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>> Christine Quinn: It's great to be here. There were certainly lots of
details that took place behind
the scenes and to see all of you here today and all of the pre-work that's been done in
terms of the round tables, it's really exciting for us to come
hopefully by the end of today you're going to have so many together today. So to get us thinking, and
thinking started now. So you asked the question, why thoughts about sustainability bubbling, but I want to get that
is this forum so very important? We heard Regent Connolly-Keesler
talk about how it links to the
growth agenda and to the priorities of the UW System.
that, we think about the world And if we go even broader than
It's tripled since 1920. population. What's happening to our world's population today?
That, indeed, is putting pressure on our ecosystem,
Bring it home. leading to local changes.
Is that impacting us in Wisconsin? Yes it is.
Was there a time when we could
step back and say the Earth is so big, how might it matter?
say that. As we continue to consume more, as we continue to have fewer, excuse me, more cars and more
airplanes and more technology,
we continue to consume more. So now that we have a population
we are making a significant impact on our ecosystem. of 6.5 billion,
Impacts indicates that the state Here at home, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change
Some of you may have even is noticed the warmer and theto nine degrees by the middle of the century.
as including the environmental wetter nature of our climate. And as we look at sustainability
aspects, the economic aspects, and the social aspects, we also look at economically, what's
happening in the state of Wisconsin.
Our employment rate is hovering around 10%. Within the last two weeks in the we're struggling economically.
Cap Times, they reported that 169 rural schools have already Sunday paper of the Wisconsin
in Wisconsin? Those are all significant things closed. What does that mean to us
that we need to keep as top of mind as we talk about
sustainability. Sustainability is important.
We hope you think of it from the various aspects.
The aspect of the economic
communities as the context we're sector, the environmental sector, the human aspect, and certainly how it impacts our
from our forum better informed, that you've had an opportunity relationships and interactions. So we hope that you walk away
this might be used to create to grow in your understanding around sustainability and how
sustainable communities. We hope you learn from each other.
We hope you learn from all of the case studies, some of those local, some of those even further away.
And then we hope you stay tomorrow where you can also engage in the conversation
around policy. that began in the round tables
How do we really take action as a group? What are some of the barriers
that are creating difficulties
for communities from becoming sustainable? We need your insights.
We're going to use the insights that have been gathered already to share this information so
desired outcomes is informed that at the end one of the
policy, and I'm convinced that, indeed, it will be that. So I say to you that there's no
time like now for us to be
taking action on critical issues that are going to improve the health of our local communities
and allow them to thrive into the future. We must make our communities
We must ensure that future attractive to young people.
generations will love our fine state and experience a quality
that this great state of of life and a quality of place
away with and that is the power of local communities, the power Hopefof grassroots efforts.away there is a theme that you walk
event that you see in front of Well, I must say to you the
team that's made this possible. yoI would actually like to askf grassroots efforts. Jim has made reference to the
each of them to stand. And so our Sustainable Community
Conference Planning Committee consisted of Andrew Dane, would you please stand and I'll walk
Sean Dargan, Tony Garton, Eric Giordano as co-chair, right through the list here,
Mary Kluz, Daniel Kuzlik, Jay Moynihan, Catherine Neiswender, Lou Pech, cJim Perry, Greg Peter,
Jamie Poindexter, and James Resick. Please give them a round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
However, it also takes So that's the team that have really put the on the ground picture together.
engaged in the conversation system as well as set direction thatfor this event. the And I would like them also to
stand.
Rick Klemme who is our dean of Cooperative Extension,
of Continuing Ed Outreach and eLearning, Kim Kindschi who is David Schejbal who is the dean
our director of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development,
Malcolm Brett was also part of
that, I don't think he could be with us today, Greg Hutchins was part of that initial team,
as was Tom Blewett. These leaders that is you see standing are not only committed to sustainability and the
execution of the forum but
they're also committed to taking this to the next level. So when we have the document
regarding policy, these folks are going to provide leadership and say how can extension take
an impact on our communities. Please give them a round of applause as well. this to th[APPLAUSE]el to make
So we have a great day in store.
We will return and then you will We're going to begin this morning with a keynote. Then we will have lunch.
hear case studies, both locally and from out of state. Then we will come back here at
4:30 for another keynote and at 5:30 with networking and
your peers. Tomorrow we will be back here to socializing, trying to connect, build partnerships, learn from
learned in the round tables and how might we use to that advance talk more about policy and what we've learned, what we've
our communities. So with that I'd like to
introduce our first keynote speaker.
