Gov. Jennifer Granholm took to the stage of the National Summit in Detroit late Tuesday afternoon and predicted a green future for her state as a way to "replace a good chunk of those lost auto jobs."
In a general session, Granholm spent a good deal of time predicting to the students in the audience what their lives would be like in Michigan in 2030.
They'd pull up to their zero-carbon-footprint home in their electric car and plug in for a recharge. In the backyard, a small wind generator spins, like the solar panels on the roof pumping electrons into a smart grid. Well, heck, even the car's battery would be smart, negotiating with the grid for the best deal on renewable power. Inside the house, a sophisticated trash masher would turn garbage into biofuel.
Granholm said her administration is working toward making all of that stuff in Michigan -- or at least the Midwest.
She repeated her oft-quoted statement that Michigan has "great bones" on which to build a green economy -- winds, waters, work force and work ethic, along with great research universities. (Too bad only one starts with a W.) She said Michigan's thousands of miles of freshwater coastlines are a natural home for wind power -- which for efficiency's sake should be built here too.
Even Michigan's deep underground cave system, she said, heretofore used commercially only to store natural gas, could have a green future as a home for sequestered carbon dioxide.
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Following Granholm in the general session was Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York City political risk research consultant. He offered a 50,000-foot overview -- no, make that 200-miles-in-orbit view -- of the global economy.
Globalization? Forget it, it's over. Besides, Bremmer said, "globalization is not a good thing, it's not a bad thing, it's a thing, which created winners and losers. If you were an entrepreneur in Bangalore you did very well with it. If you were an autoworker in Detroit you did not."
Now there are two new trends, he said. First, the dominant actors in economies are now state actors, not private. New York City is no longer the financial capital of the United States, Washington, D.C. is. In the Middle East, Abu Dhabi has similarly replaced Dubai. And in China, no longer do they seek funds from the Shaghai Princelings, they go back to Beijing.
The tipping point came last September, when Lehmann Brothers fell.
He said Chinese have asked him what the U.S. is going to do "now that the free market system has failed." Well, Bremmer said, what failed was "fetishized unregulated hypercapitalsm," not the free market system, and while the U.S. might drift a little closer to being like Sweden or France, it's not about to become China.
The second big trend: The U.S. is no longer the globe's only superpower. Indeed, we're headed for a period where there are no superpowers. He said the G7 industrial nations have been replaced by the G20 and that's going to be tough -- the G7 "was like herding cats," and the G20 "isn't herding more cats, it's herding cats and animals that don't like cats."
The effect of all this? Bremmer said capital flows will become more regional and less globalized, and expectations for global growth should be moderated.
Policy recommendations from Bremmer included a recognition that the United States, Japan and Europe still share free-market values, and increased recognition of the mutual dependence of the U.S. and China.
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The final speaker in the open session was Van Jones, special advisor for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Jones said the good news was that "despite all the challenges, the real economic pain, the real ecological concern, there is a solution that will put people back to work that respects what our scientists tell us about the planet cookin'."
The bad news, he said, "is that you're it -- our business leaders and institutions. We will have to invent our way out of this crisis. We cannot drill and burn our way out of it, and we cannot bureaucratize our way out of it."
America's energy choices, Jones said, have been hobbled by a false choice -- that continuing on our current energy path would make things better for our children, but far worse for our grandchildren and great grandchildren, and that making things better for more distant descendants would make things awful from our children. Not necessarily true, Jones said.
"If you want the jobs of tomorrow you have to have the energy of tomorrow," Jones said -- wind, solar and advanced batteries. He said China is spending $12 million an hour on renewables, so we'd better get our act together.
Late in his speech, Jones got political, saying that "we've now got a government that is no longer solidly on the side of the last century's problem makers, and is firmly on the side of this century's problem solvers. If we have a 22nd Century, and I say 'if' because sometimes those scientists scare me ... if America's beauty and genius are shining, if the air and water are clean and the children are safe ... it won't be because Barack Obama was the first black president ... it will be because he was the first green president."
In the question and answer session that followed, Bremmer worried that the Obama stimulus package didn't spend enough on infrastructure.
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