I am white…a woman…pro-choice… educated…The government needs to run 
                                                                   like a corporation, simple as that.
                                                                                                               —Trump supporter
 
​In the age of Trump, all sustainability programs and policies will not be equal. Proven technologies and designs will surely be easier to market to the incoming administration than environmental regulation.
 
Donald’s surrogates would have us believe that he follows in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan. In fact, he patters the path of our 30th president — a man remembered mostly for having said:
 
        After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned
​        with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.

Coolidge—given the moniker of Silent Cal—was a progressive union-busting governor from Massachusetts. He became the darling of conservatives.
 
As president, he appointed regulators who would not regulate, pared back the federal budget, reduced taxes and did his best to keep government out of people’s lives—even the ones who might have benefitted from it. But for the Silent part, Mr. Trump appears anxious to emulate Coolidge and follow his mantra: the business of government is business.
 
Fortunately for solar, wind and efficiency measures and designs, there is business to be had. The business of many businesses today is sustainability. Not simply pandering to left leaning liberals, corporate America is learning that renewable energy and increased efficiency in its many forms, e.g. manufacturing and product design, is profitable in many ways.
 
Let me count some of them: job creation; investment opportunity; reduced corporate costs; higher corporate profits; lower monthly utility bills; increased consumer savings and/or greater discretionary spending; technological innovation leading to new product development and manufacturing processes; reduced risk of respiratory problems particularly in the most vulnerable populations; lower health entitlement costs; exportable products leading to improved trade balances; and, the respect of other nations.
 
These are not wishes nor exaggerations; they are facts. Though truth may fail to convert a denier, it rarely fails to convince an investor. Renewable energy and efficiency projects are everywhere. Their reality cannot be denied; their tires can be kicked.
 
A key issue of the 2016 campaigns was jobs. Losses in the mining and manufacturing sectors have weighed heavily on the minds of American workers, while rising on the list of promised political solutions. Some things, however, cannot be fixed by legislation.
 
The coal industry cannot be enacted back to health. Many of the manufacturing jobs travelling overseas have done so on a one-way ticket. Locking
American industry in and foreign manufacturers out is not going to work. Like it or not, globalization is here to stay. Trade wars have no victors; there
are no spoils to collect.
 
You can no more hold on to American jobs when the economics are elsewhere than you can hold quicksilver in your hand. President-elect Trump knows this; why else has he put a massive infrastructure program near the top of his priority list? Why, because he knows the future of the nation is intimately tied to innovation and domestic construction.
 
Renewable energy and energy efficiency are proven job creators. The clean energy industry in the U.S. currently employs over 2.5 million people, according to Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), a nonpartisan business group.
​
Today the coal industry employs some 56,700 coal miners across the U.S., down 11,200 from March 2015. Compare this to a recent study by E2 and BW Research in which 89,000 clean energy jobs, in 7,200 businesses, were identified in Ohio alone.
 
According to the report more than 56,000 Ohioans (63.5 percent of the total state clean energy workforce) are employed by firms focused on energy efficiency (EE), including residential and commercial efficiency-related activities, “smart grid” work, and energy storage. These strong results have been achieved even as Ohio was ranked only 25th among the states in energy efficiency for 2014 by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

Coal mining jobs peaked at 823,000 in 1923—the year Warren G. Harding died and Silent Cal was sworn in as president. The last time the number of coal miners equaled the number of Ohioans working in the clean energy/efficiency industry was 1995.
 
In the battle ground states of Pennsylvania, Florida, Missouri, Illinois and Ohio, the number of jobs attributable to clean energy, including transportation,
is between 1 and 1.5 percent of total employment in each of the states. For Vermont, Massachusetts and California, that range jumps to between 2.4
and 4.3 percent.
 
Mr. Trump and his troop of Republicans need to understand that a rollback of federal and state policies, e.g. tax credits and RPS, could throw out of work more people than the Clean Power Plan ever would. More to the point, clean energy jobs will continue to grow in the future, unlike coal, which is on a very slippery downward slope—with or without deregulation. On our current path, renewables will account for 50 percent of the U.S. power fleet in 2040.
 
Jobs are not the only source of vitality that clean energy brings to the U.S. economy. The American Wind Energy Association has released figures showing that in 2015, total capital investment in the industry was $32.7 billion, while annual land lease payments of >$50 million creating an additional income stream for many farmers.
 
