President Obama set a goal of 1 million new manufacturing jobs in his second term. Last month we added zero. Not one. Nada. Zip. We did add low-wage jobs, though. Maybe we can talk about a national manufacturing strategy now?

A Million Manufacturing Jobs?

In the 2012 campaign President Obama set a goal of creating 1 million new manufacturing jobs. (This goal comes after the country lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2009.) Manufacturing jobs bring money into the economy. Manufacturing jobs also bring along with them many jobs in other sectors that support manufacturing, from the supply chain to the maintenance to the marketing and sales of the goods. This is what the President understood when he set this goal.

But with the March jobs numbers out this morning the economy has created a total of only 39,000 manufacturing jobs this year — zero in March. That leaves the country with 961,000 manufacturing jobs to go in the time remaining.

Perhaps this dearth of new manufacturing jobs has something to do with the economic stagnation we see around us?

Job Report Summary

While the jobs report was not too bad overall, it was terrible for manufacturing. Job growth for January and February was revised up by 114,000, so average job growth for the last three months was 212,000. But job gains were largely in low-wage sectors with zero gained in manufacturing. Employment services, restaurant employees and the retail sector accounted for more than half of April job growth. Health care added 19,000 jobs.

The sequester started to hit, with 8,000 jobs lost in the federal government (3,500 of those from the Postal Service.) State and local governments lost 3,000 jobs, which means 224,000 jobs lost over the last year. Construction lost 6,000 jobs, apparently from public projects.

The #AAMeter Manufacturing Jobs Tracker

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) Jobs Tracker — the #AAMeter — tracks progress toward the President’s goal of adding 1 million manufacturing jobs. AAM uses the monthly jobs report data to keep track of how we are dowing towards reaching the 1-million-jobs goal, which would require an average monthly increase of 20,833 manufacturing jobs. The picture tells the story:

Not so great. What do we need to do to boost our manufacturing sector, bringing better-paying jobs and the jobs that support manufacturing?

First We Need A National Manufacturing Strategy

We need more jobs, higher-wage jobs, and jobs in sectors that do more for the economy. This requires a national manufacturing strategy.

Other countries have national strategies to increase the strength of their national manufacturing sector. We do not. We are wedded to an ideology that says that we as a nation should not protect our good-paying jobs and our manufacturing sector. In fact, the “free-market” and “free-trade” ideology even says it is wrong to have a strategy as a country to keep and strengthen our important economic sectors.

Alliance for American Manufacturing’s Scott Paul said, “The United States is the only major industrial nation that does not have a cohesive national manufacturing strategy. We’ve outlined steps the president should to help meet his manufacturing jobs goal. If the Administration and Congress show a genuine willingness to act on these common sense policies, we’ll see our Jobs Tracker move toward 1 million jobs gained.”

Democrats in Congress have, in fact, outlined a Make It In America legislative plan,

The Democrats’ Make it in America plan is a bold initiative to get America working again by building the products of the future here at home. Make it in America will create the conditions necessary to unleash American skill and ingenuity to power our 21st century economy. As President Obama has said, America must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world and our initiative will help our nation do just that. When we Make it in America, American families will make it too.

Please click through to see information about the Jobs Opportunities Between our Shores (JOBS) Act, New Alternative Transportation to Give American Solutions (NAT GAS) Act, National Manufacturing Strategy Act, Build American Jobs Act, Build America Bonds to Create Jobs Now Act, National Infrastructure Development Bank Act, The Airports, Highways, High-Speed Rail, Trains and Transit: Make it in America, One Global Internet Act, Permanent R&D Tax Credit, Rare Earths and Critical Materials Revitalization Act, Energy Critical Elements Renewal Act, Resource Assessment of Rare Earths (RARE) Act, Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, Innovative Technologies Investment Incentives Act, Small Business Start-Up Savings Accounts, Make it in America Block Grant Act, Clean Energy Technology Manufacturing and Export Assistance Act, Security in Energy and Manufacturing (SEAM) Act, American Manufacturing Efficiency & Retraining Investment Collaboration (AMERICA Works), Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success (SECTORS) Act, The Keep American Jobs from Going Down the Drain Act, Berry Amendment Extension Act, American Jobs Matter Act and the All-American Flag Act.