He's a prolific writer, a speaker, and advocate who has provided an extraordinary array of path-breaking policy and
initiatives.
organization that focuses on He's also the co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which is an
innovative strategies, working models, and timely information
and equitable community development. to support environmentally sound
In terms of his authorship, he has five nonfiction books with
quite an array of topics ranging
from the analysis of the Chilean development to the future of electric power, to the
transformations of cities and neighborhoods.
York Times, the Washington Post, Has columns in many top publications including the New
the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, and the Smithsonian magazine,
just to name a few. He's also been a consultant at
He has served as an adviser and consultant to the energy the local, state, and federal levels.
and George Bush. departments of presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton,
So today he's here to talk to us about the rules of
He'll do his presentation and when he concludes his presentation, there will be time sustainability.
So please help me in giving a warm welcome for question and answer.
to Dr. David Morris. [APPLAUSE]
David Morris: Thank you.
Is it possible to turn those lights out up there?
Thanks, it's a pleasure and an Or dim them?
honor to be invited here to speak especially about a topic that is so near and dear to my
own heart.
bio that I graduated from In defereCornell.here I'm speaking and the sports fans in the audience, I left out of my
[LAUGHTER] My charge this morning is to
present a context for the local-specific, action-oriented,
and content-rich discussions that you're going to be having
in the next day and a half. When I was preparing for this talk, I was reminded of an
philosopher Marcel Proust. insight by the French poet and
"The voyage of discovery," he said, "lies not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new
eyes."
surroundings with new eyes. AThe word sustainability is this conference is about seeing our communities and our
almost always used in an environmental context, but we
forget sometimes how
the modern environmental environmentalism itself has evolved over the years. At the turn of the 20th century
movement was born. It focused on preservation and
parks. its legacy is the national
A half century later, the environmental movement widened its scope and began to focus on
materials that were toxic to
are the Clean Water Act and the huClean Air Act and thed, mercEnvironmental Protectionies of that era of environmentalism
the state level. Agencies at the federal and at
And then in the late 1980s and the 1990s, the movement widened its lens once again to regulate
materials which undermined
ecosystems, and the biggest development, the biggest issue as we know is climate change.
And there's a reason that climate change and global warming has elicited such a vigorous and I might say vicious
opposition. The reason is that from an
environmental perspective now we are in essence saying and
declaring that we must change the materials foundation of industrial society. The fight against global warming
embodies and illustrates two
And number two, everything is connected to everything else. When we see with new eyes, it Omeans to understand and to.
tackle the central design flaw
which we've separated the worker of modern economies, which is separation. We've built a modern society in
manufacturer from the customer, the banker from the borrower, and ultimately, as we, I think, the increasingly understand, the
the citizen from the government.
We've created a system in which those who make the decisions are separate from those who feel the
impact of those decisions.
those who benefit from decisions And then adding insult to injury, we tweak the system a little bit so that we separate
from those who feel their costs. We've separated authority from
is poor decision making and sometimes catastrophic decision making. We did this all willfully and we
did this consciously. There was no conspiracy involved
in it. We did it because we felt it was
necessary and for many that it
was an historical inevitability, the outcome of the technological
experiencing in the 19th and the revolutions that we were
20th century. And there's some justification in that.
When steel replaced wood, big manufacturing replaced small
manufacturing. When concentrated energy sources
like fossil fuels replaced
we went from small and dispersed diffuse resources like wind turbines and water power that humanity had used for millennia,
of quantities on a discreet process, to mass manufacturing. Railroads and then cars replaced that is producing small amounts
markets expanded geometrically. Commerce overflowed boundaries the horse and the buggy and
And we designed rules that fit and became national and then an international affair.
State legislatures, for example, that technological development, that technological state of affairs.
in the 1920s granted private companies, electric utilities but private companies, the
governmental authority, that is authority that only governments had previously had, to seize
voltage transmission lines private property to build high
plants and bigger power plants because bigger power plants generate electricity much cheaper than smaller power
tended to be further away from their customers and so it was in
high voltage transmission lines, the society's interest to build
but people don't like high voltage transmission lines going
farms or their houses and so we gave the utilities, private companies, the right to seize throughthat property. their
The federal government preempted
state authority to regulate railroads. Railroads crossed interstate
boundaries and we felt that the railroad was so important to the
nation that we didn't want states fiddling with railroads
even when railroads were gouging
of mergers. And this is all recent news. We allowed interstate banking and then we encouraged an orgy
The four largest banks in 2010 were 37 individual banks
only 20 years ago.
And those 37 individual banks 20 years before that were 200 banks.
