Happy New Years!

Here are my favorite quotes from the 12/27/09 Sacramento Bee.

"California has the opportunity to be a leader in the green revolution – by showing how to make buildings more energy efficient, designing more efficient transmission lines, developing a better battery, reducing the cost of solar power, being a pioneer in technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a hundred other possibilities."

- Stephen Levy is director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.
- Special to The Bee, Published Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009
- http://www.sacbee.com/198/story/2420552.html

"Do not be mistaken; green jobs are not a panacea for our state's current woes, but our research reveals that a structural transition is currently under way to a low-carbon, more efficient economy, with higher consumer savings, more manufacturing jobs and a potential for higher exports. For three decades, California has established first-in-the-nation energy efficiency and renewable energy standards and incentives that have created the market certainty needed to trigger capital investment, innovation and business generation.

Over the last decade, venture capital investment in clean technologies has poured into our state – California alone now captures more than half of the nation's total. As you would expect, the total amount of investments has declined in the last year, but even with the global recession, clean tech investments in California have been similar to what they were in 2007.

Moreover, California companies and universities are receiving a large share of new federal energy grants, which will continue to provide opportunities for the next 10 years and beyond. As a result, thousands of green companies have been launched in California, while existing businesses expanded to include new green services, with jobs across a range of industries. Today, California is a leader in total green technology patents including solar, wind and battery technologies. Patents are a precursor to the establishment of new start-up companies that will employ people.

New data published earlier this month by Next 10, a nonpartisan think-tank, show that the number of California green businesses has increased 45 percent and green jobs expanded by 36 percent from 1995 to 2008 while total jobs in California expanded only 13 percent. Ten of the 15 green industry segments grew at a rate three times the state as a whole. And from 2007 to 2008, when state employment fell 1 percent, green jobs continued to grow 5 percent. By 2008, there were more than 159,000 green jobs in California...

Finally, one has to consider where we would be if we had not diverged from national energy consumption trends by instituting green standards more than three decades ago. California consumers and businesses have saved more than $56 billion as total energy consumption per capita has steadily declined – at the same time, the rest of the country's per capita energy consumption doubled. These standards protected consumers against volatile fossil fuel prices, and the money they saved helped to grow California's economy by 1.5 million new full-time jobs with $45 billion in payroll, according to a study by UC Berkeley. Had we continued business as usual, our current financial crisis would be much more severe.

California has been ahead of the green trend for decades. Our ambitious green energy policies are the goose that continues to lay golden eggs. Now is the time for a renewed effort to secure California's place in the world's coming green technology revolution. The oh decade was a tough one, but we can recover. We just need to continue doing what we know works in order to ensure that the next decade does not become a much more dangerous "uh-oh" than the last."

- F. Noel Perry is founder of Next 10, a Palo Alto based nonprofit think tank (www.next10.org) that focuses on environmental and economic issues in California.
- Special to The Bee, Published Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009
- http://www.sacbee.com/198/story/2420582.html