Democratic Whip Sten Hoyer has been a leader in promoting the Make It In America agenda, with a Make It In America web page as well.

Ideology, or Something Else?

But here is the thing: everything is being blocked by Republican obstruction in the name of “free market” and “free trade” ideology.

And here is the other thing: those who are driving and funding the ideology are making big money off of the damage this ideology is doing! The financial sector funds much of the push to “free trade” and against a national manufacturing strategy. And as a result the financial sector is soaring at the expense of manufacturing and the jobs it brings. The oil and coal industries are funding much of the fight against alternative energy, energy efficiency, green manufacturing and the jobs it brings. And as a result the oil and coal sectors are booming at teh expense of the rest of the economy.

The Koch brothers alone gained $15 billion — a 43% increase — between March 2010 and Sept 2011. Are their motives really ideological? It turns out to be a very profitable ideological agenda for them.

And we don’t even know if other countries are helping drive America’s ideological opposition to national strategies by funding the right-wing “free market” “think tanks” that push it, because the funding for these efforts is not disclosed.

Other Steps

Along with implementing a national manufacturing strategy there are many other things we can do to promote our manufacturing sector to revive our economy and create meaningful, good-paying jobs. Among these:

Tax policies: End the tax incentives that encourage American companies to move jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country. Immediately end the “deferral” of taxes on foreign income. Companies get a tax advantage on foreign profits over profits they earn here, so they more operations out of the country.

The big one in tax policy is offshore tax deferral: Companies are currently holding $1.7 trillion out of our economy and away from shareholders, just because we let them avoid taxes until the bring it back. So they move profit centers of tax havens, etc. Repeal this deferral and make them bring that money home now and stop moving profit centers out of the country from now on.

Other tax policies that would help: Section 199 Domestic Production Deduction; Accelerated Cost Recovery; Depletion Allowances; Net Operating Losses; Last-In, First-Out Accounting; Interest Cost Deductibility; Research & Development Tax Credit; Current Tax Treatment of Employee Health Care and Pension Contributions; Credit for Prior Year Minimum Tax.

Currency manipulation: Countries like China manipulate their currency to give them a price advantage in international markets. This must stop. There are steps we can take to stop this but our administration is hog-tied by foreign policy needs that conflict with our country’s trade-balance needs. For example they can’t crack down on China and then ask China’s help with North Korea. The answer is for Congress to pass a law requiring balancing tariffs on goods from countries that manipulate currency.

Buy American policies: COngress and states should improve Buy American requirements in procurement. Our tax dollars should boost our economy.

A recent example — Reps. Pete Visclosky (D-IN) and Tim Murphy (R-PA) have introduced the American Steel First Act of 2013, a bill to require the Department of Transportation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security to exclusively use American-made iron and steel in infrastructure projects.

Defense procurement especially needs Buy American requirements. Contractors should be required to increase their domestic procurement. This is about national security vulnerabilities just as much as about our tax dollars supporting our economy.

Fix and modernize our country’s infrastructure: We could have full employment right away if we just did what we need to do anyway and will have to do eventually. Maintain and modernize our infrastructure (with American-made supplies.) Our infrastructure is crumbling. We need to completely modernize our infrastrucutre so our economy is competitive, and in the process we will revitalize jobs and manufacturing.

Invest in education: to improve our high schools, colleges and universities. We need 21st-century education with a renewed focus on manufacturing in America.

Invest in energy efficiency and green manufacturing: There is a green revolution taking place in the world and we are not in the lead. The President’s 50mpg mandate is a great start, but we need renewable energy standards, tax credits for alternative energy, and policies to promote green manufacturing, especially working to capture a share of wind, solar, advanced battery, electric car and similar manufacturing.

