For those of you who are not familiar with Representative Dingell, he has 1. Been a congressman longer than any other current member of congress (since 1955), and in February will be the longest-serving member ever; 2. He has been chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee since 1981 (just about when we stopped seeing mileage standard increases), and; 3. Has been the congressional ‘enabler’ (in the Alchoholics Anonymous sense of the word) for the American auto companies and helped them scuttle environmental and efficiency legislation over and over and over again. See my post on the slow motion trainwreck that is the Big 3 from several months back to see how I really feel.

The reason this is such a big deal is that 1. Congress never replaces extremely senior chairmen of important committees; 2. Congressman Waxman is a very clear supporter of global warming and environmental legislation; 3. By ousting Congressman Dingle, the congress made if VERY clear that they intend to position the legislature to push through president-elect Obama’s aggressive green agenda, and 4. An added bonus - the US automakers have about as much clout in Washington right now as Jack Abramoff.

Keep your eye on this committee in the next year as my guess is there will be more meaningful legislation coming out of it than there has been in 28 years.

“Delay is no longer an option.”

See.

And it is music to Green Collar Media’s ears to hear him tie this imperative back to the economy and his belief that investing in green will create 5 Million good jobs. Now if only we can convince him to start calling them Green Collar Jobs (which is what they are), like his future Secretary of State does. Hey Van Jones, let’s get our people working on this together.

Going forward this blog will cover how American Green Policy is impacting American business.  This will include energy policy, transportation policy, building policy, tax policy, and environmental policy and how these decisions help or hinder the ability of the American marketplace to succeed in addressing the challenges of our time.   You can expect conversations with green business leaders who are in the trenches fighting to bring green energy solutions to scale, updates on new legislation and how the market is reacting.

We at Green Collar Media are excited about this new focus and looking forward to bringing you insight into the new Green playing field that will be shaped over the next several years.  It is going to be  a wild ride.

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released. The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. During the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.

According to the report, which was released by the United Nations, the soot is so severe that it is polluting the rain and despoiling the glaciers that tens of millions of Asians rely on for their water supply.  And if rising sea levels, and the devastation of the ecosystem through global warming isn’t enough to get us off our tails,

“The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he [Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University] said, adding that in China, about 3.6 percent of the nation’s annual gross domestic product, or $82 billion, is lost to the health effects of pollution.

My guess is that $82 billion is just the tip of the terribly filthy iceberg.

With this new hole in our federal deficit, which was already at record levels prior to this unplanned bailout (the conservative Wall Street Journal is calling it Socialism) how will we ensure that we are able to invest in Green - the one area that will lead to continued economic growth for the 21st century?  The Wall Street Journal thinks that Democrats should hold the nation’s feet to the fire and insist that we invest in this now, during the debate on this bailout.   What do you think?

In the Senate, the so-called Gang of 20 is moving to pass some moderate legislation that also allows for increased off-shore drilling - and although this is not a short or long-term energy solution, it is more important to compromise and move forward than to sit in limbo forever.

The good news is that money from this drilling will go to help fund the alternative-energy initiatives our country so vitally needs.  So, the Republicans get to say they succeeded in making America drill for its remaining oil assets, and Democrats get to say we compromised so we can move forward in solving our energy crisis long-term.  I am good with this….let’s move on and start capitalizing on the green revolution.

This seems like a reasonable question to ask, but to ask it two days after Barack Obama gave his speech on energy and announced his formal energy platform either means he is, a.) not doing his homework (at all), or, b.) actively trying to keep people from learning about it by making obtuse statements that change the conversation away from substance and towards rebuttal.  He continued this pattern with the other main point he brought up, that Obama would tax the oil companies on their windfall profits.  That he would do this to help  provide $1000 energy rebates for families unable to afford gas or heating oil was barely touched on, but plenty of time was spent on the part about how Obama hates companies that make a profit.  Mike, you can change the subject all you want, but you’re from the northeast, and you probably know people personally who are not going to be able to pay their heating bills this winter.  There are lots of working families and people on fixed income that are being hurt by these price increases and one of our presidential candidates presented his ENERGY POLICY, and American’s deserve to know what it is and how he plans to pay for it - all without partisan talking points as the main focus.   I am equally interested in learning how Senator McCain is planning on addressing this short-term issue and the much larger issue of his long-term energy policy.

