Here’s a simple story told well, about a tiny piece of the new economy. Laid-off steelworkers find good jobs making windwills for renewable energy.

I sometimes wonder what’s so hard to grasp about the trillions of dollars in revenues waiting for the smart entrepreneurs in our new, sustainable economy.

It’s really pretty simple: there is great bounty given to us in our original world. We only need to learn how to spend creatively, contributing back to the bounty, and we can live here forever.

Merry Christmas

Ray Anderson reflects on the 15 years passed in his effort to transform a billion-dollar carpet manufacturing operation, from a petro-intensive resource “plunderer” into a zero-footprint, eternally sustainable company.

It’s looking good – he’s 60 percent of the way up that mountain he talks about, and he and his people can now see the top. They know they’re going to get there.

I love how he talks about the culture change in his company, and how his products are actually vastly better now, because of the “lens of sustainable design” that the company now looks through.

Most importantly, as Anderson states, the business case for sustainability as a profitmaker has now emerged – and Anderson’s company, Interface, has prominently helped to blaze a trail into this emergence.

I was struck by something Anderson wrote in his book, Mid-Course Correction, published back in 1998, before today’s melting ice had really started to scare us.

Suppose, said Anderson,

that global warming, to cite just one threat, turns out to be so vividly demonstrable and undeniably true that the whole world wakes up one day with a gigantic cry of alarm. Suppose consumer outrage erupts and markets shift overnight. Where will the capacity to respond be found? A lack of capacity for response could be a stupendous stumbling block to Earth’s welfare.

This is a huge dynamic force for sustainability. All it takes is consumer perception to change, and suddenly all the old companies become outlaws, and only the new ones will do business. This was Anderson’s epiphany over 15 years ago.

Anderson’s goal of becoming the first completely sustainable industrial company has taken 15 years to get to the 60 percent mark. Interface is on target for closed-loop, zero-waste, zero-ecologically imbalanced manufacturing by 2020. It will then have almost a three-decade lead on any of its competition.

With “only” 11,000 workers fired last month, the job-loss slide may be easing, or it may be a seasonal stall in shedding employees. The new year will tell.

Floyd Norris at NYT thinks not only that the recession has bottomed in employment losses, but that we’ll add jobs as we recover.  Heather Boushey at CAP questions the strength of the recovery.

Much may depend on fiscal policy. Economists agree that most of the 2.8% growth in the third quarter is a result of the stimulus. As I’ve said before, more stimulus would work wonders right now.

Meanwhile, where is reasonable security of tenure, and strategic job-holding for willing workers? Only in sustainability – that third economy I mentioned the other day.

John Podesta at CAP opines that sustained job creation cannot be solved with short-term solutions, logically enough. Podesta cites CAP’s white paper proposing a wide-ranging set of policies for government to enact in order to create good jobs for the today and the future.

Included in Podesta’s prescription are a nationally chartered Green Bank to ensure investment into sustainable projects, and tax adjustments to support retrofitting.

Today, contractors offer unsecured home improvement loans for energy-efficient and renewable energy products, with a typical energy savings of 20 percent to 40 percent. But this market is small—approximately 5,000 loans per year—because interest rates are 10 percent to 15 percent—too high to be attractive for the typical homeowner. A program to “buy down” these loans would reduce the interest rate on a typical $7,000 loan from 12.99 percent to 6.99 percent at an approximate cost of $1,200 per loan. Loans would be a maximum of $20,000—typical loans are $10,000—with a 12-year term. In the meantime, the Obama administration should direct Fannie Mae—which oversees an existing energy loan program—to reduce its rates, which now range from 11.5 percent to 14.0 percent. This would also lower the cost of a buy-down program.

Retrofitting looms as an enormous growth industry. Our greatest source of local and readily available energy resides in the waste coefficient of our current usage. We waste so much energy (some estimates call it 97.5% waste) in all of our infrastructure and style of living in the U.S that efficiency alone results in immediate dollar gains.