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The Pew Charitable Trust’s fourth annual report on “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?” doesn’t give the United States much to celebrate on this Earth Day. The report, released last week, finds that the United States is no longer the global leader in renewable energy investment. China is.

From 2011 to 2012, China attracted $65.1 billion of the $269 billion globally invested in renewable energy investment. That compares to $35.6 billion by the United States, which is a 37 percent decline from 2011.

Pew found that globally investments in the renewable energy sector were down 11 percent from their 2011 figures, and that more than 50 percent of all investments were in countries not in the G-20, the set of leading industrial countries. China was the only G-20 country to have a net increase in attracting investors to its renewable energy sector in 2012. Luckily, the renewable energy sector still managed to grow by 88 gigawatts, or 11 percent, globally.

Pew said investments in wind energy were down 14 percent but solar still remained strong. “For the second year in a row, solar technologies attracted more financing than any other technology by a wide margin: $126 billion was invested in the sub-sector in 2012, or 58 percent of the G-20 total,” it said. “China, Europe, and the United States were top markets for solar investment.”

The U.S. loss is no surprise, as policy makers have begun to curtail incentive programs and pursue discredited austerity tactics. Meanwhile, China’s size, commitment and aggressive policies enable it to become the clear leader in clean energy. “In countries with strong policy, they’re successful in attracting investment,” Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew’s clean energy work, said. In the U.S., “we need more than a patchwork of state policies.”

The on-again-off-again nature of federal clean energy programs such as the wind production tax credit, which was barely kept on the books for one more year during the fiscal cliff negotiations at the beginning of the year, contributed to the U.S. losing its clean energy lead. “This is largely due to policy uncertainty,” said Cuttino. “We have no clean energy standard and while there are tax incentives on the books for oil and gas, there are none for clean energy. That makes investors a little nervous.”

The report comes at a particularly hard time for the U.S., as the economy fails to grow and millions still suffer from unemployment. According to Cuttino, the decline in investments is a double whammy because it threatens our advantage as innovators. “This is a sector of the global economy that we’ve traditionally led,” Cuttino said. “We have invented many of the clean energy technologies, so to see China come along and the United States fall back is very troubling.”

On the bright side, the U.S. led the G-20 in energy efficiency, investing $2.5 billion in 2012. President Obama’s latest budget proposal intends to hold this advantage by allocating $200 million for efficiency programs. We are not out of the clean energy race yet.

We need to Increase our public and private investments in green technologies, fix our crumbling infrastructure and create other types of green jobs to return to global green leadership. Enacting policies that would simultaneously heal our broken economy and our climate would give the U.S. a real reason to celebrate the next Earth Day.

“Tell me I’m your national anthem.” That was the theme of the hundreds of environmentalists and labor union members gathered today at the BlueGreen Alliance’s annual conference in Washington. They wanted to remind President Obama and Congress that the middle class is still the national anthem of this country.

In response,  Obama administration officials and congressional Democrats touted the president’s successes and current efforts to a skeptical audience.

They gathered at the conference with a shared vision for our country—combating climate change while creating well-paying jobs, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, advancing the rights and safety of workers, and securing our race to the top—that is shared by the majority of Americans.

At an opening panel focused on the rise and fall of climate change on the national agenda, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., acknowledged that the “propaganda campaign by the polluting industries” has been effective in derailing both the labor and environmental movements.

Although President Obama has placed climate change back on the national agenda, more needs to done. Executive action is crucial in our current political environment, but victories on the local and state level are just as important, if not more. Whitehouse told audience members “the only way to fight is to put light on it,” to advance the national dialogue. “Climate change needs to line up with issues such as gay rights and immigration,” he said.

Corporations and naysayers often claim we must choose between the environment and safety standards, between collective bargaining and job creation, while ignoring the facts. Currently, there are more than 3 million “green jobs.” Employment in this sector grew four times faster than other job categories. Since 2004, investment in clean energy is up 500 percent, and companies are bringing jobs back home from overseas.