Not all manufacturing has left the building—there are over 500 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. producing products for the wind industry ranging from blade, tower and turbine assemblies to raw component suppliers. Rather than trying to keep manufacturers at home, risking their competitiveness, why not continue the clean energy transition and expand production facilities in the U.S.?
 
Renewable energy and energy efficiency fits neatly into Mr. Trump’s infrastructure plans. While government is about the business of encouraging American enterprise to fix and expand roads, bridges, airports, schools, hospitals— basically the built public environment—why not use the opportunity to do it sustainably?

Surely as a real estate typhoon the Donald understands the economic efficiency of building the future into the present. Why invest in obsolescence? The net present value of doing it right far exceeds the cost of doing it wrong.

Proven and soon to be proven possibilities are endless: piezoelectric roads and floors; generators in the water lines; solar panels on the roofs of parking lots; reduced carbon cements; embedded solar heated water pipes under roads and sidewalks creating and capturing thermal energy.

Although I doubt that Trump’s expectation of a no-cost to government infrastructure program is totally realistic, I can see using the tax code through which he intends to attract private investment to also encourage sustainability through innovation. Write the code so that sustainable and innovative designs are rewarded with extra credits.

Shouldn’t the business of government be encouraging business to go forward rather than backward? Why let China profit from the inevitable transition to sustainability?

Even if climate change were a hoax, it’s led to profitable and growing new industries and enterprises. We’ve fallen for lies before. This one, unlike the election, is at least guaranteed to lead to producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.
 
Look for the next in the series when I will be discussing energy efficiency, environmental justice and offering a concept whereby the private sector picks up a substantial part of the check.
 
 

I imagine many in the renewable energy, energy efficiency and environmental communities are still trying to wake up from what they are hoping is just
a bad dream. Well, let me tell you, Donald J. Trump is not the result of a piece of bad fish you ate or some incubus who has dropped in to disturb your sleep.

No, indeed, DJT is the next President of these here United States. Deal with it!

By dealing I don’t mean coping or carping. I mean we as a community need to sit down and figure out what can be done--together—to keep the climate
train on the tracks.

Let’s start with something of a probable positive — an observation addressing the President-elect’s oft repeated promise to end the war on coal.
The reality of today’s energy market is that coal is increasingly less competitive. As I have pointed out before, king coal is no longer a merry old soul because
of the operation of the market, not regulations. Nothing—short of heavy federal subsidies or enactment of a fossil portfolio standard—is going to change that.

Talk of saving the coal industry is babbling about when elephants learn to fly. Nothing is going to change that—not President Trump and not the maintained Republican majorities in Congress. Not even coal state journals believe this to be other than myth—convenient to get elected, not possible to make good on.
Less mythical and more likely is the impact DJT, XLV is going to have on the Paris Accord. Trump and the Republican Party walked the plank of opposition to
the Obama administration’s commitment to combat global warming and to transition the world away from fossil fuels towards a clean energy economy.
The candidate and his surrogates identified the 2015 Paris Accords as a prominent target of opportunity in their scheme to make America great again.

World leaders were sufficiently worried about a possible Clinton loss, but they managed to ratify the COP21 agreement months ahead of even the
most optimistic projections. As a consequence, the Accord was entered into force on Nov. 4, 2016—mere days ahead of the U.S. presidential election.
I take no pride in having warned about finding solace in the security of the Accords even in the shade of a Republican electoral victory. Unlike other promises
to reverse the emergence of a clean energy economy requiring action, Trump need do nothing in the case of the Paris agreement to make good on
this particular one.

The distinction between the need to act and to ignore will prove an important one. First, however, let’s consider the foundations of enmity felt by DJT towards a cleaner and more sustainable global climate.

Opposition by both the President-elect and significant numbers of Republican members of the House and Senate is minimally based upon:

• Commitment to cancelling President Obama’s unilateral executive actions  and orders—of which matters like the Clean Power Plan,                                  Clean Water and Ozone Rules top the list;
• General resistance to regulation particularly those they can claim are job killing;
• An overarching desire to diminish, if not disband, the Environmental Protection Agency;
• Disbelief that pollution/climate change/human action are in any way related or harmful  to the health and welfare of the nation                                              or the world and the scientific basis of the conclusion is at best whack and at worst self-serving by scientists in search of funding;
• Belief that U.S. cannot be energy independent without continued dependence on coal; and,
• What appears to be an abiding belief that solar and wind are somehow culpable for coal’s plight.                                                               

The easiest targets for the incoming administration are regulations based on Executive Orders, especially those that have or are encountering
substantive legal challenges to the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to promulgate them in the first place. Much of what President Obama
has accomplished in terms of climate and clean energy has unfortunately been a function of his power as the chief executive.