Brad Johnson writing at Grist offers shirtcuff analysis estimating that 1.7 million new clean-energy jobs could be created as permanent careers PER YEAR, commensurate with public and private investment of 150 billion dollars each year. That’s not a lot of money, for the results.

The stronger the carbon cap is in a carbon market, the greater the investment. A $150 billion carbon market would be about double the size of what is being considered by Congress. That investment would be sufficient to construct a nationwide smart grid, retrofit every building in America for energy efficiency, and produce 20 percent of electricity from renewable sources—all by 2020.
- How to make 1.7 million new clean energy jobs permanent

These are some of the astonishing gains buried under our dying economy, lying in wait for the intrepid to set them free.

Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.

Roubini is one of the few trustworthy economists around, having predicted and long warned about the housing and financial collapses. The idiocy of the media in labeling him the doom side of probability (as if there were another side) belies the fact that all he does is look at the numbers with a clear eye.

Roubini’s Tale of Two American Economies details the state of play in our current depressed economy. We’re losing jobs, credit is unavailable, small businesses and householders are being forced to bankruptcy, and this will continue for some time yet.

Meanwhile, Roubini points out what we had already noticed, that the stock market is up and so are bonuses in the financial sector. As he states,

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Personally, I’m tired of this. I’ve been watching public policy and economics for over a year here, and I have the picture down now.

Reading my earlier posts there’s plenty of collateral for saying that politics is broken, because business largely owns it. The media are hacks and even if not are controlled by the same business that owns politics. The economic system fuels with exploited money the myth that its underlying dynamic (free market) both actually exists (wrong), and actually creates good (not demonstrable).

All of this can be improved, and Obama is a great force for good, loosening up this national gridlock. But Obama himself struggles still to get the financial industry to extend credit to the productive economy. And Roubini notes that one-fourth of our economy’s jobs can easily (and thus will) be outsourced in coming years. The jobs are never coming back, says Roubini.

I truly wonder how Americans will take this state of affairs as the near future rapidly unfolds. Anyone working in the old economy will become a kind of serf, in a master and servant relationship to holders of capital. And that capital itself has been created in a deeply flawed model of extraction that has never put a true price on its acquisition.

All of our economy is built on externalizing the destructive costs of resource extraction onto future inhabitants of the planet. Almost none of our current system is sustainable, with the exception of enterprises such as Ray Anderson’s.

So there’s an economy for the rich, and one for the poor. If you’re not in the first, you sure don’t want to be in the second, even in the U.S. As we begin to count the true cost of our economic system, provocative examples of the damage it creates start to arise:

Are we yet able to understand that an entire category of deaths not measured above—the category development economists now refer to as “preventable death, particularly from disease and malnutrition”—may indeed come to represent a greater challenge that the sum of likely wars and civil wars combined?
Wall Street’s excesses caused more deaths among children than the tsunami four years ago

On the basis that the old economy was wrongly constructed to begin with, what’s actually to preserve here? The old jobs are never coming back. Time for new jobs.

Here’s a new job: green chef. In a Fortune Magazine article just today, 6 green cooks are profiled, the first one Brittany Baldwin in Portland, who caters personal meals using ingredients straight from her own local half-acre farm. Locavore economy is the new gourmet. And actually local food for everyone may be one basis of the new economy. See my fuller exposition of this in my other site, the Local Food Grid.

Copenhagen is coming in a couple of weeks. I believe I’m about done with following this old economy. Expect to see more on sustainability from here on.

There’s not much I can personally do to reverse climate change, beyond the activities available to any citizen. But on the slim chance we can survive the global climate crisis that is already on the edge of the tipping point, I’m focusing on building the new economy that will replace the old one.

To me the one person who most symbolizes the new economy is Paul Hawken. If you thought Roubini was scary, try an overview of the world situation from Paul in this 50-minute speech given in Seattle in September. Just remember, he’s only using the same clear eyes that Roubini uses. But Hawken has answers.