By Deborah McDermott, Seacoast Online

This column, in many ways, chronicles the story of a present planning for a future. I have told you week after week about people who have not only a vision, but a suppleness of action that allows them to seize the day.

The state of Maine is not, unfortunately, well positioned right now to seize the day. Here are a few disheartening facts. It has the oldest housing stock in the country, and 80 percent of the places are heated with fuel oil, according to the state.

At this time of economic uncertainty, it also has the lowest income per capita in New England, according to the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, and the second highest unemployment rate — 7.8 percent in January.

So the fact is no matter how much of our electricity might eventually come from alternate energy, it’s still coming into dwellings that are leaking like a sieve, owned or rented by people who have modest incomes.

To stem this depressing tide, the think tank Opportunity Maine has proposed what it’s calling a “Green Jobs, Green Savings” bill. It has the backing of many of our local Maine legislators and was also recently endorsed by the Seacoast Democrats.

It is based on the reasonable premise that while alternative energy production has to be a goal, as that industry is gearing up and state and local regulations are being promulgated, the state can do something immediate. Something NOW.

It can make every single house, business, industry and government building in the state of Maine as energy efficient as possible. No more sieves, less need for power, potentially more money in the pocket of everyday people.

“We’ve got to view efficiency as an energy source. That’s really the future,” said Opportunity of Maine executive director Rob Brown. “If in 10 years, electricity costs are going to grow by 20 percent, we can build new power generation or we can make what we already use 20 percent more efficient.”

The bill envisions creating a new utility that will provide one-stop shopping for consumers, an ability to bond and a command central for all the disparate energy efforts in existence right now in state government.

It would set up “a universal, income-based” system for homeowners and businesses alike, with low and even (hallelujah!) moderate-income people qualifying for an outright grant to weatherize and insulate their homes and buildings. Industries and manufacturers, too, will qualify based on size of business, with all but those who can really afford it getting some kind of assistance either through grant or low interest loans.

“We can do this in a decade if we think big and bold,” said Brown.

Meanwhile, work on all those buildings will be done by Mainers.

Some 5 percent of all the money raised by the utility would go toward training and creation of in-state, nonexportable jobs.

Of course, there’s a catch. It’s going to cost money up front. But hear me through, because only a portion of it is “new” money. The bill will assess utilities and wholesale-level heat fuel providers a fee that would form the financial basis for the new utility.

At least a portion of these fees, overall expected to generate $178 million, will be passed on to the consumer. However, that same consumer will be seeing immediate benefit from lower bills after weatherization work is completed, so that bill should be no higher and could be lower than before, Brown said.

But while the fee is on one side of the see-saw, on the other is a variety of mitigating grants.

Key among these is federal energy funds, particularly competitive funds where well-positioned states will succeed.

“We’ve gone through the stimulus bill line by line and identified what could be channeled. An enormous amount will be handled on a competitive basis,” said Brown. “Those states with their ducks in a row will be at the top of the line. Right now, Maine would not fare well.”

The bill will have competition — chief among them an as-yet unwritten proposal by Gov. John Baldacci. But more and more these days, I keep hearing that for us in heat-intensive New England it is imperative that energy efficiency be the central green point from which all else flows.

“People are going to be nervous,” said Brown. “It’s an ambitious plan. But frankly, isn’t that what these times require?”

P.S.: On Wednesday, the NH Climate Change Task Force releases its report. Next time, I’ll go beyond the headlines and let you know what it says for New Hampshire’s energy future.

Bangor Daily News, Staff Editorial

Big problems require big solutions. And no problem is greater than the need to move away from petroleum-based energy. President Obama has launched initiatives that begin to move the nation in this direction, but there is much more to be done at the state level. A plan developed by the education advocacy group Opportunity Maine would, if approved by the Legislature, create a 10-year comprehensive approach to saving up to 30 percent of nontransportation energy while also launching a new jobs sector.

The catch is that it will cost money. And that money will come from fees attached to electricity, natural gas and fuel oil purchases. Selling those fee hikes to recently sticker-shocked consumers will be tough, but not impossible.

The plan, as explained by Rob Brown, executive director of Opportunity Maine, would move the existing Efficiency Maine program out from under the Public Utilities Commission. Efficiency Maine, like FAME and MaineHousing, could then do its own bonding. The bonds would be paid for with funding from existing fees paid in electric and natural gas bills and a new fee on wholesale heating oil purchases. With that money — an estimated $178 million a year — Efficiency Maine would give grants to industrial, commercial and residential applicants to pay for improving energy efficiency.

The focus, Mr. Brown says, is on existing structures. Industry in particular, he says, which often uses large, older structures, can achieve energy savings of 30 percent or more with easy fixes. And rather than merely give tax breaks to those who would slap insulation up in their business or home in a haphazard way, the plan would provide carefully developed standards. Those standards would be based on what works and would be available in a single, centralized source, and professional energy audits would be conducted before fixes are approved.

What’s especially appealing about this proposal is that it addresses a demonstrable need, while also creating a job force to complete the work. The state Department of Labor would, under the plan, give competitive grants to consortiums that include colleges, social service agencies and businesses, which in turn will create training programs for the new jobs.

Mr. Brown sees training programs for jobs such as weatherization technician, insulation installer and solar thermal technician, as well as to keep carpenters, electricians and heating system installers up to speed on the new “green” best practices.

