Outline:
1. Importance of green jobs.
2. The NYC Apollo Alliance and its relationship to the creation of green jobs.
3. The Ten Point Plan for creating green jobs, changing energy supply and demand, and improving the environment.
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Green jobs have become a renewed focus for New York City with respect to alleviating climate change and becoming a more sustainable city. Creating and sustaining green jobs has become an important strategy for environmental protection.
The NYC Apollo Alliance is a coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs. This organization has outlined a “Ten Point Plan for a Strong Economy and Healthy City”. This plan is the coalition’s strategy for creating jobs, changing energy supply and demand, and improving the environment. The Alliance will promote the plan through research, public policy, development, organizing, communications and education initiatives.
The Ten Point Plan is as follows (taken straight from the Apollo Alliance website):
1. Build a New Generation of Buildings
Create hundreds of thousands of good jobs in New York City by investing in construction and retrofitting “green” high performance buildings with innovative financing and incentives, improved building operations, and updated codes and standards. This will reduce our energy needs, promote health and safety, and help working families, businesses, and government agencies realize substantial cost savings. It will also improve student performance, worker productivity, and the city’s physical and emotional health.
2. Bolster Energy Distribution Systems.
Ensure that our existing energy distribution systems are adequately maintained and upgraded to prevent future blackouts and secure public safety. Make certain that NYC maintains its competitive edge by ensuring a consistent and reliable power supply. Promote distributive sources of energy by enabling their access to the grid.
3. Develop Green Roofs.
Significantly expand the city’s open spaces and create thousands of highly skilled jobs by greening our city’s roofs. Mitigate the urban heat island effect and in turn reduce air-conditioning needs, decrease the negative effects of storm-water runoff, which has been identified as a major source of water pollution and retain 50-75% of storm-water. This would ease pressure on the city’s combined sewage overflow system which cannot handle the increased volume of combined sewage during heavy rains and produces an overflow which empties untreated contaminants into the city’s waterways.
4. Create Thousands of “Green Collar” Jobs.
Make NYC the home of the niche high performance building product market through research and development, marketing campaigns, technical assistance for manufacturers and by investing in existing manufacturers to upgrade their capacity and create new incentives.
5. Eliminate Waste.
Pursue a citywide zero waste policy that promotes waste prevention and creates thousands of “green collar” jobs by reusing, remanufacturing, and recycling existing materials. Link zero waste to green industrial retention.
6. Transition Workforce from The Old to The New.
Link workforce and economic development and prime the pump for high performance building investments by training a skilled workforce. Create jobs through energy audits and retrofits, deconstruction, brownfield remediation, and specialized pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship trainings.
7. Prime the Pump.
Encourage government to take the lead in creating a high performance city with public buildings, schools, affordable housing, parks, and transit infrastructure. Invest in high performance real estate; and redevelop brownfield sites. Encourage the business community to invest in high performance real estate and the technologies of the future by demonstrating grow potential.
8. Plan and Distribute Power Fairly.
Ensure that energy planning and economic development in NYC are conducted equitably and that lower-income communities of color do not bear an overwhelming burden.
9. Invest in Renewables.
Reduce dependency on foreign oil and diversify energy sources by promoting existing technologies in solar, biomass, micro-hydro, geothermal, and wind, and by setting ambitious but achievable goals for increasing renewable generation. Bring highly skilled construction jobs to NYC by augmenting incentives for residents and businesses to install solar units. Promote state and local policy – including the establishment of renewable portfolio standards – that link clean energy and good jobs. Research and develop new technology for distributed renewable generation. Invest in our local economy by relying on indigenous resources, which retain rather than export revenues.
10. Develop Transit Alternatives.
Increase mobility, job access, and transportation and reduce congestion, environmental toxins, and waste by investing in effective multimodal networks including bicycle, mass transit, ferries, and non-polluting vehicles.
(Source: http://urbanagenda.org/nycapollo/10ptplan.htm)
