How to Create American-Made Clean Energy

by James Parks, Mar 19, 2009

Rapid growth in green jobs, especially those that create clean and efficient energy, offers huge opportunities to revive American manufacturing and rebuild the nation’s economy. But there’s a hitch: Most of the components for clean energy are manufactured overseas. The United States ranks fifth among countries that manufacture solar components, even though the solar cell originated in America. The fact that other countries are prepared to deliver these products means that new legislation creating demand for renewable energy systems and energy efficiency services actually could create new jobs overseas, even though we have a robust manufacturing infrastructure.

The Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labor, environmental and community leaders working to create a clean energy revolution in America, has developed Make It In America: the Apollo Green Manufacturing Action Plan (GreenMAP), a series of policy recommendations aimed at revitalizing America’s manufacturing sector by investing significant federal funding in the domestic manufacture of clean energy components.

The boost to manufacturing is sorely needed. Since 1999, some 4.6 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost, many of them sent overseas. In fact, more than 1 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since the start of the current recession in December 2007, including 200,000 in January 2009 alone. These jobs are among the cornerstones of the nation’s middle class, but as manufacturing jobs disappear, the only options for many workers are low-paid service-sector jobs without clear career advancement opportunities. The result is growing inequality and a dramatically shrinking middle class.

The Apollo Alliance recommendations include:

• Providing direct federal funding for clean energy manufacturers to retool their facilities and retrain their workers to develop and produce clean energy technologies.
• Attaching standards to funding and conditioning federal support to manufacturers on their ability to meet labor and domestic content standards.
• Increasing funding for the Green Jobs Act and directing funds administered under the act toward workforce and skill standards development for the clean energy manufacturing industries.
• Creating a Presidential Task Force on Clean Energy Manufacturing to bring together a range of federal agencies to make the manufacturing of clean energy systems and components a national priority.

 Click here to read the Apollo Alliance recommendations.

Speaking at the first meeting of Vice President Biden’s Middle Class Task Force in Philadelphia last month, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard, an Apollo Alliance board member, emphasized that any new green job also must be a good job.

To rebuild our middle class, we must also be sure that the jobs created in this new, green economy are good jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, that we maximize the number of jobs created in this economy, and that these jobs truly contribute to the protection of our environment for future generations of Americans.

To ensure the green jobs created under President Obama’s economic recovery bill are family-supporting jobs, the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute (WAI) and its brand-new Center for Green Jobs have created standards to help community-level unionists assess the quality of jobs created under the recovery act. They also are urging the forming of new partnerships among employers, government, labor, community groups, environmentalists and other stakeholders to make sure the standards are carried out.

In his comments at the Middle Class Town Hall, Gerard pointed to the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s 2007 statement that said, in part:

It makes sense to seek energy independence through investments in infrastructure, clean coal/carbon sequestration, advanced technology vehicles and their key components, alternative energy resources such as solar, thermal and wind, and energy efficient buildings and appliances. Each of these should be linked to domestic investment and production.

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