Darlene Superville wrote:
U.S. to announce billions for green jobs, training
Some $4 billion from President Barack Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus plan that was budgeted to renovate public housing will be spent to create so-called "green jobs" by making the dwellings more energy efficient.
Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan was making the announcement Tuesday in Denver at a meeting of Obama's Middle Class Task Force.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, another task force member, also will announce that $500 million from the stimulus is becoming available to train workers for these jobs. That sum includes $50 million for communities battered by job losses and restructuring in the auto industry.
Both Donovan and Solis also were announcing that their departments are working together to make it easier for public housing residents to find training programs or a green job. ...
These jobs, broadly defined as related to helping the environment, pay up to 20 percent more than other jobs, are more likely to be union jobs and are more likely to be held by men, less so by minorities and people who live in cities, according to a report the task force issued in February. These jobs also are ones that cannot be easily transferred overseas. |
Environment News Service reported:
"We defined green jobs broadly as jobs that help to improve the environment in some way," the task force states in the update. "That includes blue collar workers building out the smart grid to efficiently move the wind power (green, renewable energy) from the mid-west to major urban centers on both coasts. It includes 'weatherizers' who can diagnose and repair the energy inefficiencies in your house or business. And it includes the green manufacturers who made those wind turbines or the scientists and lab technicians who developed those renewable energy sources and weatherization materials."
As part of the $500 million announcement, the task force said new partnerships are being created between the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Education and Labor that are intended to make it easier for people to find green jobs and connect to the training they need to fill them. |
+ + +
The rescue begins below and continues in the jump.
Sue Sturgis reported on the Arrests in protest of dangerous W.V. coal sludge dam: "Seven people were arrested for trespassing Sunday during a nonviolent protest against a Massey Energy subsidiary's plans to blast just 100 feet away from a massive dam holding back billions of gallons of toxic coal waste in the mountains of West Virginia. ...The Sunday afternoon protest involved more than 70 people and took place at Massey's Marfork mining complex near Whiteville, W.V. The arrests came when seven people approached the entrance to the coal sludge dam and refused a request from the West Virginia State Police to leave. Two other people were arrested at the Marfork facility Sunday morning after boating onto the impoundment and floating a banner that read, ‘No More Toxic Sludge.’ They were charged with misdemeanor trespass and littering."
+ + +
The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal
Haole in Hawaii gave us some underwater eye candy in his Dolphins and Turtles and Boobies diary.
mwmwm highlighted A Tom Sawyer [Climate] Solution: "Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, Nobel Prize Winner, and Really Smart Guy, speaking at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, shows that it doesn't necessarily require high tech space umbrellas, seeded clouds, or a decades-away plan for fuel cells, to make a big difference in climate changes. Nor does it necessarily require that we dress in hair shirts or live lives nasty, brutish, and short. A big difference could be white paint. That's right -- Tom Sawyer's solution."
newpapyrus said people who are afraid of nuclear power because of radiation shouldn’t be in the diary Natural Radiation: "Persons-- working-- at a nuclear facility are normally exposed to 1.15 mSv (115 millirems) annually. This would be the equivalent of living in the state of Ohio where Americans there are exposed to an equivalent amount of cosmic and terrestrial radiation and below that of states like Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah where one receives a lot more background radiation. If you lived near the gate of a nuclear reactor and never left the house, you would be exposed to 0.03 mSv (3 millirems) of radiation annually from that nuclear facility. However, you would receive 0.07 mSv (7 millirems) of radiation if you were living in a stone, brick, or concrete building. So you would receive more radiation from your house than from living near the gate of a nuclear facility."
Anti-nuclear activist harveywasserman came around to promote The 8 Green Steps to Solartopia: "he noble vision of a Solartopian green-powered Earth is at last upon us. Our eco-future is defined by the four Great Green Truths: we have a global crisis, it has a solution, the solution is winnable, and winning requires a "middle path" of action that is both non-violent and non-stop.There are technological solutions to the crisis, but they demand political action. Together they comprise the Eight Green Steps to a sustainable world...
Extinction might be a good thing if it took the right species was the implication of jimraff’s Global Warming Not So Bad After All: "Why do humans believe that we are, or should be ‘at the top of the food chain?’ Humans have behaved badly over the past several hundred years. We have so screwed up this planet, between the environmental disasters we have created to the human disasters we have created that the planet is now trying to take it back. This is mega karma in action."