The following post is from Eric Steen, Deputy Director of Communicaitons for the BlueGreen Alliance.

I’m a fan of 80’s and 90’s actions movies, particularly bad ones. If it’s got Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Sly Stallone, or Arnold in it, I’ve probably seen it (and enjoyed it). So, when I was reading a Washington Post article about how firefighting capability in the U.S. is going to be cut during the wildfire season because of the sequester cuts implemented earlier this year, I obviously harkened back to a 1990’s action movie — starring none other than Howie Long — called Firestorm (I’d link it at IMDB but then you’d be tempted to click and find out more about this terrible movie. You’re welcome for saving you from that).

The movie was bad. Let’s just say that Howie Long may have been a great football player and is a good commentator but his acting chops left a little to be desired. The premise was simple, Long played Jesse Graves, our “smokejumper” hero — basically a firefighter who parachutes into remote areas to fight wildfires — who gets stuck in a secluded area fighting a fire where, inevitably, an escaped criminal mastermind and his men are trying to recover a bunch of money they stashed at some point.

Now, you’re probably asking yourself, what does Firestorm have to do with what is going on with the sequester? Good question. The answer is that, because of cuts to the Department of Agriculture, we’re put in the difficult position of moving money away from preventing wildfires to put money into firefighters who will have to fight them, during what is predicted to be the worst wildfire season in recent memory. Things like having people remove extremely flammable and hazardous materials from the path of wildfires may not get done. And, if it comes down to a firefight, there may be half as many firefighters as last season and 50 fewer trucks.

We may as well be relying on the fictional Jesse Graves to fight our fires.

From the Washington Post: 

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said his agency, which is largely responsible for fighting monster fires along with the Interior Department, will try to manage burns with 500 fewer firefighters and 50 fewer engines and by shifting money earmarked for prevention to pay for fire suppression. 

“I hope we can get through this fire season without any fatalities,” Vilsack said. 

“When fires burn uncontrolled in our nation’s wildlands, it means a loss of homes, businesses . . . and all too often lives,” said Ernest Mitchell Jr., the U.S. fire administrator who joined Vilsack and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at a news conference in Boise, Idaho. 

The sequester cut more than $115 million from the federal wildland fire program budget, USDA officials have said, at a time when the nation continues to face abnormally dry conditions, particularly in the West, as a result of climate change.

During one of the worst wildfire seasons on record amid a historic drought, the USDA Forest Service ran out of money last year to pay firefighters, operate trucks and fly aircraft. The agency borrowed money from fire management budgets, which help prevent fires, to pay for suppression.

There are basic things in our lives that we expect to pay for with our tax dollars. Things like firefighters being there to fight out of control wildfires. But, with the dysfunction in Washington, D.C., we’ve gotten to the point where saving homes and lives is less important than cutting a budget. Where are our priorities? How did our lawmakers let these untargeted, across-the-board budget cuts take effect? Especially during a wildfire season expected to be worse than last year — and will likely keep getting worse as the years go on and our climate continues to change. 

The answer is simple. They put politics ahead of making us safe. And, that’s unacceptable.

Justifiably, our nation’s ports have earned the reputation of being gritty, noisy and industrial gateways to our shores. However, this grimy image should not preclude us from viewing our ports as an important opportunity to improve our efficiency and sustainability. A recent speech by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is showing that with the right investments, our nation’s ports can be a shining example of how investments in clean energy can also invigorate the economy.

Citing the Port of Los Angeles as an example of the vast potential to clean up our ports, save energy and curb emissions, Villaraigosa touted a $1.5 billion investment to modernize LA’s port as the catalyst for sweeping upgrades. The changes to LA’s port included upgrades to trucks that operate around the port, encouraging the use of onshore electricity for cargo ships and requiring cargo ships to find new ways to curb emissions. Also helping to curb emissions, California recently mandated that cargo ships visiting the state’s ports turn off idling or plug into onshore power.

These changes represent significant progress for one of the country’s biggest ports. The port of Los Angeles is responsible directly or indirectly for 1.1 million jobs in California and handles $223 billion in U.S. trade value. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach combined handle about 40 percent of the total value of cargo container imports entering the U.S.

Mayor Villaraigosa showed outstanding leadership charging forward with this initiative. "When it comes to greening our shipping operations and growing our port in smart and sustainable ways, the world looks to us for leadership," he said. Likewise, the industry has also lead by example by publicly committing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  

It goes to show strategic efforts to expand clean energy and curb greenhouse gas emissions can produce meaningful results across the economy, be it in solar and wind power, vehicle fuel efficiency or at our ports. 