I urge you all to watch or read Senator Obama’s speech, as it is vitally important.  Early on he eloquently lays out the essence of his position with this statement:

When it comes to our economy, our security, and the very future of our planet, the choices we make in November and over the next few years will shape the next decade, if not the century. And central to all of these major challenges is the question of what we will do about our addiction to foreign oil.

OK, that is exactly what we want and need to hear.  What’s more important than our economy, our security and our planet?  The fact that energy policy can positively impact all three is why Green is going to help America get its Mojo back and is why I started Green Collar Media.  He makes it clear that there are some short term pains that need to be addressed due to the price spike and he makes the following suggestions:

1. Provide $1000 energy rebate to every working family in America (to be paid for by windfall profits tax, as mentioned earlier by Mr. Barnacle)
2. Increased domestic oil production
3. Not opening up new areas to drilling but making the oil companies drill on the 68 million acres they already have, or give up their leases to someone who will
4. Increasing shale oil extraction
5. Drilling in a portion of Alaska (not ANWR)
6. Releasing 70 Million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve to bring prices down quickly

He states, though, that these are short-term fixes and in no way address or solve our addiction to foreign oil which is so poisoning our nation.

…breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face. It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy. This transformation will be costly, and given the fiscal disaster we will inherit from the last Administration, it will likely require us to defer some other priorities.

It is also a transformation that will require more than just a few government programs. Energy independence will require an all-hands-on-deck effort from America — effort from our scientists and entrepreneurs; from businesses and from every American citizen. Factories will have to re-tool and re-design. Businesses will need to find ways to emit less carbon dioxide. All of us will need to buy more of the fuel-efficient cars built by this state, and find new ways to improve efficiency and save energy in our own homes and businesses.

This will not be easy. And it will not happen overnight. And if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they are either fooling themselves or trying to fool you.

If that is not a presidential candidate telling us the truth, than I cannot imagine what that could possibly look like.  Mr. Barnacle, you owe this guy an apology.

He goes on to outline 3 main steps that he would take as president to help America succeed in meeting these challenges and taking advantage of the opportunities it will create:

1. Help American car companies create the next generation of electric-hybrid vehicles that get 150 miles to the gallon and get 1 Million of them on the road within six years.  To do this, he suggests investing in advance battery technology, leverage private sector funding to bring the products to market, but offer a $7000 tax rebate for purchasers of the new cars.
2. Require that 10% of our energy come from renewable sources by the end of his first term.  Tax breaks, incentives, funding for entrepreneurs…all the stuff you would expect, but hey…they work.
3. Start a nationwide conservation effort.  He wants America to use 15% less energy by the end of the next decade.  This is the easiest and most cost effective thing we can do and it will save us $130 Billion a year if we can pull it off.   He wants to make national building efficiency standards so that new buildings will be 50% more efficient within 4 years, and based on California’s success, change the ways that utilities get paid by compensating them on how much energy they save, not how much they sell.

This is a substantive and well thought out stance on the most important strategic decision of our time.   I’ll let Senator Obama’s optimistic words, which capture my own beliefs, sum up his policy.

But I know we can do this. We can do this because we are Americans. We do the improbable. We beat great odds. We rally together to meet whatever challenge stands in our way. That’s what we’ve always done — and it’s what we must do now. For the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we must end the age of oil in our time.

Game On!  Senator McCain - you have your work cut out for you.

The front page article from the New York Times today outlines the sprint the Big 3 are in to see if they can completely revamp their offerings and business structure prior to running out of cash.  I hope they make it.

This is not really why I’m posting today, however.  There is another article I noticed while sitting on my front porch, reading the Times on my laptop, called Ditch the Gas Guzzler?  Well, Maybe Not Yet. that outlines the  financial reasons why, if you are an SUV or a truck owner, you may want to consider holding onto your big vehicle or even getting a new one (wow, can you get a deal now!).  It cites a number of factor to take into consideration, including trade in value, practicality of a small car for your needs, how much gas you would actually save compared to cost of trading in your vehicle for a rock bottom price, etc..

