GM's Fall Can Become Green Economy's Rise

"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