The following blog is cross-posted from the Good Jobs, Green Jobs website.

Even months after Super Storm Sandy, power hadn’t been restored to all residents on the East Coast. That was one of the many events that brought a serious problem to light: Our infrastructure systems — the energy, water and communications networks we rely on and use every day — have not changed, in many ways, since they were originally designed, and they are not able to keep up with the demands of 21st century living. This was the discussion of the second plenary panel during the 2013 Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference on Tuesday, April 16.

As Mike Langford, National President of the Utility Workers Union of America, explained, “Our infrastructure is at the end of its life. That is why our national infrastructure earned a grade of D+… Don’t we deserve an A+ water and energy system?”

Nancy Stoner, Acting Assistant Administrator for Water at the Environmental Protection Agency added, “The good news is that investing in our water infrastructure creates jobs. We owe it to future generations to ensure they have safe drinking water like we have had.”

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, spoke about the importance of using pension funds to fund training programs to support training programs for workers. “We know that if we invest pension funds into infrastructure projects in a prudent, fiducially-sound way, retrofit and upgrade buildings to make them energy efficient, and create those type of jobs and training to allow current workers to upgrade their skills and create a new skill base for new workers, that is a win-win-win.”

Representative Stacey Abrams, Minority Leader of the Georgia House, shared the story of the Atlanta Green Beltway as an example of what can happen when infrastructure projects are done right. This project is re-using 22-miles of historic railroad corridors to connect 45 neighborhoods and provide a network of public parks, multi-use trails and transit.

Eric Rodriguez, Vice President of Public Policy for the National Council of La Raza, spoke about the importance of building relationships and non-traditional partnerships in order to get these types of investments done. “We spend a lot of time talking to ourselves. Building relationships and agenda setting collaboratively takes time and energy, so it is easier to talk to ourselves. Building deeper, collaborative and authentic relationships on the local and national level is what is needed to win.”

Langford pushed conference attendees to be talk about the importance of investing in our nation’s infrastructure to those in their home communities. “Every person needs to be an ambassador for how these types of projects need to happen in their own communities. We need community involvement and education so we can get the investments that are good for workers and good for communities.”

The following blog is cross-posted from the Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference website.

Addressing a standing room only crowd of union members, environmentalists and business leaders who are all prepared for an exciting few days ahead, David Foster, Executive Director of the BlueGreen Alliance opened up the first Good Jobs, Green Jobs 2013 plenary session. Leo Gerard from United Steelworkers, Larry Cohen from Communications Workers of America, Jon Barton from Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Michael Brune from Sierra Club all spoke about why they individually are engaged in the movement to build a stronger, cleaner economy and also why their respective organizations are also  leading the way.

Leo Gerard with United Steelworkers spoke about growing up in one of the most polluted towns in North America. Now at the head of the United Steelworkers organization, everyday he’s working to convince others about the importance of good jobs that protect the environment. He said, we won’t always agree on every item. He urged the need to go after the low-hanging fruit that’s going to create jobs. One example he gave was that more than 50 percent of schools in America are more than 60 years old and there’s millions of jobs in retrofitting schools and public buildings.

Speaking also about the impact pollution had on him when he was younger, Sierra Club’s Michael Brune  said that our biggest challenge is we think we can all take on this pursuit alone. He warned that we don’t just want to slow the rate of warming or the decline of the environment and if we’re fighting to win on climate change, we have to do it together.

Communications Workers of America’s Larry Cohen spoke about how we have to take a broad view of this challenge. He said, we have to work together on a democracy movement. As important as climate change and workers’ rights are we need to raise up these democracy issues. He added, let’s put together climate change, workers’ rights and democracy and let’s stand together and fight back.

Jon Barton from SEIU provided some perspective on the experiences of his own members, that the same communities that are bearing the brunt of environmental injustice are the same ones bearing burdens of economic injustice.

All of the leaders agreed that there’s no reason we have to accept this level of unemployment when changing the infrastructure for this country is in need.  If you’re not able to attend Good Jobs, Green Jobs 2013, or even if you are at the conference, tell us why you care about this work together. Share your thoughts and ideas on Facebook and Twitter, @GJGJConference or www.facebook.com/greenjobs conference. We’re here and together we make progress more progress than we can on our own.  

Optimism from job growth in the first two months of 2013 was interrupted today with the release of the March jobs report. The numbers reveal just 88,000 jobs were added last month and unemployment dropped slightly to 7.7 percent, although for all the wrong reasons. At face value, this data may not sound terrible, but if we read between the lines the numbers are troubling for the economy. It’s time to make investments that will stimulate growth and get the economy back on track.