The genesis of the article is described like this:

Philip Reed, senior consumer advice editor at Edmunds.com, was on the tennis court a month ago when a friend asked him what he ought to do about his Ford Escape S.U.V. “I said, ‘You probably don’t want to hear this, but your best thing is to keep driving it,’ ” he said.

Mr. Reed and his colleagues huddled to come up with a way to help consumers do the math, and the result is the new “Gas Guzzler for Gas Sipper” trade-in calculator at edmunds.com/calculators/gas-guzzler.html.

Nowhere in the article does it encourage people to take carbon, or environmental impact, into consideration.  The calculator does not take this into consideration either.  I understand that it is the “Money” section of the paper, but it is nearly malfeasance in these times to not even mention this.  With all of the data they are gathering in this calculator, it would be an easy update to also allow people to get an idea of how they would be impacting their carbon footprint by trading in.

By the way, I am also not saying that trading down would make a positive carbon impact - or at least not for a long time.  There was a great article in Wired a few months ago that detailed the carbon ramifications of trading in your big car for a Prius.  Thier analysis?  Between building a new car, crushing and getting rid of the old one, combined with the actual carbon savings based  on how much you drive, you would not break even until you had put over 100,000 miles on the Prius.  Their suggestion is to buy a used car that gets decent mileage - it creates a much lower carbon footprint. 

What I am saying is that we need to have this kind of information at our fingertips whenever we make large decisions.  If we are going to ask our corporations to consistently make decisions with the triple-bottom-line in mind, then we - as consumers - need to do the same thing.

Hey Edmunds, update your calculator…we need all the information we can get.

Not every  green initiative has to be focused on saving energy…although this idea will save energy, and resources and vital metals, and MONEY!  The idea came to me while helping my 6 year old son sort through his piggy bank and make neat little stacks of 10 out of all of the different coin types (oh my god, what a pain).  It turns out that while scavenging around the house, he had collected 396 pennies.  I was impressed with his persistence in getting them all stacked (not to mention scamming all those coins from his mother and I).  We were going to bring them to the bank to cash them in - until he dumped them all back into his piggy bank and mixed them with all the other coins as soon as he had finished. 

But that got me thinking.  How many pennies are in the average home?  And how much does it cost to make a penny in this era of spiking commodity prices?  And how many pennies are we minting every year?  And how much time are we wasting dealing with these things.

According to the New York Times, the US Mint produces about 7.7 billion of the useless little suckers a year.  That’s $77 Million dollars worth of pennies put into circulation per year, but here is the kicker…It is costing the US at least $107 million to produce them.  That’s because the price of zinc (which makes up 97.5% of the penny) and price of copper (the other 2.5%) are at historic highs.  Just like oil, this is not because of commodity traders, although that had something to do with it.  It is due to the fact that demand is sky high.  Countries like China are consuming vast amounts of these metals and there are limited amounts available.  Thank goodness the zinc market has cooled off a little bit.  This time last year, zinc was trading for well over four times as much as it was in 2003.

This brings me to my next point.  The reason we have to produce so many pennies is because they are all in jars in our houses, and retailers need them to make change.  When retailers need them they go to their banks, who go to the fed to get shiny new pennies because the banks don’t have any because nobody is turning in their pennies.  Let’s be honest, when was the last time you rolled up all your pennies and brought them in to be turned into cash?  Even my 6 year old was horrified that all that work netted him less than $4.  So here is some back of the napkin calculations on the number of pennies hidden in houses.  According to the US Census, there are  111,162,259 households in America.  Figuring 400 pennies (we’ve got at least 5 times that many if I look around), we are looking at over 44 Billion pennies hanging out in people’s homes, and my guess is that this is an extremely conservative estimate.