Rather than hope for across-the-board job growth as a result of investing in improving Maine’s building and housing stock, the plan targets a specific job sector. This approach, Mr. Brown said, has been shown to work effectively.

Opportunity Maine’s plan, LD 1724, is sponsored by Rep. Seth Berry, D-Bowdoinham, and is expected to be introduced later this month. If passed as written, it could reduce Maine’s nontransportation energy consumption by a third, thereby making its businesses more competitive, and train a work force ready for the post-petroleum age.

Our financial challenges offer a chance to re-think our economic system

By Peter Alexander

With all the rush and anxiety to get our economy (and the world economy) moving again we are at risk of losing an opportunity to redesign from the ground up the way the economy works. After all, what good would it be to recreate the same unsustainable, excessively consumer-driven system that we already know has been destroying the ability of the earth’s ecosystems to sustain life?

In response to the crisis, American families seem to be following a logical course: reducing spending and personal debt and increasing personal savings. Banks and businesses are doing the same thing, and with good reason. Because so much of Wall Street value turns out to have been based on fraudulent (or at best, highly leveraged) transactions, it is natural for individuals and institutions alike slow down and look twice before leaping back into a “business as usual” scenario.

Unfortunately, as a result, millions of people have lost their jobs. And as the economy stalls and tries to find a new footing, millions more jobs will be lost. The question is, what kind of new jobs will be created for these legions of unemployed to fill? The opportunity before us is to encourage the development of new businesses based on principles of sustainable development. And it is not a small opportunity! Let’s start with energy efficiency. For decades we have been wasting unconscionable amounts of energy in the way we heat and cool our homes, businesses, schools, and public buildings. The market for retrofitting buildings with energy efficiency improvements — from weatherization and lighting to appliances and insulation — is enormous: hundreds of billions of dollars in the US. Some states are taking the lead on this. Vermont has led the way with an “efficiency utility” that has dramatically cut the cost of energy bills for many homes and businesses, and the Maine legislature is now considering two bills that would boost investments in energy efficiency and help underwrite the advancement of a multi-billion dollar efficiency industry, creating many thousands of jobs just within the state of Maine. (See www.opportunitymaine.org). Other states should follow suit, and the federal government should support and encourage these efforts.

The production of electricity is another area where huge strides could be made. Traditional coal, gas, and nuclear power plants are unbelievably inefficient. Even at peak efficiency, only about one third of the embodied energy from the primary fuel source gets converted into electricity. The rest goes up the smokestack or gets released into the environment as waste heat. Then, because of voltage losses in hundreds of miles of power lines, a tenth or more of the electricity that is generated gets lost in transmission. Even more disturbing is the fact that traditional coal and nuke power plants are designed and run at full power, and they burn up fuel day and night at the same rate whether the electricity is being used or not! Needless to say, a revolution in the way we produce and use electricity is urgently needed; and it offers the promise of a new multi-trillion dollar, high-tech industry. There has never been a better time for Washington to reset its priorities and policies on energy.

Other areas with enormous potential are ecosystem restoration and adaptation to the impacts of global warming. Sometimes these are one and the same. For example, the increasingly extreme storms attributed to climate change are overwhelming municipal waste-water and storm-water systems, causing degradation of our lakes, rivers, and coastal areas on a massive scale. The EPA estimates that nearly $400 billion is currently needed to upgrade these systems throughout the US. Other job-creating ecosystem restoration projects include cleaning up toxic sediments in rivers, harbors, and industrial sites, restoring and preserving wildlife habitat, and finding and retrieving abandoned fishing gear in coastal waters and estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Maine. Taken together, these kinds of projects can create many hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide and provide enormous societal benefits such as clean drinking water, swimmable beaches, and revitalized fisheries.

There are many other industries where reforms and re-invention could boost efficiencies and create jobs, including transportation, health care, education, and agriculture. But at the bottom line, we come back to consumer behavior. Under our current system, over-consumption is not only encouraged, it is subsidized by political policies that enable the exploitation of labor and resources by many of our ‘trading partners”–countries whose governments do not care about human rights, justice, fairness, or human dignity. This laissez-faire policy approach, which is so undermining to American values, has also undermined our nation’s ability to provide the basic goods and services upon which we all depend.

We have largely exported to other countries the means of production for everything from clothing to electronics, and now we are even at risk of losing our ability to manufacture automobiles and many of our basic foods. Public policy and consumer behavior need to evolve hand in hand. Consumers are already focusing more on necessities, which is natural in a recession. But public policy should quickly adapt to encourage this more conservative form of consumer behavior while raising the bar with market signals to our trading partners to clean up their act. For example, we should stop importing goods and services from third world countries where laborers work in virtual slavery.

Finally, as this enormous restructuring of our economic system takes place, the government must ensure that individual families are not cast into poverty and homelessness, and that the out-of-work workforce is quickly trained to fill the jobs that a new, sustainable economy will create. The challenge is great, but the opportunity is greater. No one likes change: as long as the status quo was reasonably comfortable nothing was going to change. But now that things are in turmoil, now that people are already very uncomfortable—this is the time to seize the moment, making the kind of dramatic changes that were politically impossible before.

Now is the time to re-engineer our economy—not by micromanagement and central control, but by using the economic power of our government to absorb much of the shock that threatens the well being of American families, and by crafting policies that encourage industries and consumer behaviors that are sustainable in the long run.