GM's Fall Can Become Green Economy's Rise

categories: Clean Energy, Jobs & Economy

Published June 03, 2009 @ 09:49AM PT

$Worker wearing \"Blue collar, Green jobs\" slogan jacket$
"De-carbonizing" the US economy means slashing our reliance on fossil energy to drive job growth and wealth, and replacing it with naturally-replenished, clean energy sources and materials.

The employment that would be created in the process gets shorthanded in public discourse as "green jobs."

Painting millions of roofs white to reflect heat back into space, an adaptation and mitigation strategy recently endorsed by Energy Secretary Chu? Reforesting North America? These are just the low-hanging fruit of green jobs that can help the environment, restore the stability of the climate, and put people to work for pay they can live on and outcomes they can take pride in.

Green For All's Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins believes that we as a nation can use the economy-shocking bankruptcy of General Motors to catapult the U.S. into a decarbonized economy.

On yesterday's MSNBC Morning Joe show, Ellis-Lamkins put it pretty simply: Green jobs will turn the U.S. back into being a global manufacturing leader.

Today she goes into more depth at CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 blog. GM "rejected improving the environmental and safety standards of its vehicles and shipped thousands of American jobs overseas," she writes. "Meanwhile, Japanese and German cars improved their gas mileage and safety – and foreign auto industries took off.

"GM also callously misjudged the American people believing that the size and speed of our gas guzzlers was what mattered most."

General Motors is just one of the foundering American mega-corps that long ago stopped making cars, and started making profit. It sacrificed the pride of doing a job well for doing anything to make a buck.

Now those chickens have come home to roost. Your business cannot endure if you send auto factories overseas to slash costs, and then rely upon Americans facing ever-worsening prospects for steady jobs and good pay back home to buy those cars.

Trying to stop time by ignoring global energy and environmental trends just intensifies the scope of that failure.

Ellis-Lamkins offers a way out:

The promise of American economic growth and jobs still remains in manufacturing, though the products we make must change.

Our industrial manufacturing economy has relied on unregulated consumption of fossil fuel for too long – consumption which steadily destroys our air, our communities, and our planet.

We should not salvage the gas-guzzling U.S. auto industry. But that does not mean the factories in Flint, Michigan, should stay shuttered. Instead, the manufacturing industry in the United States must be revitalized to build the infrastructure for a clean energy economy.

Imagine America’s ‘Rust Belt’ transformed into a green belt of clean energy manufacturing. Imagine the factories of Detroit making wind turbines and solar panels to power America.

The rest of the world is already racing to implement clean energy solutions. The U.S. must catch up and blaze a new trail.

The U.S. can help create a more secure, healthy, abundant future for ourselves and the rest of the world, by seizing this moment to fundamentally remake how we make goods, and make money.

That future won't happen as long as we continue to do business as usual: depending upon energies and technologies invented in the 18th and 19th centuries to save us in the 21st.

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Image via Sustainy

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Comments (13)

Emily, GM never stopped making cars Americans wanted. As you very well know in their last year with a cash reserve (2007) They sold 9.3 million cars, the same as Toyota. Americans want GM cars just fine. The problem is GM is losing money building them. In 07 Toyota made 18.4 billion profit while GM with the same sales lost 34.4 billion. Giving Americans what They wanted was never GMs' problem. I was never really a Ford guy before this, but Ford here I come! Anyone Who cares about liberty surviving in America should avoid buying GM at all costs! The only choice until GM shakes the government yoke is Ford.

Posted by Charlie Reed on 06/03/2009 @ 03:53PM PT
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I don't feel GM or any auto maker should be giving people what they want, but what is best for the country. As we all seem to want freedom from foreign oil the government and auto companies are sure to founder. The final death nail will be the ridiculous electric car. We are already severing the tops of our mountains to fuel the enormous appetite of coal powered power plants. Add millions of new electric cars and it will be only a matter of time before our mountains are replaced by mountains of dead batteries. We should be mandated to drive clean diesels, they are 300% more efficient then coal powered vehicles while causing far less global warming. AND they drive like the vehicles we're use to, not golf carts. Isn't it better to fuel our cars with oil from a hole in the ground from some foreign country then from our mountain tops? If we use what oil that is left wisely we may have time to use our mountains to clean the air and use its force to drive turbines.