And so we created and, in fact, encouraged larger and larger
banks which, as we understand, could create a problem.
We signed free trade agreements that stripped us of our ability to regulate the flows of capital
Because we figured that if and goods across our borders.
another country could produce something more cheaply than we could, no matter what the
reason, we paid less. If we paid less, we had more
money in out pocket. If we had more money in our
pocket, we would spend it elsewhere and we would all grow faster. And then in the last 40 years,
very recently really, since the 1960s, some would say maybe from
And it was driven, that change, but two mutually reinforcing the 1950s, the dynamic of history abruptly changed.
factors. One was technological and one
was cultural. In terms of technologies, the new technologies, the new machines, are in their impact
centrifugal, not centripetal. They are decentralizing in their
scale rather than larger scale. When we shift as we are doing now from concentrated energy They encourage and honor smaller
to more diffuse and decent sources like fossil fuels back
energy sources like solar and wind and slow moving water, we shift from big and centralized
to small and dispersed. The Internet not only makes all of us customers, but it makes all of us potentially producers
in an increasingly information
intensive economy. Culturally we've begun to question the economies of scale.
We've begun to question the conventional wisdoms that have
over the last 150 years. underpinned, if you will, the policies that we've developed
We've discovered the We've rediscovered the value of community, and we've discovered the dark side of globalization.
dis-economies of scale, as well as the economies of scale. And all around us we see that
sometimes in inchoate areas,
sometimes in fragmented areas, but I think it's fairly clear now that the word local and
community, or the words local and community, which I think
pastoral romantic yearnings for yesteryear have become, in fact, maybe just a few years ago were considered quaint sort of
much more profound and much more concrete.
The local food movement is
strong and is growing rapidly. Indeed it has coined its own new
We talk of energy independence, not of nations but of states and word: locavore.
of cities and even of buildings. At my organization we're
thrilled that the term local
self-reliance, 36 years after we coined it, is now becoming a
An excellent indicator of the power of the local in 2010 is the eagerness with which the matter of the zeitgeist.
to change the obvious meaning of global corporations have tried
Mitchell, has widely written on tthis subject.. MAnd if you're interested ine reading her writings and findy
out what we do in more detail,
the Huffington Post. newrules.org, and you can look at them or you could read her writings at
Arianna Huffington called us up a couple months ago and asked if we would partner with her on her
new campaign which is called
Move Your Money. It has generated enormous amount
interest, and it essentially of activity nationwide and of
small banks and community banks, asks that cities and states and individuals and businesses move their money from big banks to
for the Huffington Post on that issue said moving your money to the deposits of local banks is The first column that Stacy did
local banks lose money on deposits. Even if they pay you a very small amount it still is ant
amount. Much better is to move your borrowing to local banks. That's how they make their
money.
So move your credit cards, move your consumer loans, move your mortgages there.
Stacy has written recently about
advertisements and PR maneuvers hthe nation's largest banks are embraced by the global. She writes in a spade much new
working hard to win us back. They are in effect standing on
our door step, flowers in hand, trying to convince us they have changed.
and community because they know quite well that there's a rival for our affections. A recent Zogby poll found that
nearly one in 10 Americans has
already moved at least some of their business to small banks or
During the Olympics, Wells credit unions.
Fargo, now Wells Fargo may have as its logo a stage coach, but Wells Fargo has $1.2 trillion
in assets and 10,000 locations. During the Olympics it ran a
television commercial in which it described itself, and I
quote, as the nation's leading
community bank. HSBC, which is also one of the largest banks on the planet, has
taken to calling itself, and I
quote, the world's local bank. In a biting response to these new commercials, the head of the
Independent Community Bankers Association warned, and I quote,
Wall Street mega firms better be careful what they call
themselves, lest they be
confused with actual community banks that regulators allow to fail.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, the technique of what Stacy has dubbed local washing goes far beyond the financial
sector. Starbucks has begun unbranding
as 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. its stores. The first of which just reopened
Hellmann's, the mayonnaise brand owned by the giant retail Unilever, is test driving a new
eat real, eat local initiative
in Canada. Barnes and Noble, the world's top seller of books, has
launched a video blog site under
the banner all book selling is local.
they're calling themselves local Well, it's clear that when
as a place that can guide our intentions and guide where we spend our dollars and where we not as a romantic concept, but
investments. buy our goods and make our
We have a new, or maybe I should say a renewed appreciation of the power of community and of
community institutions. We've begun to realize that it's
that encompasses technological, economic, and political not a fucomponents. at all. We are learning that mutual aid
practiced by strong communities not only makes us feel good, it makes us stronger and it saves
Before he died, the eminent psychologist Erich Fromm invited us money.
conversation he said that he was me over to his house and we had a conversation, and during the
fairly sure that there was a direct correlation between the
and the increase in the number decline of neighborhood taverns
of psychiatrists. [LAUGHTER] And I thought about that,
that's interesting comment
because in the old days we, probably mostly men, could go to their neighborhood tavern.
