Saving the Earth by Way of the Moon

By Amanda Griscom Little, The American Prospect. Posted October 3, 2005.

The mission of the 2-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based Apollo Alliance has come to represent a bold vision of progressivism. Named for President Kennedy's moon shot, the alliance's goal is to mobilize a sweeping federal commitment to energy independence, with the triple-whammy promise of creating good jobs with new technology, bolstering national security with energy independence, and saving the planet from carbon emissions.

Apollo calls for grand-scale federal and state investment -- $300 billion over 10 years -- to underwrite a suite of policy measures designed to stimulate the development of clean-energy industries. The alliance claims the measures would create more than 3 million jobs, eliminate American dependence on Middle East oil imports, lead to 15 percent of U.S. electricity coming from renewable sources, and reduce national energy consumption by 16 percent.

But even though energy independence is almost universally applauded in principle, Apollo faces heavy opposition. Powerful extractive industries fear their own demise in a post-fossil-fuel era. Their close allies in the Bush administration and the Republican-dominated Congress are likewise beholden to the energy status quo and share an aversion to public planning.

A budget crisis created by tax cuts makes it seemingly unthinkable to spend the kind of money necessary to make serious headway on renewable energy. But if Apollo is unlikely to achieve progress at a federal level anytime soon, its backers hope it can help transform energy politics at a local and state level.

Apollo's vision has been endorsed by many major unions and many environmental groups, as well as nine Democratic governors, including Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and Bill Richardson of New Mexico. The funding community is similarly enthusiastic. "Apollo has been an absolutely integral force, if not the key force, in helping shift the framework of the energy debate from environmental space into economic ... and national-security space," says Peter Teague, director of the environment program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a lead funder of the Apollo project. "At almost every meeting of progressives I go to, people point to Apollo as the prime example of how we should be doing our politics differently. It fundamentally reorients our message away from doom and gloom and toward inspiration and solving multiple problems simultaneously."

Apollo was publicly unveiled in June 2003, at a time when a host of other organizations were proclaiming similar goals. Many of these like-minded groups were spearheaded by conservative hawks concerned about national security. Frank Gaffney Jr., a former policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior and founder of the Center for Security Policy; C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel, and Robert McFarlane, former national-security adviser to Reagan, are active in The Energy Future Coalition and an organization called Set America Free. These groups champion efficiency and alternative-energy agendas in the name of national and economic security, and have intermittently collaborated with Apollo. "All these organizations evolved in parallel on the heels of September 11," said Apollo Alliance founding director Bracken Hendricks, who has been a key adviser to the Energy Future Coalition and is a member of Set America Free.

According to Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition, "Apollo was the first out of the box in articulating the idea that this is a job-creation and economic-development engine as well as good for energy and the environment. Those of us coming from the security angle have definitely embraced that message." Likewise, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, "Look at the opportunities our country is missing -- and the risks we are assuming -- by having a president and vice president who refuse to ... marry geopolitics, energy policy, and environmentalism."

Bill Clinton is also a believer. "We've got to make [energy] a national-security argument, and we've got to make it a jobs argument, and we've got to make the price of oil irrelevant," Clinton said in July at an Aspen Institute gathering.

Amanda Griscom Little writes the Muckraker column for Grist Magazine. Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

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