Posted by EQUINE ESCAPE RESCUE LTD on 06/03/2009 @ 05:22PM PT
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Any dependence on fossil fuels is shortsighted. I travel all over by bicycle. You could, too.

Posted by Vernon Huffman on 06/07/2009 @ 08:31PM PT
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Our dependency on foreign oil not only compromises the the health of our planet but ties our government's hands when attempting responsible diplomacy abroad.

Posted by Emma Lazar on 06/08/2009 @ 08:11AM PT
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Giving the people what they want is how free enterprise works. It is not for government to decide what people need. It is for people to decide what They want from government.

Posted by Charlie Reed on 06/04/2009 @ 11:42AM PT
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Great point Em and good crossover with the social entrepreneurship blog on Change.org. My synagogue is in a building of a blacksmith that was put out of business when times changed and people started driving cars instead of horses. Smart business understand that change happens. While Toyota and Honda are building efficient hybred cars with skilled labour in the US and EU, US car makers are struggling to win on price with low budget manufacturing in China and Mexico. When I lived in Michigan I bought a Mazda made in Detroit while my friend bought a Ford made in Mexico. GM has had to undercut and take losses to move a poorly made product. Their senior management needs a lesson in basic business strategy.

Posted by Leonard Bloksberg on 06/04/2009 @ 04:35PM PT
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GM also builds lots of hybrids and Toyota and Honda also build huge monsters.

Posted by Charlie Reed on 06/04/2009 @ 05:24PM PT
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They only build "monsters" for the American market, because that's what many Americans were buying.

Posted by D K on 06/07/2009 @ 04:17PM PT
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It's a little late for free enterprise rhetoric. Deregulation and 'free markets' have run this country into the ground. It time to take control, demand as much accountability from corporate America that is experienced by those who collect social security or disability, and get our economy and environment on track. Rev. Bookburn - Radio Volta

Posted by Rev Bookburn on 06/04/2009 @ 05:33PM PT
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It wasn't free enterprise that created this speed bump. It was socialist totalitarians forcing banks to give mortgages based on everything but sound lending practices. The only time deregulation got involved was when it became legal to sell those bad mortgages with crooks like Barney Frank telling people They were sound investments

Posted by Charlie Reed on 06/05/2009 @ 03:51AM PT
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Green cars, what a joke. The Obama administration is taxing everything from horse and wagons to cow farts and the air we breath with this phony Co2 gas tax (it is really a tax on the air we breath) Wake up AmeriKa. The Obama Administration wants nothing more than to take our Freedoms away. I think Bush was terrible but Obama is way worse. The globalists are here. There is no United States of America. The NWO has taken over. Wait till the WHO declares Marshall Law and you are forced to take a vacination or off to a FEMA Camp. Thank God Jesus is coming soon and he doesn't have curly hair.

Posted by Mickey Theade on 06/07/2009 @ 08:23PM PT
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Careful Mickey, did You get that comment approved by the authorities? slightly kidding, CR

Posted by Charlie Reed on 06/08/2009 @ 03:58AM PT
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Cars can't ever be all that green. It takes too much energy and materials to make them, and then they require so many paved roads, parking lots, and always a fuel that's dirty in some way or another - diesel, biodiesel and electricity are only "less bad" than gasoline, not actually good. They also create streets that are dangerous to walk in and encourage sprawling, ugly architecture that's near impossible to walk around. I'd rather see cleaner cars that the ones we have now, but better than that would be mass transit, walkable city/town planning, and those swanky high-speed trains they have in Europe and Japan - those are sweeeeeet.

Posted by Amanda Zabohne on 06/12/2009 @ 10:38AM PT
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