This could not be possible without effective policies that promote green technologies and provide incentives for companies to relocate here, such as grants and tax credits. Research has shown that low-cost labor is not a major reason for companies taking jobs overseas. BMW manufactures its sports utility vehicles on our soil, not in Germany. We can compete.

“We have an opportunity before us,” declared David Danielson, Assistant Secretary at the Department of Energy, on the topic of American-made clean energy and manufacturing. He discussed the administration’s current green energy efforts, such as the Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative. In one recent success, in 2012 General Electric moved some operations from China and started manufacturing energy efficient water heaters that use 60 percent less water and save families on average $300 per year.

On the same topic, Leo Gerard, president of SWU, pointed out that “if we don’t have the manufacturing here, we won’t do the R&D here, and if we don’t do that here, we won’t be able to compete in a global economy.”

Our trade deficit is already costing us almost $1 billion a day and our current deficit with China is the largest in history.

This is not only an economic and environmental issue, but also a moral one. “I don’t want this generation, my generation, to be the one who destroys the planet” said Gerard. He envisions a future where his “grandkids and grandkids’ kids” are able to “grow up in an environment where they don’t worry about rising waters or finding good jobs.” This is an idea that we can all get behind.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood proudly stated that “America was built on big ideas and bold action. We have a duty to be good stewards of the environment.”

We have a clear path forward: Green jobs are good jobs that can end the pain and suffering caused by the recession, while setting America on a sustainable track.

Can something be equally beneficial for both the environment and the economy? Leaders of the nation’s largest environmental organizations and labor unions say yes. This week in Washington, the BlueGreen Alliance will be holding its annual conference, appropriately themed “Good Jobs, Green Jobs.”

Often considered each other’s adversary, both the labor and environmental movements share the same goal of putting America on a sustainable path. David Foster, President of the BlueGreen Alliance Foundation, opened yesterday’s kickoff event by saying that both groups agree “90 percent of the time,” and that they share the same “desire for change.”

Combating climate change while simultaneously creating good-paying jobs is a reality that our country has not taken seriously enough. More than 50 percent of our schools are more than 50 years old, as well as our more than 2.5 million miles of existing pipelines. Retrofitting our schools and repairing our existing infrastructure not only leads to a more energy-efficient country, but also a more prosperous one.

Modernizing and fixing our current infrastructure should be one of America’s top priorities, especially while interest rates remain low and unemployment high. Moving toward a greener economy can rebuild our middle class by providing jobs, better working conditions and a higher standard of living. Showing how the interests of workers and environmentalists intersect, Leo Gerard, president of United Steelworkers, noted, “There is more steel used in one wind turbine than in 100 cars.”

Climate change also burdens taxpayers and is a direct threat to our national security. For example, if the U.S. continues to burn fossil fuels at its current rate, ocean temperatures will increase one degree every 10 years. While this may not seem like a lot, scientist have shown that warmer waters lead to more powerful natural disasters, such as superstorm Sandy. Already, from 2004-2011, more than $80 billion was allocated for disaster relief.

Green jobs are not only more advantageous to our overall economy and future, but also to human needs. Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, said, “environmental rights and worker rights are one in the same.” Members of labor unions are disproportionately put at risk for being exposed to pollutants while working and therefore overwhelmingly support environmental protections. Green jobs allow workers to have clean and safe working conditions. In the U.S., environmental pollutants have already led to higher rates of mortality, and just recently, China acknowledged the existence of cancer villages due to its pollution.

Several panelists discussed the election of 2008 and President Obama’s broken promises of change. While issues surrounding social equality have triumphed over the past five years, economic justice has not. Both climate change legislation and labor laws have failed to see progress as CEO pay soars and banks, once again, get bigger. This is the first time since 1935 that the U.S. has not had a fully functioning National Labor Relations Board, and due to this, the rights of workers are continually threatened.

