A Force for Nature: The Fourth Decade
Authors:
JohnHAdams
padams
gblack
There’s an old saying: “As California goes, so goes the nation.” If it were an independent country, California would have the world’s sixth- or seventh-largest economy, roughly equal to that of France, and we were sure that whatever steps the state took to slow carbon emissions would serve as an example for others. California offered us many other assets: it had a long tradition of environmental activism; with an economy dominated by the high-tech boom, it was home to many of the country’s most imaginative entrepreneurs; and if we wanted to reach mainstream popular culture, this was the place to do it.
The November 2000 elections brought us a brave California assemblywoman (now senator), Fran Pavley, who left her position as an eighth-grade teacher to run for public office. One of the first bills she proposed was to cut CO 2 emissions from automobiles, which were the single largest contributor in the state to global warming, accounting for 40 percent of the total. Her Clean Cars Bill, designated Assembly Bill (AB) 1493, said that CO 2 was a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act and required automakers to reduce emissions from all new cars and light trucks sold in California by 30 percent by 2016. No one in the world had passed such a law, and its implications were staggering. Detroit did not make a special product line for sale in California, and if the state passed AB 1493, it would invite a predictable challenge in the federal courts by opponents arguing that both clean air standards and fuel efficiency standards are set and enforced in Washington, not Sacramento.
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Fran came to us for help, having met NRDC’s Annie Notthoff some years earlier, when Fran was a member of the California Coastal Commission. Annie had started work in our San Francisco office in 1981, and I think of her as a poster child for how far we have come during those three decades. In the beginning she worked 10 hours a week, doing a bit of everything around the office, while she also pursued her master’s degree in urban and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and raised her two young children. Today she is our California advocacy director and one of the most effective environmental campaigners in the country. To help flesh out the details of AB 1493 and plan a strategy for getting it through the legislature in Sacramento, Annie introduced Fran to our resident auto industry expert, senior policy analyst Roland Hwang, and to a newly founded group that has been critical to NRDC’s success during our fourth decade: Environmental Entrepreneurs, or E2.
E2 was established by two Californians, Bob Epstein, a co-founder of the leading database company Sybase, and the biologist and medical researcher Nicole Lederer. The group’s philosophy is simple: what is good for the environment can also be good for the economy.
After Sybase went public in 1991, Bob began a search for the most effective partner among the major environmental organizations. He was looking for four things: legislative ability, litigation and enforcement skills, scientific expertise, and an understanding of business. We had the first three, and though we had taken some steps toward the fourth, we still had a ways to go. Bob thought he could help us in that area, and in 1999 he joined our board. Nicole became a trustee in 2002.
In 2001, however, when Fran Pavley presented her Clean Cars Bill to the legislature, E2 had no experience in lobbying. Bob hadn’t even been to Sacramento in almost a decade. But these “neophytes,” as Fran calls them (counting herself among them), quickly became a force to be reckoned with.
AB 1493 was fiercely opposed by both the oil industry and the automobile manufacturers, who spent more than $5 million fighting its passage. They put out a steady stream of misinformation about the bill, saying that California would limit the number of cars per family and raise gas taxes and that the price of cars would skyrocket. They whipped up opposition on conservative talk shows. In response, we and our partners created a series of “There they go again” ads showing that the automobile industry was using the same kind of scare tactics it had tried before to fight seat belts, catalytic converters, and unleaded gas. No, our ads said, the sky would not fall if the bill passed. There was no economic or technological reason why more-efficient cars could not be built by the deadline set by AB 1493.
In the end, Fran Pavley won. A statewide poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 81 percent of Californians favored her bill, including a remarkable 77 percent of SUV owners, and almost every daily newspaper in the state came out in support of it. Senator John Burton, who represented San Francisco, got the bill through the Senate, and in July 2002 Governor Gray Davis signed it into law.
Getting AB 1493 into the California statute books was only the first of two battles, and the second one would be much more challenging. General Motors and DaimlerChrysler quickly filed suit against the State of California and the California Air Resources Board, charging that only the federal government could regulate fuel economy. President Bush’s EPA agreed that the California bill was, in effect, an attempt to set a gasoline mileage standard. What was California to do? To answer that question, we would have to go to court — and eventually the critical question of whether CO 2 could be regulated as an air pollutant would go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Since the passage of Pavley’s Clean Cars Bill, E2 has gone on to become a force in California and national politics. Bob and Nicole began to invite friends and business colleagues to “eco salons” in their homes or NRDC’s San Francisco office to learn about our work. E2 has spread to 27 states and holds similar events in many major cities. Delegations travel regularly to Washington to make their case to lawmakers that the move to a low-carbon economy represents a tremendous opportunity for American business. One group that addressed leaders of the House of Representatives included a prominent venture capitalist, the CEO of a company that does green housing retrofits, and the CEO of a biofuels company in Hawaii. That’s a fairly typical assortment of E2 members and suggests why the group has gained so much credibility in the business community: more than simply supporting a cause, it puts its money where its mouth is.