Last month jobs were added at the slowest pace in almost a year and the unemployment rate dropped one-tenth of a percent mostly because people stopped looking for work.  According to a Washington Post analysis, “…496,000 people dropped out of the labor force, and 206,000 fewer people reported having a job, meaning that the proportion of Americans currently working actually ticked down, not up.” Americans have had enough of Congress’ manufactured crises of indecision and indiscriminate budget cuts that are holding us all back. Today’s jobs report is proof that looming budget cuts and economic uncertainty are weighing down job creation, innovation and our ability to compete globally.

Despite today’s numbers, the economic recovery overall hasn’t exactly been feeble. Over the past three years, over six million jobs have been added. The damage caused by the sequester — across-the-board budget cuts that was pushed for by Republicans — have begun to take effect and are beginning to rattle the economy.

In the short-term, air-traffic control towers are being shut down, hundreds of people laid off at the Department of Energy and hospitals are also being forced to make layoffs. Over the next year or two, experts are warning that we could lose around 750,000 jobs across the country.

In the long-term, it’s hard to say exactly what opportunities America’s workers and growing industries are missing out on, but the sequester is effectively a man-made recession. We know how a recession hurts in the long term; it has, according to Lawrence H. Summers, a former adviser to President Obama, and J. Bradford DeLong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley “…scarring effects on young workers who have trouble beginning their careers, changes in managerial attitudes, and reductions in government physical and human capital investments as social-insurance expenditures make prior claims on limited state and local financial resources.”

Enough about but we’re not doing to stimulate the economy though, and more about what we can do to rev engines of the economy. The best thing to do is to make strategic investments in America’s clean energy future and rebuild our infrastructure for the 21^st century. We can put more Americans back to work and stimulate growth by investing now in infrastructure — and preparing our basic systems for the impacts of climate change — and manufacturing more clean energy technologies here in the United States. Spurring long-term economic growth today is as important as it has ever been, and we can’t lose sight of that fact.

The following blog is written by Rob McCulloch, Senior Policy and Legislative Advocate. This is the third blog in a series on the state of our nation’s infrastructure.  

America’s global trade accounts for the movement of nearly $4 trillion worth of goods annually – the world’s leading importer and third largest exporter. Around 95 percent of these goods move through our nation’s ports, which are ranked as ‘C – mediocre,’ in the latest infrastructure report card released by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

This is not a recipe for success if we expect to lead the global economy, nor is it good for our environment.

According to the ASCE report, three-quarters of America’s international exports (by tonnage) accessed global markets by water in 2010, and nearly approximately 70 percent (by tonnage) of U.S. imports arrived here by water. Trade volume through America’s ocean ports is expected to more than double between 2012 and 2021, and to double again shortly after 2030.

Our ports are barely able to handle current capacity, and will require significant investment as the economy grows. From 2012 to 2020, ASCE estimates that 75 percent of our port capital investment needs will be for expansion, with the remainder for rehabilitation.

Inefficient linkage from port terminals to nearby road and rail networks is one of the biggest challenges to expanding port operations. There are two ways to address this, both with significant opportunity for job creation and mitigating environmental impact.

The first, when feasible, is to connect rail lines directly to port facilities. Nearly half of the intermodal freight containers bound for and from oceangoing vessels moves by rail eventually, so providing a direct connection from ship to rail and vice versa would greatly improve shipping time, and reduce the need for trucks to move containers to and from off-site depots. Construction of such connections, and the additional need for operators, offer significant employment opportunities and make our ports more efficient, reducing pollution as well.

Connecting rail directly to a port terminal may not always be feasible, or at best are a long-term prospect. So when containers need to move by truck, we need to ensure those trucks are cleaner and more efficient. Often, port trucks are the dirtiest vehicles on the road, creating heavy local pollution and unhealthy working conditions for truck drivers. For example, the LA Clean Ports program successfully reduced port-related pollution 70 percent in one year by getting newer, clean trucks on the road, which also improved working conditions for drivers and increased the capacity of port operations at one of our nation’s busiest ports — wins all around.

America’s ports are often the last to be considered when it comes to prioritizing infrastructure investment, which is misguided given the trillions of dollars of goods flowing through them, in addition to their billions of dollars they sustain in terms of employment and services to local economies from coast to coast. A mediocre grade will likely have an impact down the road in terms of our ability to import and export, threatening the strength of our economy. The ASCE report card, identifying numerous vulnerabilities throughout our nation’s infrastructure, is a much needed wake-up call that will be heeded before it’s too late to act.

