Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
My name is David Foster. Currently I serve as executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership of four unions and two national environmental organizations with over six million members, touching virtually every community in the United States.
The Blue Green Alliance is specifically made up of the United Steelworkers, the Sierra Club, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Communications Workers of America, and the Service Employees International Union. The collaboration of labour unions and environmental organizations is based on our common goal to build a clean energy economy, an economy that both creates good jobs and combats global warming.
The Blue Green Alliance has become one of our country's leading advocates for global warming solutions and good green jobs. I'm especially pleased to be given the opportunity to testify before the Standing Committee on Natural Resources on this same critical set of issues in Canada.
Before serving in my current capacity, I spent 31 years as a member of the United Steelworkers, and for 16 years served on the union's international executive board as the director of district 11, a 13-state region based here in Minnesota.
Several weeks ago, in response to the deepening economic and climate crises, the Blue Green Alliance put forward a policy statement on climate change. This was the first time a climate change policy statement came from both unions and environmental organizations. For some of our partners, it was their very first public statement on climate change.
This policy statement stressed the importance of including targets that rely on the best scientific evidence and on an economy-wide cap and trade system that contains mechanisms to prevent job loss in globally competitive, energy-intensive industries. Above all, the statement made clear that comprehensive climate change legislation should focus on the creation and retention of millions of new and existing family-sustaining green jobs, and should finance the transition to a clean energy economy.
I've submitted a copy of our policy statement for the record. I hope that got to you along with my testimony here.
The Blue Green Alliance strongly believes our U.S. Congress must act this year and pass responsible climate change legislation that will rapidly put Americans back to work with millions of jobs building the clean energy economy and reducing global warming emissions to a level necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Our partner organizations agree that no course of action would be more destructive than to continue the energy policies that drove oil prices to $140 a barrel in 2008, contributed to skyrocketing food prices and global food shortages, and resulted in unsustainable trade imbalances.
Solving global warming will not be the economic calamity that some are predicting. Done right, the transition to a green economy will be the most important economic development tool of the 21st century. At the heart of this transition is the creation of a new energy system based on renewables and distributive generation. Some of the most notable examples of this transition exist in my own state.
In the neighbouring city of St. Paul, Minnesota, District Energy St. Paul produces, at its combined heat and power plant, 25 megawatts of electricity and 65 megawatts of thermal energy for its central city customers, burning wood chips from parks and other biomass, and providing steam for heating and cooling needs of much of downtown St. Paul.
In partnership with the local economic development agency, the St. Paul Port Authority, and a private recycling paper mill, District Energy has also embarked on an ambitious plan to convert the Rock-Tenn paper mill to a clean energy source, burning biogas from an anaerobic digester that converts waste residue from a neighbouring ethanol plant into renewable fuel. This project is envisioned as a key building block in creating a green corridor that connects Minneapolis and St. Paul through the delivery of clean energy.
In rural Minnesota, another renewable energy project known as CBED, or community-based economic development, provides a ready market for locally owned and developed wind-generated electricity. Minnesota has one of the country's most aggressive renewable electricity standards, requiring that 25% of electricity consumed in the state comes from renewable resources by 2025.
As a result of this policy, significant investment is taking place in the western portion of the state. CBED requires local utilities to purchase the output of individual wind turbine projects from local farmers, thus making it economically feasible for small farmers to own, operate, and profit from the production of renewable energy. The State of Minnesota estimates that family farm income could be supplemented by as much as $100,000 a year from these projects once initial capital investment is repaid.
These two local stories demonstrate what I hope is the potential of the clean energy economy. And they give us a clear sense of the important role that government can play.
First, government must give clear signals to markets on the future direction of energy prices. Strong cap-and-trade legislation that puts a long-term price on carbon, combined with a clear regulatory framework like renewable electricity standards and energy efficiency standards, provides the tools that investors need to know where the market is going. Our experience in the U.S., with some 28 state-based renewable electricity standards, shows the strength of influencing markets to create jobs and investments in clean energy.
Second, government needs to play a stronger role in solving transmission challenges that have resulted in a transmission patchwork built around moving energy inefficiently from large base-load plants to consumers. Programs like CBED in Minnesota or feed-in tariffs in Germany have shown the power of creating economic development tools that can be put in the hands of small producers or consumers. In Germany the regulatory framework and markets created by feed-in tariffs have created a solar industry that today employs 240,000 Germans in one of the cloudier countries in the world.
In the U.S. this week we will have an important milestone in the effort to pass federal climate change legislation. The Waxman-Markey bill will be heard in a series of public hearings before our energy and commerce committee. We were pleased to see many of the Blue Green Alliance principles in their draft climate change legislation. We think the draft legislation is a step in the right direction to solving climate change and creating jobs for the economic recovery.
The creation and retention of these millions of new and existing family-sustaining green jobs, particularly in manufacturing and construction, must be a top priority of climate change legislation. The recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 took the first step in that direction with a meaningful down payment on investments in the green economy. Approximately $120 billion of its investments were directed toward building the green economy and its infrastructure. Within days of passage we started seeing anecdotal evidence of its benefits when over 180 workers were recalled by the Andersen Corporation in Bayport, Minnesota, which makes energy-efficient windows. But this down payment could be wasted if we don’t make all the next installments in the clean energy economy at the scale necessary to convert our country to renewable energy.
The Blue Green Alliance was especially pleased to see the draft legislation require an increasing percentage of electricity sold by utilities to come from renewable sources, reaching 25% by 2025. Creating a regulatory framework that supports renewable energy, energy efficiency, and new transmission provide important market signals that will provide private investment at the scale necessary to put millions more Americans back to work.
A study released in 2006 by our organization and the renewable energy policy project of component manufacturing, based on a 10-year effort, found that 850,000 jobs would be created with $160 billion of investments in manufacturing. Economic models for my state showed that a 15% renewable electricity standard would generate over 18,000 jobs in component manufacturing. As I mentioned, my home state currently has a 25% renewable electricity standard, and as a result is home to the nation’s two largest construction companies specializing in wind farm installation.
In the interests of time, I will skip over some of my written testimony and hope that can be shared with other members of the committee.
In conclusion, I want to say simply that global warming is already destroying the livelihoods of workers everywhere. For example, thousands of steelworkers who used to make aluminum in the Pacific Northwest have lost their jobs in the U.S. because 15 years of declining snowfall in the Cascade Mountains meant less water in reservoirs and higher-cost electricity from the mightly dams that Henry Kaiser built 60 years ago. Seven smelters closed because they were unable to afford the higher costs of electricity. These lost jobs are a grim testament to why we can't wait to deal with climate change.
Failure to act will have severe economic consequences. In Nairobi, where last month I spoke to the United Nations Environment Programme's biennial ministerial forum, global warming isn't just about lost jobs. It's about starvation and mass migration. What little hope countries like Kenya or others in the developing world have of climbing the development ladder out of extreme poverty and into the ranks of the so-called emerging economies is evaporating as surely as the deserts of Darfur are expanding. That's the price of failing to act on global warming.
Before us are critical choices and decisions. Will we build the clean energy economy and put North America's factory and construction workers back in their jobs? Will we advocate a new development model for the third world that emphasizes consumption in their economies instead of unsustainable trade deficits in ours? Will we look back a year from now and say that we stood up for our countries, our climate, and all humanity when it mattered?
All of our choices are among those that will decide which path we go down. The Blue Green Alliance, its partner organizations, and its sister organization, Blue Green Canada, look forward to working with members of your committee as you continue to work on this critical issue.
Thank you very much.