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A Force for Nature: The Fourth Decade
Chicago Plants the World’s Largest Urban Solar Farm
Chicago’s sprawling south side, once thrumming with steel mills and factories, is now covered by large swaths of weedy land strewn with the rubble of faded industries. But last year, a 40-acre patch not far from what was once home to the famous Pullman rail car factory sprouted a crop of 32,000 solar panels. The photovoltaic arrays move automatically to follow the sun, a glistening aberration in an otherwise drab and decrepit landscape. This is the country’s — and perhaps the world’s — largest "urban solar farm," and since December it has been generating up to 10 megawatts of clean electricity to help power a metropolis better known for its archaic dirty coal plants. Industry executives, environmentalists, and city officials — who don’t always find themselves on the same side of an issue — hope it will inspire other solar plants throughout polluted Rust Belt cities. Today Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Exelon CEO John Rowe will lead an official unveiling of the plant. Daley has touted it as part of the city’s plan to take action on climate change and hailed it as a job creator in tough economic times. The Chicago plant hired a handful of permanent employees and about 200 union construction jobs, 44 percent of which were awarded to minorities. Large solar plants of 5 megawatts or more are common in Europe and the southwestern United States but usually aren’t built in highly populated areas. Denis Lenardic, the Slovenia-based editor of widely respected annual reports on the solar industry, said the Chicago project is likely the largest of its kind in the world. Advocates hope the Chicago project shows that solar plants don’t have to be massive and remote — they can be built on abandoned industrial sites or unused land owned by water treatment plants. Putting solar plants close to transmission lines and power users is highly efficient and improves the availability of power for local users in case of downed lines or other problems on the grid. Though not as sunny as the American southwest, the Chicago area’s solar resources are roughly equivalent to or even better than those of Germany and Spain, the world leaders in solar generation. The swiveling panels at the Chicago plant, built by SunPower Corp. and billed as "the most powerful on the planet," generate 30 percent more energy than typical fixed-base panels. The Chicago plant’s maximum capacity of 10 megawatts isn’t much in the larger scheme of things — enough for just 1,500 homes in a city of three million. And during the winter, generation is usually below capacity. But proponents would like to see a host of similar solar farms peppering pockets of empty land in metropolitan areas, providing 5 megawatts here, 10 megawatts there, adding up to a significant energy output. SunPower vice president of public policy Julie Blunden describes them as potential "urban infill." Neighbors of the south side plant say they are thrilled with the investment and symbol of green energy in their back yard. "You hear so much about NIMBYism, here we actually got YIMBYism. We were very welcomed by the community," Blunden said. "We came in and provided clean energy and some jobs, using local labor and local steel." As clean energy has become more desirable and cost-competitive, solar panels have sprouted on the rooftops of houses, government buildings, and big box stores in major cities. This type of solar power is called "distributed generation," with panels providing electricity for a given building or complex and often sending energy back to the grid if the panels generate more than the building uses. Solar plants, by contrast, generate electricity that goes directly to the grid and is sold by a local utility. In northern Illinois, the electricity from Exelon plants is distributed by ComEd. Illinois previously got just 3.3 megawatts of electricity from solar, meaning the Exelon project increased state solar capacity four-fold. Solar generation is driven in part by state renewable energy portfolio standards. Illinois’s standard mandates that 25 percent of the state’s electricity must be generated from renewable sources such as wind and solar by 2025. Six percent of that must come from solar by 2015. That would mean about 750 megawatts of solar power, or more than 70 plants like the south side one in the next five years. The Illinois Power Agency, a government body, is responsible for buying power from different generation companies to make sure that the state complies with the RPS. But larger-scale projects like the one on Chicago’s south side will only become commonplace if they end up being cost-effective, experts say. Exelon was counting on three types of government incentives to make the Chicago solar plant viable. A federal loan guarantee fell through, but company officials say they are still committed to the plant as an experimental "demonstration project." Whether they would build more in the future remains to be seen. "The economics are such that we need the federal incentives," said Exelon senior vice president Tom O‘Neill. "Without these incentives, the cost structure exceeds the revenue." Henry Henderson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Midwest program, said it’s only logical that the government back clean energy. Coal-fired power plants might seem cheaper, but actually, fossil fuels such as coal come with all kinds of hidden costs in the form of air pollution, human health problems, and global warming, he said. Henderson appreciates the symbolism of cutting- edge energy generation on the city’s now-ragged far south side, which once produced luxury rail cars for the nation. "Pullman was very innovative in its time," he said. "This is a way of doing something innovative now within a place that drove the transformation of our transportation system in the 19th century. How do we take that legacy and turn it into a point of productivity again? It’s recycling at the most important scale."
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Chicago Plants the World’s Largest Urban Solar Farm
Standard Solar CEO Tony Clifford Addresses White House Clean Energy Economy Forum
Standard Solar, Inc. CEO Tony Clifford addressed top Administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, during the White House’s Clean Energy Economy Forum held today in the nation’s capital. Clifford joined business leaders and experts from the Federal government to develop strategies that grow clean energy manufacturing and services to create jobs and build the economy.
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Standard Solar CEO Tony Clifford Addresses White House Clean Energy Economy Forum