I’m not the only person thinking about this.  There is a pretty strong movement out there to retire the penny, and the most well known group, Citizens for Retiring the Penny, makes the case that pennies, in addition to costing more than they’re worth, are a waste of time:

Most cash transactions involve the exchange of pennies, leading to an increase in the time for the transaction to take place.  The National Association of Convenience Stores and Walgreen’s drug store chain estimated that handling pennies adds 2 to 2.5 seconds to each cash transaction (remember that we are including the occasional customer who spends 30 seconds looking for the penny in his pocket).  

Let us estimate that each person goes through two of these transactions per day and that on average there is one person waiting in line (making for a total of three people’s time wasted in each transaction).   We can then calculate that the presence of pennies wastes (2 transactions/day) X (2 seconds/transaction) X (3 people per transaction) = 12 seconds per day, or 1.2 hours per person per year.  Of course, when you get home you still have to find something to do with your pennies, meaning that probably only about half of the wasted time is directly connected with a cash transaction (the other time is associated with counting pennies etc), giving a total of 2.4 wasted hours per person per year.  The mean wage in the US is approximately $17/hour, implying that each of us is effectively “paying” $40 per year to keep pennies in circulation.  Given that the US has ~ 240 million adults, using pennies is currently costing the nation $10 billion per year!

OK, I think that is interesting….but my issue is that we are not going to retire the penny cold turkey…not gonna happen.  So my little brainstorm is to use the green movement to give us a call to action and a ’time horizon’ (to quote our beloved president) to begin retiring the penny.  This is how it would work.

1.  Have the fed suggest to every bank in the country that they get a self service coin sorting machine.
2.  Run a public service announcement encouraging Americans to gather up their loose change and bring it to the bank - it is good for the environment, saves taxpayers money and helps ensure that we don’t run out of important metals (I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to run out of copper anytime soon…I like electricity and microprocessors).
3. The fed will figure out an amount (less than $0.004 premium they are paying for every penny produced now) that they will pay the bank for every penny collected in this manner.
4.  The banks submit notarized accounts of the number of pennies collected each year and put back into cirulation (fed sends check).  They can offer bonuses to the banks that order fewer than ‘X’ new pennies each year
5.  We announce at the same time a 10 year timeline leading up to the elimination of the penny, and make it a stated goal of the US to mint as few pennies as possible during that time (make it patriotic to turn in the pennies - it is green and good for the economy!)
6.  At the end of the penny era, we ask Americans to turn them in again, and we have a huge smelt-fest, put all the metal on the open market and use the proceeds to help pay down this outrageous-freaking deficit we’ve been handed.

So if my estimated number of orphaned pennies is even close and we can get 10% of the households in America to turn their pennies into cash each year, we will be able to eliminate 57% of our new penny creation.  This is about a $60MM savings to US taxpayers each year (minus what would be paid to the banks) and we get to (literally) put our money where our mouth is when it comes to sustainability.  We also get the added benefit of, in the near future, never getting 49 cents in change again!

Go green…save the planet…kill the penny.

Enter Rice University and lead research Ramon Gonzales. 

They found a way to use a modified version of E. Coli bacteria to cost effectively transform the glycerin into formate, succinate and other valuable organic acids.  They have also discovered a method of turning the glycerin into ethanol.  Now if you’re like me and didn’t pay that much attention in organic chemistry class you have no idea why you should care about this.  Well the answer is simple:  Profit.

 These manufacturers have a major waste problem, not to mention a cost center that eats into their margins.  With this new technology, they can sell these and add to their bottom line instead of subtracting from it.  According to the release by Rice:

Succinate is a high-demand chemical feedstock that’s used to make everything from noncorrosive airport deicers and nontoxic solvents to plastics, drugs and food additives. Most succinate today comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels. 

According to Renewable Energy World:

Gonzalez said he’s had similar success with organisms designed to produce other high-value chemicals, including formate and lactate.

“Our goal goes beyond using this for a single process,” he said. “We want to use the technology as a platform for the ‘green’ production of a whole range of high-value products.”

This is the type of breakthrough that we are going to see more and more of.  New ways of thinking about waste that will create opportunity.  Who would have thought that the gunk created when we make biofuel would have the potential to create profits and green collar jobs?  I just don’t know if I want to be the guy working with E. Coli every day.