As the nation struggles to combat climate change and rebuild the middle class, organizations and leaders must not fall for the allure of self-reliance. “They will either knock us off one at a time or all together unless we fight back,” said Gerard at the end of the panel discussion.

Neither the labor nor environmental movements can achieve success without one another. And, the U.S. economy and middle class cannot achieve success without both of them. As progressives, we are all in the struggle for a sustainable and equitable future together.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a new Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative. This initiative is about both manufacturing clean energy products and manufacturing using advanced techniques to drive energy efficiency. Both will help make American companies more competitive in the world economy.

At the Energy Blog, David Danielson, Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy explains, Energy Department Launches Bold New Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative,

The Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative aims to:

• >Increase U.S. competitiveness in the production of clean energy products — a key economic opportunity for America to innovate, compete and lead the way in a growing global marketplace.
• Increase manufacturing competitiveness by increasing energy productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. This includes the use of advanced manufacturing technologies, implementation of energy efficiency measures, the capture of combined heat and power opportunities and taking advantage of low-cost natural gas to help American manufacturers across the board compete in the global marketplace.

Helping U.S. manufacturers succeed in the global marketplace is one of my top priorities here at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. During the State of the Union last month, President Obama re-emphasized the Administration’s commitment to American manufacturing, declaring that “Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing.” The clean energy sector represents one of the most promising areas for the United States to re-invigorate its manufacturing base and create good paying American jobs.

… To learn more about the Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative, I encourage you to check out our website at: eere.energy.gov/energymanufacturing.

As part of this initiative DOE “announced five new innovative research and development projects focused on reducing energy use and costs for U.S. manufacturers, while helping to boost product output and improve companies’ bottom lines.” See the list at the Earth Techling blog, in Energy-Efficient Manufacturing Sees New Investments. They include,

• Ford Motor Company will lead a project to develop a highly flexible energy-efficient sheet metal forming tool that can simultaneously create features on both sides of sheet metal.
• A team led by University of Texas at Austin will develop a tool that integrates performance metrics, models and simulations with real-time plant energy data.
• Colorado School of Mines will work with industry partners to develop a new manufacturing process that replaces hot stamping (typically 1650°F) for making advanced high-strength, lightweight steels with a room-temperature stamping technique.
• Ithaca, New York-based Novomer will head up a project that converts waste CO2 from industrial sources and ethane-derivatives from shale gas into valuable chemical intermediates that are used in applications such as paints, coatings, textiles, diapers and plastic polymers.
• TIAX LLC, based in Lexington, Massachusetts, will develop a new technology that converts waste heat from manufacturing and industrial processes to electric power.

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Republicans are always warning us of the scourge of federal power and glorifying the genius of the states – aka the laboratories of democracy.

On clean energy standards, conservatives have been getting their way. While Republican obstructionism has prevented the federal government from setting clean energy standards, many states have decided to set their own.

From a conservative perspective, this should be dreamy. Look at those wondrous laboratories go! 29 governments, close to the people, made their own clean energy regulations.

They helped double our renewable energy capacity in just four years. 12 years from now, these rules are projected to help power the equivalent of 47 million homes with clean energy alone. States rights FTW! Amirite?

Not according to the Right.

For some reason, when states decide to create their own regulations, conservatives tuck their states’ rights arguments away.

As GreenTech Media reported, conservative groups are fighting to scrap or weaken clean energy rules in 22 states.

How far are conservatives going to kill state-based clean energy? Get this.

In Colorado, a lawsuit led by a secretly financed Beltway conservative group called American Tradition Institute argues that the state’s clean energy standard violates the federal Constitution’s “commerce clause,” which reads, “The Congress shall have power … To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes”.

The commerce clause is the perennially and fiercely debated part of the Constitution that conservatives have long claimed should not be interpreted to give the federal government wide-ranging regulatory power.

Now, conservatives are effectively trying to use it to say only the federal government should regulate clean energy and states are forbidden to get involved.

