Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy

410 Pages·2007·1.75 MB·English

by  Jay Inslee

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A P O L L O ’ S
F I R E
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A P O L L O ’ S
F I R E
IGNITING AMERICA’S
CLEAN-ENERGY
ECONOMY
Jay Inslee
Bracken Hendricks
Foreword by President Bill Clinton
/ Washington (cid:129) Covelo (cid:129) London
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Copyright © 2008
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press,
1718 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009.
ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Inslee, Jay.
Apollo’s fire : igniting America’s clean-energy economy / Jay Inslee,
Bracken Hendricks.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59726-175-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Energy policy—United States. 2. Renewable energy sources—
United States. 3. Global warming. I. Hendricks, Bracken. II. Title.
HD9502.U521536 2007
333.790973—dc22
2007026185
British Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available
Printed on recycled, acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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This book is dedicated to my mom and dad
—Jay Inslee
And
to my wife, Alice, and my children, Galen and Clea Rose
—Bracken Hendricks
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Contents
Foreword by President Bill Clinton xi
The First Apollo Project xv
Chapter 1: A New Apollo Project for Energy 1
Global Warming Comes to the White House—Or Doesn’t 23
Ten Energy Enlightenments 27
Chapter 2: Reinventing the Car 36
Becoming Mahatma 63
Chapter 3: Waking Up to the New Solar Dawn 66
When Energy Markets Go Wrong: Surviving Enron 89
Chapter 4: Energy Efficiency: The Distributed Power
of Democracy 93
Green-Collar Jobs: From the South Bronx to Oakland 109
Chapter 5: Reenergizing Our Communities, One Project
at a Time 113
vii
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viii Contents
“We Don’t Need Oil” 143
Chapter 6: Homegrown Energy 147
Wind Energy: False Starts on the Road to Success 175
Chapter 7: Sailing in a Sea of Energy 178
A Mind Opened about Mined Coal 193
Chapter 8: Can Coal or Nuclear Be Part of the Solution? 195
The Apollo Alliance: New Coalitions for Change 223
Chapter 9: What’s It Going to Take? 227
A Tale of Two Presidents 255
Chapter 10:An American Energy Policy 258
Placing Our Bets on a New Apollo Project 299
Lessons of the Mimosa Tree 309
Stories from the Field 313
Epilogue: Launching Apollo 331
Acknowledgments 335
Notes 339
Index 369
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Foreword
As I sat down and read the preamble to Congressman Jay Inslee and
Bracken Hendricks’s new book, Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean-
Energy Economy, I immediately noticed something. The energy in their
words is tangible as they recount President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 an-
nouncement of his plan, by decade’s end, to land an American man on
the moon.
Just a sentence or two brought me right back to that day, when I was
fifteen. Like the rest of America, I was mesmerized by President Ken -
nedy’s ambition and entranced by the novelty and urgency of the Space
Race. Our potential was so great that it was nearly impossible to digest,
and though times were uncertain, the threat of the Cold War was tem-
pered by the promise and, yes, the energy of the American pioneer
spirit, surging ever forward into uncharted territory, always innovating
along the way. Our pragmatism and our optimism, our diligence and
our sense of duty are the ideals that serve as the nation’s cornerstone,
beginning with the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” and enduring
today, into the new millennium, as we face new and insistent challenges.
If there is just one thing we can glean from days gone by, it is that
history is full of themes that repeat themselves, often in the most ironic
of ways. Energy—in a variety of ways, ranging from its detrimental ef-
fects on the environment to the quest for clean alternative forms, and
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