Evergreen Cooperative Initiative (ECI): Businesses and community groups in Cleveland, Ohio, determined that they needed to solve the problem of joblessness in low-income areas by creating living-wage jobs and then training eligible residents to fill them. They developed a new, cooperative- based economic model, based on green jobs that can inspire other cities with similar economic woes.


The ECI is a community undertak- ing in which anchor institutions like the Cleveland Foundation, University Hospi- tals and the municipal government lever- age their purchasing power to help create green-focused, employee-owned local businesses, which to date include a green laundromat, the hydroponic greenhouse Green City Growers, and Ohio Coopera- tive Solar, which provides weatherization and installs and maintains solar panels. The solar cooperative will more than double Ohio’s solar generating capacity from 2011 levels by the end of 2012 (see EvergreenCooperatives.com).


CALGreen: Updated building codes may not generate much excitement until we consider that U.S. buildings account for a lion’s share of carbon dioxide emissions (39 percent), and consume 70 percent of the electricity we generate. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) reports, “If half of new commercial buildings were built to use 50 percent less energy, it would save over 6 million metric tons of CO2


Sustainable development includes fighting poverty, increasing social inclusion (including advancing the status of women) and protecting the environment.


annually for the life of the buildings— the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road every year.” The California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen), which took effect in January 2011, sets the highest green bar for new buildings in the country. It requires that new build- ings achieve a 20 percent reduction in potable water use, divert 50 percent of their construction waste from land- fills, use paints and materials with low volatile organic compound content and provide parking for clean-air vehicles. Multiple key stakeholders have been in- volved throughout the process, includ- ing the California Energy Commission and the Sierra Club.


“We really tried to bring together an entire spectrum of people and groups with different perspectives and expertise to build a consensus,” says David Walls, executive director of the California Building Standards Commis- sion. “If we were going to put some- thing in the code, we wanted to make sure it was right.” (See Tinyurl.com/ CALGreen-Home.)


Renewable Portfolio Standard: Texas leads the country in electricity generated from wind power. One complex, in Ros- coe, features 627 turbines on 100,000 acres that cost $1 billion to build. Much of the rapid growth of the state’s wind industry can be credited to Texas’ Re- newable Portfolio Standard, legislation passed in 1999 that mandated construc- tion of renewable energy, including so-


34 Collier/Lee Counties swfl.naturalawakeningsmag.com


lar, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass and landfill gas, in addition to wind. It further mandated that utilities generate 2,000 megawatts of addi- tional renewable energy by 2009, then 5,880 MW by 2015 and 10,000 MW by 2025. The 10-year goal was met in six years, and Texas has added many green jobs, increased tax revenues and provided security against black- outs, which is critical in the event of extreme heat or drought (see Tinyurl. com/TexasStandard).


Edison Innovation Green Growth Fund: Clean technology is booming despite the economic recession and attracting serious investment funds. Ac- cording to a report by Clean Edge, Inc., venture capital investments in clean technologies increased 30 percent between 2010 and 2011, from $5.1 bil- lion to $6.6 billion.


New Jersey entrepreneurs are upping their state’s potential in this arena with the Edison Innovation Green Growth Fund. The program proffers loans of up to $2 million for compa- nies, research facilities and nonprofits engaged in producing clean energy technologies, ranging from energy effi- ciency products such as LED lighting to solar, wind, tidal, biomass and methane capture. A condition of the loan is that a project must employ 75 percent of its workforce from New Jersey, or commit to growing 10 high-paying jobs (mini- mum $75,000 annually) over two years (see Tinyurl.com/NewJersey-EDA).


Grassroots Leadership Elinor Ostrom, the political economist who won a Nobel Prize in economics but passed on just before the start of the Rio conference, dedicated her last blog post to considering the event’s impact. Titled “Green from the Grassroots,” the post stressed the priority of a multifac- eted approach to curbing emissions. “Decades of research demonstrate that a variety of overlapping policies at city, subnational, national and interna- tional levels is more likely to succeed than single, overarching, binding agreements,” Ostrom remarked. “Such an evolutionary approach to policy provides essential safety nets should one or more policies fail. The good news is that evolutionary policymak-


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