifacted challenges that threaten to drag our economy further down mean we need to have new ways of generating long-term jobs on a large scale and new ways of communicating what these jobs are,what we need to do to get them and why they are preferable to the old dirty jobs.

We can’t simply say “no coal, no coal.”  We are at a dangerous moment where we have the momentum to turn the tide on coal, which is worth celebrating to be sure.   This makes us a target for the folks promoting fossil energy jobs right now.   As the economy deteriorates we risk being made scapegoats by an industry who is putting much more money into developing and distributing a persuasive message than we are.

We talk about building a diverse movement and engaging those who will be most affected by climate change, which means that we need to adapt our communication to resonate with folks’ economic concerns.  As the coal industry plays on the public’s economic fears, we have to be prepared to rebut their claims with clear concise and evocative messages that are easily recognizable and go beyond “look it’s a wind turbine.” This is a challenging time where people are willing to accept coal if it guarantees jobs.

Obviously the battle for public opinion is an ongoing process, but we are never going to reach our full effectiveness if we don’t try to anticipate the counterarguments of the fossil fuel industry.  At the moment we sometimes come off as kind of self-righteous, with the message “we are good and those who support coal are bad.”  If that image persists, the fossil fuel industry will find a receptive audience for their message among people who have lost their jobs and just need to put the food on the table.  This is not to say that everyone stopping coal comes off as self-righteous, but we should be aware of this potential.  Let’s make sure we are conscious of the image we project, the way our opponents portray us and how we want to counter it. That way we can keep winning our victories against coal and building solutions with the public’s support behind us.