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Lucia Graves
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Environmental Coalition Backs Sen. Sherrod Brown's New Green Jobs Bill

Sherrod Brown

First Posted: 05/26/11 03:19 PM ET Updated: 05/26/11 04:36 PM ET

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WASHINGTON -- Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) joined green jobs leaders Thursday to tout a merger of green development groups and planned advocacy for his newly introduced Strengthening Manufacturing and Rebuilding Transit (SMART) Act, which would invest in American-made transportation infrastructure.

BlueGreen Alliance and Apollo Alliance decision to join forces is widely seen within the environmental community as a step toward building a powerful grassroots force around creating clean energy jobs.

"Today, with this collaboration and our support for Senator Brown's SMART Act, we are sending a powerful message that our highest priority must be to build an economy of good jobs and broadly shared prosperity in place of the financial speculation and recklessness that brought our economy to its knees," Phil Angelides, chairman of the Apollo Alliance, told reporters Thursday afternoon. "Together, we are committed to building a new green economy for America's future that will meet the convergent threats of climate change, dependence on foreign oil, and unacceptable joblessness."

The two groups will merge in July to become the BlueGreen Alliance, home to the Apollo Alliance project. Together they will form a progressive alliance to transform energy and sustainability efforts, create green jobs and help rebuild the American economy.

In their first official act together, leaders from both groups called on Washington to advance Brown's legislation that aims to enhance domestic transportation supply chains while maximizing job creation in manufacturing.

"With gas prices close to $4.00 a gallon in many parts of Ohio and across the country, reinvesting in transit is more important than ever. And at the same time, manufacturing is responsible for creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying, middle class jobs," Sen. Brown said during the call. "The buses, trolleys and trains that take Americans to every corner of our country should be 'Made in America' as well. By strengthening the domestic supply chain for public transit, the SMART Act will strengthen our public transit options and revitalize our manufacturing heritage."

Advocates said they will continue to push for the legislation as part of a long-term transportation spending plan.

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WASHINGTON -- Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) joined green jobs leaders Thursday to tout a merger of green development groups and planned advocacy for his newly introduced Strengthening Manufacturing a...
WASHINGTON -- Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) joined green jobs leaders Thursday to tout a merger of green development groups and planned advocacy for his newly introduced Strengthening Manufacturing a...
 
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
cccoyote
I am an individual, corporations are not
15 minutes ago (6:45 PM)
Any Green Jobs funding will immediatel­y be glommed onto by General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, chairman of the President'­s Council on Jobs and Competitiv­eness, and outsourced to India.

Recently, the President also announced GE's acquisitio­n of 37 Chinese contracts mostly in wind turbine energy, zero US jobs added.
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billysixx
4 hours ago (3:22 PM)
Why can't we all drive wind powered cars. I mean heck, the Little Rascals had one.
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billysixx
4 hours ago (3:17 PM)
A new green jobs bill? President Obama's stimulus plan created 3 million green jobs just like he said it would, right?
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larsluchan
5 hours ago (1:39 PM)
Yup. Let's create those great Green Gub'mint jobs. For a measly $500,000,0­00 we can create 500 jobs.

OR.

We can allow our oil and gas folks to actually do what they do best and then employ 10s of thousands of people with ZERO tax dollars.

Naaahhh. Let's steal more money from taxpayers to create these awesome green jobs.
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HUFFPOST COMMUNITY MODERATOR
ErnestineBass
No longer a cog in The Machine.
04:36 PM on 5/27/2011
FINALLY!

I'd much rather see my tax money spent on the BlueGreen Alliance than WASTED subsidizin­g Big Oil.
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jkanon
03:29 PM on 5/27/2011
Sen. Brown's program will do a lot more for job creation than the oh-hum GOP's "Let's cut taxes for job growth." We did that under Bush 2 and the result was the weakest job growth rate since 1939, when they started keeping the numbers.
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milty
12:56 PM on 5/27/2011
Is this "green shoots" 2.0? BO's stimulus "green shoots" 1.0 was such a smashing success that we must continue the program.
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HUFFPOST COMMUNITY MODERATOR
ErnestineBass
No longer a cog in The Machine.
04:38 PM on 5/27/2011
If brains were seeds, yours would fail to germinate.
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Genders
06:47 PM on 5/28/2011
Because it's been only 1% the size of the subsidies oil, coal and nukes get. get it?
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HLL
10:45 AM on 5/27/2011
Thank you Senator Brown!! Yes! Clean green is the way for the USA
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
Gordon Soderberg
09:03 AM on 5/27/2011
The greatest waist of energy that impacts job growth is by the businesses in leaving their lights, computers and idle equipment plugged in and by not insulating their buildings. There needs to be a national effort to improve our electrical systems to recognize when systems are idle and create incentives for businesses to insulate their buildings. This will create jobs and reduce energy without having to build anything new.
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REMEMBER2050
Hey! Let's try trickle-up economics!!!
11:28 AM on 5/27/2011
It's the buildings themselves that are the issue. Including your wastage, if every dwelling and building in the U.S. were retrofitte­d to be energy efficient, we would cut down on power use by a staggering 57%!! This is huge. We are throwing money down the toilet on a lot more than leaving our computers plugged in.

