energy

Van Jones talks in perfectly shaped sound bites, which is great when you're having him as a guest on your radio show.

The author of the new book The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne) alighted on my WPKN-FM show between engagements with Tavis Smiley, Fox News, CNN and the Colbert Report, and he sprayed bullet-point ideas like clips from an AK-47.

Jones, whose book made it onto the New York Times bestseller list through a well-coordinated media campaign, thinks the Obama administration should hit the ground running with Green New Deal programs that will achieve the three-in-one of combating global warming, jump-starting renewable energy and getting us out of the recession.

Jones wants to empower a Clean Energy Corps modeled on the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps to "retrofit America" by weatherizing millions of leaky homes, small businesses, schools and other public buildings. Like Sarah Palin, he invokes "Joe Sixpack," but he sees him "in a green hard hat installing windows and wielding a caulk gun."

The program would include volunteers, people in job training programs and permanent employment, too, and the recruits would come from every spectrum of society, including prison. Jones' Civic Justice Corps would give ex-offenders a new career and a green job.

"The Bush administration left us with a big mess," Jones told me. "We need solutions that solve a lot of problems all at once." The process of putting people to work installing solar panels and making wind turbines, he said, will "require thousands of contracts and millions of jobs -- producing billions of dollars in economic stimulus."

Jones notes wryly that the $700 billion bailout gives bipartisan endorsement to the idea of taking government handouts. If it's good enough for Citigroup, Wells Fargo and AIG...But Jones is somewhat wary of handing a blank check to the embattled auto industry unless it gets its priorities straight.

"The big dogs barking for bailout money has drowned out common sense," he said. "We've had too narrow a view of what to do with our industrial sector. We need to think about what we want to make in America. We should be using our Boeing-level engineering talent to manufacture wind turbines, which are made with 20 tons of steel and 8,000 parts. We should be making solar panels, hybrid buses and light rail cars."

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It's a big government report, with charts and graphs. If you've ignored every other technical paper from an agency with a long name, it sure looks like you can cheerfully deep-six the one released last week, since it contains phrases like "World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 57 percent from 2004 to 2030. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 95 percent, compared with an increase of 24 percent in the OECD countries."

What's an OECD country?* Who cares, right? But actually this report from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) is kind of a big deal, because of what it says about the collision course between business as usual and our climate and peak oil realities. The report makes a lot of assumptions, among them continued rising energy demand for the next two decades, mainly from the Third World (and especially China). It says that those cries of "Oil! Oil!" will push prices to $186 a barrel. What's more, coal will stay on the front burner as our largest source of electricity.

This is plainly impossible, both from the planet's point of view and the cold facts about our energy economy.

Coal is the biggest global warming aggravator, and climate visionaries such as NASA's James Hansen, not to mention myriad and increasingly vocal college students, are calling for "No New Coal." Soaring oil prices have already put a big crimp in demand, and it's far from clear we would even have it to pump if EIA's projections bear out.

The federal government needs to do energy outlooks, but this one is likely to be far off the mark. For instance, on June 19 China (the second-largest oil consumer today) announced steep 17 percent hikes in gasoline and diesel prices "to rein in energy consumption," according to Bloomberg.com. Electricity is going up, too, which should at least dent coal use.

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