The strategy lays bare the fundamental hypocrisy of modern conservatism.

There are no “federalist” conservatives praising and defending state-based clean energy regulations. States’ rights arguments get thrown out the window as soon as the states start deciding to enact liberal ideas. Then conservatives glom on to any legalistic argument they think they can twist toward their real ends, which in this case, is serving their fossil fuel industry donors.

If conservatives want to be seen as serious about solving problems, they could decide to mean what they say about “laboratories of democracy.” Here’s an example where in the absence of national consensus, some states tried ideas, and they worked. Now we can take these proven successes and use it to model federal legislation.

The Right, early in its soul searching phase, has not yet found the path to intellectual consistency.

The climate in Washington has been heating up as lawmakers brace for the automatic spending cuts come March 1 known as the sequester. However, the only real thing heating up is our climate, and that’s where the House GOP prefers to remain silent and cold.

In reality, climate change should be taken as seriously as the sequester. Both will produce a perfect storm that has the potential to wreck our economy and devastate human needs. Every two years the Government Accountability Office compiles a list of “high risk” issues facing the federal government, and for the first time warnings on climate change were added.

Due to an increase in the number and intensity of weather disasters, the report warns that climate change is not only a threat to individuals but also the U.S. economy because we will spend more money on response efforts in the future. Already, from 2004-2011, more than $80 billion was allocated for disaster relief. The report comes as Obama names climate change one of his top priorities for his second term.

Obama emerged as the green guardian during his State of the Union address, urging Congress to develop strategies that combat climate change: “I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change.”

Obama, who has not backed down from climate change since his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention last summer, knows this task will not be an easy one to accomplish. “But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he said. “I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

In clean energy and the green economy, the U.S. has had short-term and changeable policies at best. Overall, in 2008 the U.S. came in second place, behind Germany, in absolute sales of clean-energy technology products. However, when comparing product sales in proportion to G.D.P the U.S. came in 19th place; comparatively, Germany came in third, Spain in fourth, and China in sixth place.

These countries have also shied away from old energy policies and embraced new ones by setting a price on carbon emissions, implementing strong energy performance strategies, or both. Each of these countries also ratified the Kyoto Protocol; the U.S. did not. Clear evidence has been shown that countries that initially signed the protocol saw more than a 33 percent rise in green-tech patents.

The last time Congress took a serious stab at climate legislation was in 2009, on a bill that would have implemented a cap-and-trade on greenhouse emissions. The bill died at a time when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. Last week, Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a similar bill that would put a price – in other words, a “carbon tax” – on carbon emissions. Here is a solution that is both sustainable and grows our economy.

Will it go anywhere? Congressional Republicans, putting politics over country, will do all they can to make sure it doesn’t. In his post-State of the Union response, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that government policies “can’t control the weather.” One thing’s for sure, if a serious government response on climate is going to happen, it won’t be done through Congress but through executive order.

Will Republicans ever learn the true ramifications of their actions? The Republican Party brand is eroding and 73 percent of voters disapprove of the job they are doing. How many more elections will Republicans have to lose before they realize that their views are not aligned with the American public?

Our democracy has been hijacked by corporate and self-interest over science, preventing meaningful action surrounding climate change. Global warming is not a theory; it’s fact. Just consider what America faced in just the past year. We saw the hottest year in history and 60 percent of America experienced a drought. Superstorm Sandy caused over $110 billion in damages and the federal government allocated more than $60 billion in disaster relief. Yet Congress remains paralyzed at a time when 52 percent of the people who elected them believe that protecting the environment should be a top priority. It is time to put an end to the manufactured crises and focus on the real storm ahead.

As I discussed yesterday, David Leonhardt of the New York Times counseled President Obama to drop using green jobs as a selling point for address climate change. Thankfully, last night Obama did not listen.