This is the second blog in a series on the state of our nation’s infrastructure. 

Any way you measure it, at D+ isn’t an acceptable grade. Any kid who brings home a D on a test or paper knows they’re in trouble. It’s alarming then to learn that in a recent evaluation by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) our nation’s infrastructure earned a D+. The report released this week evaluated our dams, drinking water, levees, bridges, roads, transit and public parks, schools and energy distribution systems. The findings in the report aren’t great news. Most of these systems were found to be in poor condition which is especially alarming for our drinking and wastewater management systems we rely so heavily on for good public health.

Old infrastructure wastes valuable resources. Many U.S. cities rely on pipes that are, on average, a century old. Leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water a day and are known to leach contaminants and breed bacteria in drinking water, jeopardizing the health of our nation’s communities.

Our aging pipes also affect how we’re able to safely discard of wastewater. Like drinking water delivery pipes, sewage systems are aging. Many of these systems were built around World War II, according to ASCE.  

It’s time to recognize the importance of the pipelines, dams and other barriers that make up our water infrastructure with proper investments because the damage caused by this one storm only scratched the surface in terms of revealing the vulnerabilities in our water infrastructure.  

According to the ASCE report, “Nearly 170,000 public drinking water systems are located across the United States. Of these, 54,000 are community water systems that collectively serve more than 264 million people.” These aging drinking water systems along with over 14,780 wastewater treatment facilities pose both a risk and reward. If we allow them to get any worse, the threat of contamination increases significantly. Fixing them on the other hand has the potential to create thousands of jobs in every city across the country. Every $1 billion invested in water infrastructure is estimated to create more than 20,000 new jobs.

The ‘to do’ list is long: Motors and electrical equipment must be waterproofed or raised above newly established flood levels, pipes and sewage systems must be upgraded. Failure to do so could leave population centers vulnerable to public health — like sewage in our streets and water — and environmental hazards in the future.

These are jobs that can be done by American workers and shouldn’t be outsourced. Further investments in our utilities and transportation systems will yield even more benefits and job creation, not to mention the benefits to workers in the concrete, steel and other U.S. industries building the foundation of 21st century infrastructure.

There’s a lot at stake. There are few needs more basic needs than water in our everyday lives. We must invest in our water infrastructure accordingly. 

This is the first blog in a series on the state of our nation’s infrastructure. 

At any given time, it lies beneath our feet, it’s where the rubber meets the road, it’s beneath our home foundations, in the air and at the water’s edge. Infrastructure is everywhere in the form of roads, bridges, ports, drinking water and waste water delivery, transit and more. Despite the prevalence and usefulness of these structures and systems in our everyday lives, a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) shows that we’re falling behind on repairs and upgrades to our infrastructure. What ails our infrastructure — evident in the “D” grade awarded by the report — poses a national problem and potentially an economic solution.

According to the ASCE report, “…it is clear that we have a significant backlog of overdue maintenance across our infrastructure systems, a pressing need for modernization, and an immense opportunity to create reliable, long-term funding sources to avoid wiping out our recent gains.” 

Mediocrity and underperformance are the common themes that emerge from the report. The highest grade goes to our solid waste management at a “B-“. The lowest grade is a “D-“ with a two-way tie between inland waterways and levees. Other categories include drinking water, energy, bridges and ports.

The facts in the report speak volumes about the problems we’re facing: one in nine of the nation’s bridges are rated as structurally deficient; pipes and mains are frequently more than 100 years old and in need of replacement; deficient and deteriorating transit systems cost the U.S. economy $90 billion in 2010, to name a few examples. However, the opportunities to stimulate the economy and create jobs by making necessary repairs are just as numerous.

Over the next week, keep an eye out for our blog series on the problems and opportunities of repairing our infrastructure systems. We’ll be taking a closer look at drinking and wastewater systems, our nation’s ports and roads, transit and rail.

Henry Kaiser, the engineer, businessman, and entrepreneur whose shipyards in Oakland built a battleship a day in World War II, who designed and built the Hoover Dam, and who left his name on one of the largest healthcare companies in the country, once said, “Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.” We see it that way too. 

This blog was written by John Schulz, Director of Sustainability Operations at AT&T (connect with John on Twitter @johnfschulz).It is cross-posted from the 2013 Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference blog. The conference will be happening April 16-18 in Washington, D.C. Reserve your spot today!

