More than 20 years ago, Mayor Richard M. Daley had a vision of a green Chicago, from trees and roofs to green buildings and alleys. While on a visit to Germany in the late 1990s, he saw a green roof on Hamburg’s City Hall and sought to replicate the idea in Chicago. He wanted the city to be a model for America around the environment. That first rooftop garden gained residents’ interest, lowered fees and sparked other incentives to make the city the nation’s “green roof” capital, with more than 300 buildings totaling 4 million square feet.

Today, Mayor Daley’s vision has come to life. Chicago is leading by example. In 2008, the city launched its Chicago Climate Action Plan (CCAP), a comprehensive and detailed blueprint for lowering greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change. Through five key strategies–energy efficient buildings, clean and renewable energy sources, improved transportation options, reduced waste and industrial pollution, and adaptation–Chicago plans to decrease its carbon footprint 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, as well as encourage its residents to adapt lifestyles that preserve and protect the planet.

Already the initiative has generated positive effects, from investing in the nation’s largest urban solar power plant and adding more than 600 car sharing vehicles to retrofitting 15,000 buildings and decreasing family waste by 11.5 percent.

A comprehensive “green jobs” plan is also a vital part of Chicago’s environmental strategy. Over the next three years, $900 million in federal and state grant money will be invested into the Chicago region’s energy efficiency efforts. In preparation, the city is training its workforce for these incoming job opportunities. To date, more than 250 green jobs have been created and over the next two years, 650 additional green jobs will be created through federal grants for residents, in areas ranging from infrastructure and technology to engineering and construction, and thousands more are expected as additional projects develop.

Environmental initiatives have also proven beneficial for business and the local economy. Some of the world’s leading sustainable corporations now call Chicago home: Veolia Environment, the world’s largest environmental-services company; 14 wind-power companies including Suzlon and Invenergy; and Serious Materials, the developer and manufacturer of sustainable green building products. In addition, CCAP’s Green Hotels Initiative resulted in 14 hotels being certified as “green hotels” — the most of any city in the nation.

All these factors are helping to strengthen Chicago’s position as the go-to hub for businesses around sustainable innovation and environmental leadership.

Suzanne Malec-McKenna Huffington Post

Jonathan Lim – Huffington post
The #1 argument by corporations and politicians who oppose reducing pollution, fighting climate change and moving America to a cleaner, greener, more sustainable future is that doing so will cost the country jobs and hurt the economy. In fact, since many corporations and politicians claim to believe that climate change is a serious issue that must be dealt with (eventually), the “sustainability = job killer” argument is essentially the only one they have.

And it’s a lie — scaremongering from dirty energy companies so they can keep polluting at current levels, protect their unsustainable energy monopoly and maximize their short-term profits. They claim that responsibly cleaning up their own poisonous mess — instead of “socializing” the cost of dealing with it by spewing it into the air or dumping it in our oceans and streams — will force them to raise energy rates. This is a way to blackmail small businesses into defending the status quo and joining their efforts to kill any legislation that promotes efforts to reduce pollution or invest in sustainable energy. But the dirty energy companies are simply fighting to be the last of the dinosaurs, forestalling the inevitable day when they join the fossils that created their fortunes.

The green economy isn’t some untested theory or pie-in-the-sky fantasy — it’s already here, and its kicking butt. So here are some links that show why reducing pollution and embracing sustainable energy and green technology will create jobs and give our economy the boost it needs.

If you think the green economy won’t create jobs, you might want to tell those dirty hippies at the multinational bank HSBC, who found this in a 2009 report:

Global revenues from climate-related businesses such as energy efficiency rose by 75 percent in 2008 to $530 billion and could exceed $2 trillion by 2020, HSBC Global Research estimated on Friday.

In the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change, climate-related revenues were forecast to climb to $500 billion by 2050.

“We can see that this seemingly huge figure has already been surpassed well ahead of time as more and more businesses adapt their business model,” said Joaquim de Lima, global head of quant research for equities at HSBC.

You also might want to tell the Chinese. A January New York Times article found that China’s decision to become the leader in producing solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy technologies is paying off:

Renewable energy industries [in China] are adding jobs rapidly, reaching 1.12 million in 2008 and climbing by 100,000 a year, according to the government-backed Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.

The Pew Charitable Trusts released a report finding that, despite “a lack of sustained government support”, America’s clean energy economy grew two and a half times faster than overall jobs from 1998 to 2007.

Pew found that jobs in the clean energy economy grew at a national rate of 9.1 percent, while traditional jobs grew by only 3.7 percent between 1998 and 2007. There was a similar pattern at the state level, where job growth in the clean energy economy outperformed overall job growth in 38 states and the District of Columbia during the same period.

A group of economists at Economics for Equity & Environment released a study this week that found that reducing emissions, becoming energy independent through clean energy and embracing the green economy would generate net job growth. The study goes on to debunk many of the myths that say reducing emissions and investing in the green economy would hurt the larger economy. A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists came to the same conclusions about the green economy generating job growth, as did a recent study conducted by UC Berkeley that examined the effects that implementing the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) would have on California’s economy.

But the clean, green gravy train is leaving the station, and if America isn’t careful, we could miss it. Michael Northrop tells us that “the clean energy gold rush” has already begun. However, due to a lack of policies to provide a stable marketplace for green tech investment, we’re letting that $2 trillion slip through our fingers:

Even with growing unemployment, America seems incapable of recognizing a golden opportunity. With no goal or effective policy framework, not only are we shipping oil dollars to the Middle East, we are watching our solar, wind, and other renewable energy dollars begin flowing to Asia. -snip-

Without the economic security of guaranteed purchase contracts, companies will keep relocating overseas. Evergreen Solar, an up-and-coming solar manufacturer in Massachusetts, recently disclosed all of its manufacturing will be based in China.

So don’t let yourself or anyone else be fooled by the dirty energy industry’s lies. They want our heads in the tar sands because relying on fossil fuels makes them money, regardless of what it does to the environment, your health or anything else. And they’re not the only ones. As Thomas Friedman wrote in a NYTimes op-ed this week:

Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now. And Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other. Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming confused about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move toward clean-tech and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to oil.

The 200-mile long Citarum River in Indonesia hosts more than 500 factories along its banks and is quite possibly the most polluted river in the world. There is so much garbage coating the surface that in many places you can’t see the water, and it is more profitable to forage for garbage than making a living fishing the river, though you do risk catching a nasty disease by spending any time in it.

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.

By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal
Published: November 2006   [ Updated: Mar 12, 2009 - 6:17:24 PM ]

Photo: Courtesy of Matt Kramer/Algalita Marine research Foundation Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? Read the full story