Obama made clear that tackling the climate crisis can be accomplished while growing the economy:

We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas, and the amount of renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar — with tens of thousands of good American jobs to show for it. We produce more natural gas than ever before — and nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it. And over the last four years, our emissions of the dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet have actually fallen…

…we can make meaningful progress on this issue while driving strong economic growth. I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will…

…Four years ago, other countries dominated the clean energy market and the jobs that came with it. And we’ve begun to change that. Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America. So let’s generate even more. Solar energy gets cheaper by the year — let’s drive down costs even further. As long as countries like China keep going all in on clean energy, so must we.

The President offered only two specific, relatively narrow proposals: 1) an “Energy Security Trust” which would take some revenue from oil and gas development in federal areas and funnel it into renewable fuels, and 2) a “Race to the Top” program where states compete for federal funding by implementing innovative energy efficiency strategies.

Left unspecified is what exactly he will direct the EPA to do, circumventing Congress, that will cut greenhouse gas emissions. EPA has the legal authority to issue regulations that cut emissions, it just can’t complement those regulations with subsidies that can help businesses and consumers manage the transition to a clean energy economy. You need Congress for that.

And left unknown is if Obama’s tweaking of McCain — along with the pressure from new EPA regs — will prod him or other Republicans to return to the negotiating table and pass legislation that will best address climate while also investing in the economy.

But we do know that Obama is not going to pursue a climate agenda and forget about jobs, which is both the right politics and the right policy.

Expectations are high for President Obama to get specific about his second-term plans to protect the climate, particularly regarding plans to bypass Congress and use the EPA’s authority to further reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

The appeal is obvious: no need to wrangle with the climate change deniers that currently run the House.

Still, there are plenty of other political risks with the executive action route. President Obama doesn’t have to run for office again, but other Democrats do. And massive backlash from overly crude regulation could lead to another Tea Party victory in 2014.

Which is why I found the counsel from David Leonhardt in Sunday’s New York Times so strange.

He glibly dismisses the importance of stressing the creation of “green jobs” and argues we should embrace the simple argument that we should stop climate change because we should stop climate change:

Green jobs have long had a whiff of exaggeration to them. The alternative-energy sector may ultimately employ millions of people. But raising the cost of the energy that households and businesses use every day — a necessary effect of helping the climate — is not exactly a recipe for an economic boom.

The stronger argument for a major government response to climate change is the more obvious argument: climate change. The continental United States endured its hottest year on record in 2012, and the planet’s 13 hottest years have all occurred since 1998.

This severely downplays the green jobs case, and is blind to the problem with focusing on climate alone.

If it were as simple as Leonhardt makes it, then President George W. Bush would have followed through on his 2000 campaign platform and enacted climate legislation before Barack Obama even came to Washington.

But there’s a big hurdle to clear for any clean energy legislation, let alone legislation as complex and far-reaching as climate change legislation: how will it affect jobs and the economy?

The fossil fuel posse will be out in full force warning of killed jobs and skyrocketing energy prices. The response from the environmental community can’t be: yeah, too bad.

Leonhardt briefly alludes to this reality at the end of his piece: “the strongest economic argument for an aggressive response to climate change is not the much trumpeted windfall of green jobs. It’s the fact that the economy won’t function very well in a world full of droughts, hurricanes and heat waves.”

Well, OK. But we have the facts to make a better case than: the economy will suck less if we avert a climate crisis.

We have the JOBS21 report from the Blue-Green Alliance which tabulates the potential job creation for all the various green jobs initiatives — a minimum of 7 million jobs in the next six years.

Investing the future of green jobs will pay off better than remaining dependent on fossil fuels while letting other nations seize dominance in the clean energy technology industry. The Political Economy Research Institute’s Robert Pollin finds that “The green economy will create about 17 jobs per $1 million of expenditure, the fossil fuel economy about five.”

Leonhardt realistically notes that just because you create green jobs doesn’t mean you don’t eliminate jobs somewhere else. But would a comprehensive strategy to cap carbon necessarily mean an economic loss? Absolutely not.