In a given day, my cell phone plays the role of alarm clock, navigation system and personal assistant. The next day it is my meteorologist and entertainment system. Oh, and I also use it to communicate with co-workers, business partners, friends and family. It’s so thoroughly a part of my daily routine that I rarely stop to think about what makes it all work. Recently though, I’ve been looking into a resource that helps make it all work but is rarely, if ever, discussed. It’s water.

This idea of “embedded water” represents the sum of the water that is used in every step of a product’s life cycle. You usually hear about embedded water related to food and drink — and that is fairly intuitive because crops demand water — but there seems to be less public dialogue about the embedded water in other items we use each day like electronics and communications technologies.

In the case of my phone, there is embedded water in manufacturing it and delivering it. There is also embedded water in using it. How? Every time a phone — or any other device — connects to a network, that signal flows through a complex maze of equipment that is housed in a diverse collection of facilities. These facilities house the equipment that makes the 21st century digital economy and lifestyle possible, but the equipment demands electricity to run and throws off substantial heat in the process. It’s critical to keep the equipment cool, and the mechanical gear used to accomplish that climate control frequently uses water. My colleague Tim Fleming, Senior Energy Manager, explains the link between building cooling and water in this video. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that a full quarter of the daily water of U.S. buildings is used by cooling systems.

To address this challenge, AT&T and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) joined forces. To start reducing the water used in AT&T’s operations, and thus the water embedded in using our phones and network, AT&T and EDF are running cooling efficiency pilots to identify best practices in three categories: better water treatment technologies, improved operational practices and increased use of “free air” cooling. Our hope is that we will identify concrete ways to reduce AT&T’s 3.4 billion gallon water footprint, and announce the results of our pilot in early 2013. We anticipate finding ways to save millions of gallons of water per year for AT&T, and potentially billions of gallons if the solutions are adopted by other industries.

To learn more about our efforts and how your own company can build a water efficiency program, join us at the Good Jobs Green Jobs Conference for the How AT&T Is Building A Water Efficiency Program and How Your Company Can Too! workshop on Tuesday, April 16 from 3:40 p.m.-5:10 p.m.

Portions of this post originally appeared in Triple Pundit, January 2, 2013.

The following blog is written by Amber Scott, Legislative Intern for the BlueGreen Alliance.  

A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) shows “deteriorating infrastructure, long known to be a public safety issue, has a cascading impact on the nation’s economy, negatively affecting business productivity, gross domestic product, employment, personal income, and international competitiveness.” The ASCE report highlights the fact that infrastructure is too important to both the economy and the environment to fall by the wayside budget cuts — known as the sequester — take effect, but that’s what is happening right now. 

President Obama addressed this critical need for infrastructure improvements in his State of the Union speech, proposing a “Fix-It-First” program to start on our most urgent repairs, such as “the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country” as well as roads, ports, pipelines, and public buildings such as schools. In support of that goal, the president also proposed a “Partnership to Rebuild America” to attract private capital for infrastructure investment “to make sure taxpayers don’t shoulder the whole burden.” Under the Obama administration, $31.3 billion has already gone toward infrastructure projects through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — better known as the stimulus package — according to the White House. 

Infrastructure seems to be a point that both parties can agree on — with a bipartisan transportation infrastructure bill passing last year — however the details of which areas deserve more attention, which programs are most beneficial, and many other important details make policy creation an often partisan game. 

The sequester cuts were originally designed in 2011 to be so arduous that none of the political players would want them to be enacted, as a way to force an agreement for smart cuts. However that didn’t work and now those same cuts have begun to take effect. As President Obama said in his State of the Union address, “we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.” The recent inaction on the part of Congress to deal with the sequester has triggered many national cuts, including cuts in infrastructure and transportation programs such as MAP-21 — the bipartisan bill passed last year — to  be cut by $471 million, FHWA emergency relief funds to be cut $136 million,  and Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants — which are direct grants to states and local governments from the U.S. Department of Transportation to invest in transit and transportation — to be reduced by $41 million. 

Now, a new agreement could deepen those sequester budget cuts. The agreement is a continuing resolution that was passed to keep the federal government funded through the end of the fiscal year and avert a potential government shutdown before March 27^th. The agreement that passed a House vote this past Wednesday afternoon and it would cut MAP-21 funding by $555 million for highways, $117 million for public transportation, $48.5 million for highway safety and delivers no money for new safety programs. 

Although infrastructure has been acknowledged as an important focus by both parties, it has only been a victim in the budget feuds. It is time for Congress to come together and compromise on priorities, including supporting the President’s “Fix-It-First” program to secure investments for our infrastructure, which creates good, middle-class jobs, builds safer transportation networks, reduces carbon emissions, and ensures a higher quality of life for our nation’s citizens.