I say unfortunate, because what one President’s pen hath writ can be erased by his successor. Traditionally, incoming presidents have acceded to an outgoing’s request to maintain some executive continuity. Nothing about this election or the Republican nominee is traditional. Trump’s supporters are expecting significant change in the first 100 days; he is going to disappoint them at his peril.

DJT/XVL has overpromised what he can accomplish quickly; environmental regulations based on executive actions and drafted by an agency itself created by
an order of the president should prove as easy as it is going to get. Even should the courts find the Clean Power Plan and the Water and Ozone
rules constitutional, the new administration can choose not to enforce them.

As I will discuss in future installments, targets like tax credits, state clean energy policies and programs not dependent upon federal funds or authorizations
and growing demand for distributed energy systems, powered by solar and wind and kept running by batteries, will be much harder targets to attack.
The most vulnerable targets of opportunity, beyond Paris and the power, water and ozone regulations already referenced, likely include:

• Pipeline permitting, e.g. Keystone and Dakota Access;
• Allowing extraction of oil and gas reserves from federal lands;
• Fracking rules that have also come under judicial review;
• The budgets of federal agencies, e.g. Energy, Interior and Environment connected  to clean energy sources and the environment—including                         not replacing retiring federal program personnel; and
• The appointment of federal lower and appellate court judges—not the least of whom will be Scalia’s successor.

The relatively greater vulnerability of environmental regulations and policies troubles me—not only for the potential to roll back the progress made to date—for what it means to the larger clean energy and environmental communities.
I had written in a column this summer of concern about the growing fissures in the relationships within and between the renewable energy and environmental communities. I gave as an example of my concern the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert — a project opposed for its impact on nature and supported for its production of green electricity.
I had written then:
                       Big versus little, rich versus poor, strong versus weak, conservationist versus environmentalist, solar versus wind, wind versus
​                       biomass, biomass versus environmentalist… state government versus federal—we are a global community divided.
It is easy to see how an early focus on environmental targets could create negative pressures on already fissured relationships. We have seen it most recently in
the carbon tax initiative in Washington state.
As always, in any given year there will be winners and losers within our community. Do not let what happened on Nov. 8 divide us. Today’s winners could well
be tomorrow’s losers. We have come this far together; to now go it alone, to not chart a course that fights for environmental justice, while recognizing
the requirements of the marketplace is to court defeat.
Throughout this series I will be addressing an agenda I hope accommodative of the concerns of the whole community and able to capture its collective strength. The next installment of the series will describe some of the weapons we have at our disposal, e.g., citizen law suits and community power, for charting a new passage in the book of transition.

Have you noticed something missing from the presidential campaigns lately? I mean other than veracity, high principles and civility.
 
Global warming seems to have left the building about the time Sanders did.  Although the question of climate change has been raised a lot lately, it has been mostly by movie stars, pundits and bloggers like me asking: “why the candidates aren’t talking about it?”  Inconvenient though it may be, I don’t think it particularly surprising. 
 
The most prominent mention of the topic since the summer’s nominating conventions was made towards the end of the second presidential debate, when a be-sweatered, beatified and, ultimately, berated Ken Bone asked the candidates:
 
What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs, while at the same time remaining environmentally-friendly and
minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?

To which Donald replied:
 
Such a great question because energy is under siege by the  Obama administration.  The EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, is killing these energy companies. And foreign companies are now coming in.  Now I am all for alternative forms of energy including: wind and solar, etc. But we need much more… Hillary…wants to put the miners out of business…I will bring our energy companies back…go to a great place like West Virginia or places like Ohio…or …Pennsylvania…see what they are doing to the people, miners and others in the energy business. It's a disgrace.
 
