Plan to junk oil, add jobs – New coalition pushes renewables

Using renewable sources to meet new energy needs would create three times as many jobs as relying on fossil fuels, UC Berkeley researchers said in a study issued Tuesday.

The report from Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory fans a growing national debate over how to reduce America’s dependence on imported oil.

Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

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While the Bush administration wants Congress to approve an energy program that would, among other things, expand oil exploration in the United States, a coalition of environmental and labor groups, calling itself the Apollo Alliance, is pushing for federal incentives to promote wind, solar or biomass power plants.

At a conference in Seattle on Tuesday that called for a federal push similar to the Apollo space program, UC Berkeley Professor Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, said up to 240, 000 jobs could be created by 2020 if federal policies favor renewable sources. Building new coal and gas-fired plants would produce about 80,000 jobs, he said.

"Renewable energy is not only good for our economic security and the environment, it creates new jobs,” Kammen said.

Using jobs to sell renewable energy is a central strategy of Apollo backers like Michael Shellenberger, a public relations executive turned activist. The El Cerrito resident helped start this effort to win federal support for "green" energy about 18 months ago by bringing union groups like the California Federation of Labor together with environmental outfits like the Sierra Club.

"We talk about these proposed tax credits and tax cuts as investments,” said Shellenberger. "We want to dominate the clean energy industries of the future and free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil.”

Adam Werbach, a member of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and Apollo Alliance organizer, said backers used the presidential primary campaign to seek official support. "We’ve received endorsements from most of the presidential candidates, but not President Bush,” he said.

White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said the president continues to seek an energy policy that includes incentives for conservation, renewable energy and alternative fuels, while also promoting cleaner-burning coal power plants, safer forms of nuclear energy and new oil exploration within the United States.

"Our overarching theme is calling for a comprehensive policy to reduce reliance on foreign sources,” Lisaius said.

The House has passed the Bush plan, but it remains stalled in the Senate. Just before lawmakers took their spring recess, Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., attached the tax portions of Bush’s plan, including some renewable incentives, to a bill that would change how U.S. corporations are taxed on foreign income, hoping to pass the program in stages.

The sense that energy policy is in play, and that renewable energy will be part of the mix, has emboldened Apollo Alliance members to push harder for alternative energy — using market arguments like jobs and trade.

Kammen said Sweden, Finland and Brazil are developing systems that turn vegetable waste into a gas that can be mixed with natural gas and burned in a conventional power plant.

The United States must expand its know-how in emerging energy technologies or get left behind, he said. "The Bush plan is all about exploring and drilling and not about innovation,” Kammen said.

E-mail Tom Abate at [email protected].