Worrying About Green Jobs in Boulder, CO

If there is a laboratory of the America of tomorrow, it is here. Boulder is one of the “greenest” cities in the United States. More than ever, people ride bikes, recycle, and invent. “Green is the new gold”: the green rush succeeded the gold rush. Many large American scientific institutions are located here, including the “crown jewel,” as Democratic Governor Bill Ritter says: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

At an altitude of 1650 meters, Boulder mixes intellectuals and athletes. On campus, one crosses paths with Nobel Prize physicists (2001, 2005) as well as climbers. Or perhaps one of the fourteen scientists who participated in the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore). In 2002, Boulder adopted its own “Kyoto resolution.” Four years later, it became the first city in the United States to pay a tax on carbon dioxide emissions (proportional to property taxes).

As often happens in the West, innovations come from the population, which applies pressure through a referendum. In November 2004, although the majority voted for George Bush, Boulder’s inhabitants adopted Amendment 37, which mandated that 10% of electricity consumed come from renewable energy. At first, the company X-Cel attempted to oppose it. Now, the firm promotes the “Smart Grid City,” the first of its kind in the United States.

Lawyer Dennis Arfmann is one of the smart grid’s pioneers. In 2007, he installed solar panels on his house. He benefited from a company subsidy and tax reduction from the federal government. He only paid for 30% of the total financing (or $14,000, around 9000 Euros). In one year, not only did he not pay for any energy, but he sold electricity back to the company. This is the democratization direction praised by Al Gore, a system in which individuals contribute to general consumption. But decentralization cannot last. X-Cel expects to build its own solar factory.

Dennis Arfmann codirects the “climate change” division of one of the major legal offices in the United States, Hogan and Hartson, a firm that employs 1,200 lawyers around the world. The unit was created in 2002 with the adoption of the Kyoto protocol. “The private sector wants to understand and prepare,” he explains. The firm also helped to establish the legal framework for carbon markets in Russia and Eastern Europe.

From his office on Walnut Street, the lawyer helps large industrialists and financiers with new energy, against competition for turbines and batteries that still lack “green” stock. One of the clients of Berkshire Hathaway, billionaire Warren Buffet’s firm, just purchased 10% of the shares in a Chinese battery factory. Vestas, the Danish turbine manufacturer, expects to open two new factories in Colorado, which will create 1,500 “green jobs” that the candidates promoted – before the crisis – as being the basis of the increase. East of Colorado, on agricultural land, hopelessly flat, farmers are now profiting from their land by distributing rights to push the development of windmills. Foreshadowing the Midwest of tomorrow, Colorado is reinventing agricultural areas into “green basins.”

No matter who the next president is, Congress is looking into what the Bush administration always refused: constraining legislation, aimed at reducing emissions here by 80% by 2050, and installing a CO2 market. The financial crisis is in the process of questioning these perspectives again. Certain Republicans are starting to say that imposing limits on emissions could increase the cost of energy, which to them does not seem like a good idea at the moment. Democrats recognize that the sale mechanism of bids for permission to emit is probably compromised.

In the private sector is incertitude. “A certain number of projects we are working on are postponed,” explains Dennis Arfmann, for example, the “clean carbon” project in Wyoming, which he was working on. Nonetheless, the lawyer shows the letter signed by 153 Democratic representatives on October 2. On the eve of the vote on the plan to stabilize Wall Street, these elected officials attempted to let it be known that they will not accept the next administration pushing to the background what should be the “new” new economy.