To which Hillary responded (emphasis mine):
 
We are however producing a lot of natural gas that serves as a bridge to more renewable fuels…I think that's an important transition.
We’ve got to remain energy independent…I have a comprehensive energy policy, but it really does include fighting climate change because I think that is a serious problem. And I support moving towards more clean renewable energy as quickly as we can. Because I think we can be the 21st century clean energy superpower and create millions of new jobs and businesses. But I want to be sure that we don't leave people behind. That’s why I'm the only candidate from the very beginning of this campaign who had a plan to help us revitalize coal country.  
 
After which, the campaigns went back to battering each other as usual about things other than global warming and what they would do about it.
 
Over the past year numerous polls have shown Americans’ willingness to believe the scientists and to pay extra for electricity generated by clean energy sources as well as support for climate action.  Senator Sanders and others, including the billionaire activist and political contributor Tom Steyer and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, have spent significant time and resources educating voters about the problem. 
 
President Obama has made it a priority of his last years in office, ordering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to draft the Clean Power Plan.  Pope Francis issued Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, a 200 page encyclical, echoing the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi and encouraging Catholics and non-Catholics alike to care for our common home.
 
So why—with voters indicating their desire to act and all of these heavy hitters extolling, urging and cajoling Americans to recognize global warming as one of the more significant problems facing future generations—have the candidates not addressed this issue more prominently? 
 
The fact is that climate change remains one of the more contentious, divisive and over appreciated issues.  According to the Christian Science Monitor (CSM):
 
In 2001, the gap between Republicans and Democrats on whether climate change is real and human-caused was 17 percentage points.
This year, the gap stands at 41 points. Just 43 percent of Republicans now believe climate change is human-caused, compared with 53 percent back then.
 
This disagrees rather dramatically with a New York Times/Stanford University/Resources for the Future poll conducted in January of 2015
that concluded:
 
An overwhelming majority of the American public, including half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming….
And, that voters were:

…more likely to vote for political candidates (in the 2016 election) who campaign on fighting …global warming.

A Stanford University poli-sci professor, and an author of the survey, called this particular conclusion the most powerful finding of the poll.  Assuming the recent CSM conclusion is a more accurate reflection of what voters believe today, what caused the finding of the earlier poll to fizzle?

Actually, nothing has happened—that wasn’t already happening.  Numerous polls over the years have claimed climate change advocates and the scientific community are making headway in their efforts to educate voters, consumers and political decision makers of the truth and consequences of global warming and to encourage action.  Like the January 2015 survey, the difference between fact and opinion was significant.

The fault is not in the finding; it is in failing to understand where on the list of priorities they place the issue and what they are really willing to do about it.  Just as the pollsters misread the depth of anger and frustration of voters in the 2016 elections, too much is made of respondents answering “yes” when asked global warming is bad. 

This is particularly the case in polls like that reported by the New York Times.  Most of the questions were prefaced by words like “assuming it is happening,” and “if nothing is done about it.” 

If I asked you: “assuming you have cancer and are going to die tomorrow, how you would feel about it.”  I venture you would say: “lousy.”
 
If nothing were done about global warming:

• 78% said it would be a serious or somewhat serious problem for the U.S;
• 59% said it would hurt future generations a great deal or a lot; and,
• 34% said a global warming would personally hurt them a great deal or a lot;
• 13% said it has hurt them.

About taxes:

• 74% opposed taxes making electricity more expensive; and
• 63% opposed higher gas taxes.

Level of understanding:

• 15% said a lot; and,
• 51% said some.

Government and elections:

• 78% said government should limit corporate pollution;
• 67% said they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate calling global warming a hoax.

Like contemplating one’s own death, the size of the universe, if aliens exist and whether Earth could be wiped out by a meteor—some problems are just too personal or too colossal to imagine.

We humans tend to break things down in understandable bits—reconcile big problems by envisioning their consequences as happening sometime in an ill-defined future—putting near-term economics ahead of future problems.  Would someone admit that global warming is a serious problem and oppose measures to avoid it—otherwise?

Pollsters do renewable energy and environmental advocates a disservice by glossing over the difference between answers and actions.  Why else would the CSM poll show a nation with 78 percent of the population believing global warming a serious problem, also leading the world in its unwillingness to do anything about it?

Take comfort that more people are willing to admit to the possibility of global warming.  Do not, however, forget the lesson of the 2016 election—it is not at the top of most people’s list of things to do.