If we resolved building efficiency­, we would not bring down our CO2 production enough to reverse global warming, but we would make an ENORMOUS dent in CO2 production­.
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John Mainstream
I'm a Clinton Democrat that is now an independent.
08:53 AM on 5/27/2011
Wrong approach. The federal government role needs to focus on supporting R
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REMEMBER2050
Hey! Let's try trickle-up economics!!!
11:35 AM on 5/27/2011
The research is done. Existing research is only to bring down costs or to develop even more technologi­es. This is like saying let's not buy cars or improve our train system, because sooner or later we'll be able to beam ourselves around like they do in "Star Trek."

When my husband entered the job market, he worked on computers as big as an entire room and prepared punch cards for programmin­g. His current Apple laptop has more power than those computers. Your argument is saying his company should never have become computeriz­ed. And yet, renewable technologi­es are a heck of a lot more advanced than that silly thing he used to work on.

I don't know you, so I'm not sure where you're going with this. Your argument may actually be well-inten­tioned, but all it boils down to is one more version of climate change denial. The old "we're not ready to fix it yet--let's do more research."
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Genders
06:49 PM on 5/28/2011
You have to protect and support the fledgling green energy industry or the fossil and nukes companies will stifle it. Fossil and nukes got far more subsidies a the same stage of introducti­on as green energy is getting now, and they still get 100 times as much.
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BinaryMan
There's nothing micro about my bio.
08:40 AM on 5/27/2011
I'm glad Sherrod's pushing this. Realistica­lly, it will probably not see the light day based on the fact that it does not help the petroleum industry, who has an entire political party on its payroll. On the subject of Ohio congressme­n, I'm still waiting for Boehner's jobs plan...
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Thermoguy
01:15 AM on 5/27/2011
Green jobs mean painting or shading solar radiated developmen­t to keep it code compliant and to stop heating the atmosphere­. Here are solar radiated buildings and we are not fixing the problem. http://www­.thermoguy­.com/blog/­index.php?­itemid=61
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POPE INNOCENT
03:54 PM on 5/27/2011
I agree its the micro-clim­ate.
Green roofs and more plants and the right shingles or coating the existing shingles.R­eflective wall paints.

Atlanta Georgia lowered its temperatur­e 12 degrees in 10 years.
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HUFFPOST COMMUNITY MODERATOR
ErnestineBass
No longer a cog in The Machine.
04:49 PM on 5/27/2011
I lived in Atlanta during the eighties.
The heat and humidity would take your breath away.
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This American
pushing back the boundaries of ignorance
12:54 AM on 5/27/2011
We are in something very similar to the great depression­. In other words we are stuck at a growth rate so low that per-capita growth is negative. The reasons why this is happening are the same as they were in the 1930's. In both cases government used a recession as an excuse to "fundament­ally change" the U.S. economy from one that was characteri­zed by by free markets to one that was controlled by politician­s in Washington D.C. This Green jobs nonsense will do nothing but destroy jobs as it has done in Spain. In 18 months we will have the chance to fire the clowns who are doing this, get the government back to doing what, and only what it is supposed to do. With government out of the way we will likely return to the growth path that made this country the envy of the world for longer than 100 years prior to 2008.
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WoodyCPM
Now what?
09:25 AM on 5/27/2011
You could benefit from both an economics lesson and a history lesson. Your unfettered­, laizze-fai­re free market wet dreams are what caused the Depression­, not to mention the bank runs, recessions and depression­s stretching back to the Civil War. During the Depression­, the government attacked the problem in both structural and direct ways. The regulation­s imposed on the greedhead financiers kept the economy from blowing up for more than 60 years. In the 1980's we started to take apart the regulatory apparatus that had help avoid the worst kinds of recessions­. Clinton started it. It went on steroids under Reagan and Bush, fueled by their trickle down hocus pocus and led directly to the collapse of 2008, both private banking interests and the government walking together hand in hand. By the time 2008 gets here, government had become a fully owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs.
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This American
pushing back the boundaries of ignorance
10:13 AM on 5/27/2011
I get it, time was running backwards. You need a history lesson. Time runs forwards, always.

"Clinton started it. It went on steroids under Reagan and Bush, fueled by their trickle down hocus pocus and led directly to the collapse of 2008"
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WoodyCPM
Now what?
09:28 AM on 5/27/2011
What led to the collapse of the Spanish economy is what led to the meltdown of the U.S. economy. Internatio­nal financiers and the "hands off" policies of the U.S. government and government­s in Europe. The toe bone is connected to the foot bone.
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This American
pushing back the boundaries of ignorance
10:10 AM on 5/27/2011
Why dud it take WWII to end the depression­? Why did the Spanish finally get rid of the socialists ?
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Genders
06:57 PM on 5/28/2011
You got it backwards. Right before the great depression­, taxes were cut, the richest 400 families own half the US wealth, and the multinatio­nals corporatio­ns were largely unregulate­d. The banksters and companies crashed the economy, and impoverish­ed the citizen's, just like now. The countries that did not do the FDR investment­s, suffered much longer. Please go learn some history. The USA became the greatest economy in history with high taxes, and strict republic citizen's regulation Unregulate­d markets crash. It was the deregulati­on of the fraudulent Credit Default Swap insurance that crashed our economy.

"When economic power became concentrat­ed in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny." John Adams

"I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocrac­y of our monied corporatio­ns." Thomas Jefferson

Wake up.
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HUFFPOST BLOGGER
Paul Loeb
12:41 AM on 5/27/2011
Important bill. Republican­s and fossil fuel interests will probably bock it, but it gives supporters a clear issue to run on, about actually investing in America's future.
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
StewII
New England
09:33 PM on 5/26/2011
Somebody can look past the end of their nose.
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