Widening the Circle

A girlfriend of mine pleasantly surprised me with an unexpected visit last week. She was on her way to Mexico for a conference and during a layover found out it had been cancelled due to swine flu. She rerouted her trip to the next warmest place, LA.

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Job Opportunities Grow from Green

What kind of job opportunities might be opened up by the new federal emphasis on green projects? — Dick Wetzler, St. Paul, MN

If it’s a U.S. industry that has the potential to be cleaner and greener, chances are the Obama administration has already set aside some stimulus money for it. In February 2009, the new president signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. Besides creating jobs, the bill promises to spur American companies to greener heights through investments totaling over $75 billion.

According to Environment America, a federation of state-based environmental advocacy groups, the stimulus package includes $32.8 billion for clean energy projects, $26.86 billion for energy efficiency initiatives and $18.95 billion for green transportation. Some of the key green features of the bill include accelerating the deployment of “smart grid” technology (systems of routing power in ways that optimize energy-efficiency), providing energy efficiency funds for schools, offering support for governors and mayors to beef up energy efficiency in private homes and public buildings, and establishing a new loan guarantee program to help renewable energy producers survive in down economic times.

With the private capital and credit so tight due to the recession, this influx of federal support is vital to help the still fledgling green energy and transportation sectors stay afloat. And most economists agree that it makes good sense to steer away from finite foreign oil toward homegrown renewable energy. Obama has promised the creation of some 500,000 jobs in the nation’s burgeoning clean energy sector alone.

“The central facts here are irrefutable: Spending the same amount of money on building a clean energy economy will create three times more jobs within the U.S. than would spending on our existing fossil fuel infrastructure,” writes University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin in The Nation. “The transformation to a clean energy economy can therefore serve as a major long-term engine of job creation.” Wind turbine engineers, insulation installers, recycling sorters and photovoltaic cell salespeople—along with the businesspersons behind them—can all look forward to bright and potentially lucrative futures.

This view is shared by the Solar Energy Industries Association, which predicts that the stimulus will help create some 119,000 jobs in the American solar sector alone before the end of 2010. Employers from solar cell manufacturers to green building materials retailers to wind farm maintenance firms to recycling haulers to energy auditors will likewise be looking to swell their ranks of employees with relevant skills.

The federal government itself is also in on the recovery effort beyond doling out the money. According to the official Recovery Act website, the General Services Administration’s Public Building Service will invest $5.55 billion in federal building projects, “including $4.5 billion to transform federal facilities into exemplary high-performance green buildings, $750 million to renovate and construct new federal offices and courthouses, and $300 million to construct and renovate border stations.” About $1 billion worth of projects will be undertaken—a boon for everyone in the building industry, including construction workers, electricians, plumbers, air conditioning mechanics, carpenters, architects and engineers.

CONTACTS: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, www.recovery.gov; Environment America, www.environmentamerica.org; Solar Energy Industries Association, www.seia.org.

Plans to Mine Grand Canyon for Uranium Still Underway

Are plans to mine uranium near the Grand Canyon, as proposed by the Bush administration in 2008, still underway? – Denton Chase, Half Moon Bay, CA

The Obama administration has been quick to overturn several anti-environmental moves ushered in during the 11th hour of George W. Bush’s presidency, but halting uranium exploration and mining near the Grand Canyon has not been one of them.

Last fall, Bush’s Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, circumvented a prohibition on mining activities by authorizing uranium exploration within a million acre buffer zone around Grand Canyon National Park. Recent spikes in the price of uranium—perhaps due to renewed interest in nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels as global warming makes its presence felt—have led to a surge in applications for new uranium mining permits on otherwise protected federal lands.

Green groups fear that once mining starts near the Grand Canyon, similar destructive plans will also get the green light in and around other protected areas, including Arches National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Canyonlands National Park and the proposed Dolores River Canyon wilderness area.

When Kempthorne first proposed opening up the land to uranium mining, several concerned parties—including dozens of elected officials, public utilities and Native American tribes—complained about potential threats to surface and ground water from such activities. They fear that uranium mining in the area could lead to the release of radioactivity and heavy metals like selenium into the Colorado River and its watershed, including within Grand Canyon National Park.

In lieu of federal action on the issue, green groups have taken up the cause. Some, like the Pew Environment Group, are lobbying President Obama to overturn the mining allowances; others are working the judicial angle. Three organizations—the Center for Biological Diversity, Grand Canyon Trust and Sierra Club—filed suit in federal court in October 2008 to block the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the area, from allowing uranium mining in what they consider risky and nationally significant areas. “This is an agency in dire need of leadership from the new administration,” says Taylor McKinnon, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Grand Canyon deserves it.”

The battle over uranium mining near the Grand Canyon sheds light on an even larger issue: the 1872 Mining Law, enacted under President Ulysses S. Grant and still in effect today. Long a bone of contention along partisan lines, the law has so far opened up of some 350 million acres of public land across the western U.S. to virtually unchecked mining. Green groups maintain that the law, put in place to encourage westward expansion, no longer makes sense in the modern era of dwindling natural resources.

“Current federal policy that allows the mining industry to operate next to America’s national icons and against the will of local communities must be changed,” said Jane Danowitz, Pew’s U.S. public lands program director. “It’s time to modernize the nation’s 1872 mining law.”

CONTACTS: Center for Biological Diversity, www.biologicaldiversity.org; Sierra Club, www.sierraclub.org; Pew Environment Group, www.pewtrusts.org.

Photo: John Foxx, Getty Images

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