Last week something happened in Congress that has needed to happen for a long time, and will go down as a watershed moment for the Green Collar Economy. John Dingell, the long-serving congressman from Michigan, was squeezed out of his chairmanship of the House Energy & Commerce committee by Henry Waxman of California.

For those of you who are not familiar with Representative Dingell, he has 1. Been a congressman longer than any other current member of congress (since 1955), and in February will be the longest-serving member ever; 2. He has been chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee since 1981 (just about when we stopped seeing mileage standard increases), and; 3. Has been the congressional ‘enabler’ (in the Alchoholics Anonymous sense of the word) for the American auto companies and helped them scuttle environmental and efficiency legislation over and over and over again. See my post on the slow motion trainwreck that is the Big 3 from several months back to see how I really feel.

The reason this is such a big deal is that 1. Congress never replaces extremely senior chairmen of important committees; 2. Congressman Waxman is a very clear supporter of global warming and environmental legislation; 3. By ousting Congressman Dingle, the congress made if VERY clear that they intend to position the legislature to push through president-elect Obama’s aggressive green agenda, and 4. An added bonus - the US automakers have about as much clout in Washington right now as Jack Abramoff.

Keep your eye on this committee in the next year as my guess is there will be more meaningful legislation coming out of it than there has been in 28 years.

The President-Elect is not waiting until the lame duck Bush has even had the door hit him in the ass on his way out before making it clear that the country is on a new path. Meeting with legislators today, including a bunch of governors who have been battling the Bush administration in court to try and force tougher greenhouse gas restrictions, Barack (I can call him that, after all the emails he sent me during the campaign, right?) made it clear that he is going to go big on battling climate change and that delay is not an option. To prove my point, I quote him from his speech:

“Delay is no longer an option.”

See.

And it is music to Green Collar Media’s ears to hear him tie this imperative back to the economy and his belief that investing in green will create 5 Million good jobs. Now if only we can convince him to start calling them Green Collar Jobs (which is what they are), like his future Secretary of State does. Hey Van Jones, let’s get our people working on this together.

If I am going to be honest with myself, I’ve been struggling with this blog.  During the campaign my tendency was to want to write about politics, and in order to not rant, I found myself not writing.  The editorial mission of following how Green is going to help America get its Mojo back - while really fun - is too broad.  So Green Collar America is slightly changing it’s focus. 

Going forward this blog will cover how American Green Policy is impacting American business.  This will include energy policy, transportation policy, building policy, tax policy, and environmental policy and how these decisions help or hinder the ability of the American marketplace to succeed in addressing the challenges of our time.   You can expect conversations with green business leaders who are in the trenches fighting to bring green energy solutions to scale, updates on new legislation and how the market is reacting.

We at Green Collar Media are excited about this new focus and looking forward to bringing you insight into the new Green playing field that will be shaped over the next several years.  It is going to be  a wild ride.

When you can screw up the planet with good old fashioned polution?  This story in the New York Times scares the crap out of me.  It is about how the polution in Asia is so severe that it is substantially reducing the amount of sunshine in many cities and lowering crop yields in many parts of the continent….what?  Invisible carbon dioxide is one thing - you can’t see it and it is easy to ignore - but year round man-made clouds?   The article states:

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released. The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. During the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.

According to the report, which was released by the United Nations, the soot is so severe that it is polluting the rain and despoiling the glaciers that tens of millions of Asians rely on for their water supply.  And if rising sea levels, and the devastation of the ecosystem through global warming isn’t enough to get us off our tails,

“The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he [Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University] said, adding that in China, about 3.6 percent of the nation’s annual gross domestic product, or $82 billion, is lost to the health effects of pollution.

My guess is that $82 billion is just the tip of the terribly filthy iceberg.