When the House passed in 2009 the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act, the EPA found it would have a trivial impact on GDP. As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, “It will take until 2030 for the national GDP to reach $22.6 trillion; if cap-and-trade is passed, that will just take three months longer.”

Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office found the legislation would not significantly impact household costs and would cut the budget deficit. As I summarized back in 2009, the CBO said the bill would “slightly cut the budget deficit by $9 billion over 10 years, would only add minor costs to the average household of less than a postage stamp per day, and would result in a net benefit to low-income households.”

However, all that I cited above would not be directly achieved by EPA regulations alone. The EPA has the authority to issue regulations to curtail greenhouse gas pollution, and that will create incentives for a shift toward green energy and help create green jobs. But the EPA can’t create a broader system to collect revenue from polluters and use that revenue to invest in clean energy and provide rebates to consumers, accelerating the creation of jobs and protecting consumers from price shocks during the transition.

These economic impacts are still important issues to tackle. Following Leonhardt’s imbalanced advice to squelch the economic case for saving the climate — leaving advocates vulnerable to right-wing economic attacks — will likely stoke a backlash far more furious than the fictional “death panels”

The President is right to pursue EPA regulation so long as conservatives prevent Congress from acting, as it will not only help the climate but also may get affected corporations back to the negotiating table for comprehensive legislation.

But he can’t make a strong green jobs case with EPA regulations alone. He needs to keep up the push for more clean energy investment, which can be best achieved with the huge revenue stream that would come from comprehensive climate legislation that either sells companies pollution permits (in a cap-and-trade system) or institutes a carbon tax (perhaps as part of the broader tax reform both parties keep saying that they want.)

It not necessary for President to make a big push for a specific bill tonight. But it is important that he keep making the case that saving the climate can create jobs without increasing household costs or harming economic growth.

Otherwise, those EPA regulations won’t last very long.

The strong reaction to President Obama’s extended remarks on the climate suggests that he wasn’t doing anything on the matter and suddenly feels liberated to do so. Not so.

As I have discussed twice previously, after the failure of the Congress to pass a carbon cap in 2010, when Democrats had full control, the President immediately turned to “Plan B.” Through the EPA, he delivered an unspoken message to polluters: if you don’t help us do this easy way, we’re going to do this the hard way.

In other words, if we don’t do this through Congress, which can give you lots of subsidies to ease your transition to a clean energy economy, we’re going to do this through the EPA, which gives you nothing.

The EPA’s tightening of the vice has been slow so far, to avoid stoking conservative backlash. But all the President did yesterday was tell industry: now that the election is over, the tightening will get faster, until you come back to the negotiating table.

As The New York Times reports today:

The centerpiece will be action by the Environmental Protection Agency to clamp down further on emissions from coal-burning power plants under regulations still being drafted — and likely to draw legal challenges.

…

The approach is a turnabout from the first term, when Mr. Obama’s guiding principle in trying to pass the cap-and-trade bill was that a negotiated legislative solution was likely to be more politically palatable than regulation by executive fiat. Now there is a broad expectation that he will follow up his first big use of the E.P.A.’s powers to rein in emissions — proposed rules last year for new power plants — with a plan to crack down on emissions from existing power plants.

According to estimates from the Natural Resources Defense Council, emissions from current coal-fired plants could be reduced by more than 25 percent by 2020, yielding large health and environmental benefits at relatively low cost. Such an approach would allow Mr. Obama to fulfill his 2009 pledge to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by about 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the group says.

This strikes fear in the hearts of the nation’s atmospheric polluters.

The only way they can stop it from happening is to pressure House Republicans, and fossil fuel state Democrats, to pass a law that will cap carbon but cushion the blow on them.

As we’ve seen with the fiscal cliff deal, Republicans can be broken when they realize that 1) inaction leads to a worse outcome for them, and 2) their corporate donors tell them to quit obstructing.

Obama is setting up the same dynamic for the climate. Easy way or hard way, we will cap carbon.