They had a terrible problem that
they had to deal with. The bartender knew them, knew their family, knew that he
wasn't going to be able to solve
their problems but was very interested in listening to them, and for 50 cents or maybe a
dollar they cried in their beer,
Today if you have a serious tproblem, an emotional problem, little drunk. They could walk themselves home.
somebody who doesn't know you, you drive across town and you pay a hundred dollars an hour to
doesn't know your family but thinks he can solve your
And then you get in your car and problem.
you drive home. Well, if you multiply the number of individuals who do that you
find that an enormous amount of money has sort of disappeared from your pocket on a collective
Our communities have become poorer, not only in an emotional basis.
become literally poorer in terms way, not only in a sense of mutual aid way, but they've
of their dollars because that neighborhood institution has been disappeared.
There's a great deal of hard
evidence, not just anecdotal evidence, that communities based
widespread ownership have stronger civil cultures and their practice of mutual aid on diversified economies and
more wisely. leads them to spend their money
And I see that when we talk about sustainable communities in the next day and a half that one
of the things that we talk about
is spending our money locally and supporting local business. The seminal study about
diversified economies and their effect on civic society and civil culture was conducted about 70 years ago by a man
named Walter Goldschmidt who was
a researcher for the United States Department of Agriculture.
And Goldschmidt was a sociologist and he examined two farm communities in California's
He chose them because they were remarkably similar. Each had the same volume of crop San Joaquin Valley.
They had comparable soil production.
quality. They had the same climate.
equidistant from major urban Both communities were
respect. areas and were similarly served by highways and rail lines. They differed in only one major
hand, depended on a few large Theconcentrated agribusinessred on many operations.y farms. ThGoldschmidt discovered thater
Dinuba's family farm economy
and that the Dinuba citizens provided its residents with a substantially higher median income and standard of living
were much involved in their communities. For example, the quality and
quantity of public project, that
is projects that benefited the entire community like paved streets and sidewalks, garbage
and sewage disposal, were far superior to Dinuba. The agribusiness town, for
only one elementary school. Whereas, Dinuba provided example, had no high school and
school. The family farm town had three citizens with four elementary schools in addition to a high
play ground, of course lent to public parks. The large farm town had a single
it by the corporation. Dinuba's residents not only invested their money in
expanding their community's physical infrastructure, they also invested their time in building their civic
infrastructure. Dinuba had more than twice the
In Dinuba various government number of civic associations as Arvin.
through direct popular vote. bodies existed that enabled residents to make decisions about their public welfare
No such bodies existed in Arvin. This was an astonishing finding.
astonishing finding, and one This was the late 1940s, an
would think that the government's reaction to his
for he had emphatically validated the uniquely American belief that the key to a healthy findings would have been delight
possible ownership of productive society was the broadest
assets, and you would be wrong. For the next 30 years, the United States Department of
Agriculture suppressed the
report, and under pressure for industry it went even further.
later it abolished the entire office that studied agriculture's impact on It aboliscommunities.tion and
Well, I mentioned that the
moved into another channel. tThe external context has changed, that the flow of history has, if not reversed,
certainly changed, but the rules for the most part have not.
Institutions and habits and paradigms have an enormous
change simply because the rationale for it has built in inertia. The conventional wisdom doesn't
disappeared. And of course, once entrenched,
as we have found out, bigness in
all of its manifestations does not give way easily.
movement looks to change Part of the sustainability
individual behavior. We should buy local.
We should use efficient light bulbs. We should recycle.
We should bicycle. And these are important for many
reasons because changing
individual behavior leads us to understand that the change itself was neither wrenching in
our time or our habits nor
wrenching in our pocket books. And as we change our behavior,
dollars and as we change the we change the flow of our
flow of our dollars, we enable new business institutions, new
to arise. That is, we lay the foundations for a sustainable economy. technologies, and new industries
collectively. Now, the word collective, I think, has somewhat of a But we also need to act
States in the 21st century. Why don't we just call it democracy? pejorative meaning in the United
community, as a number of citizens to change the rules. We need to change the rules that But we need to act as a
We need to change the rules that guide entrepreneurial energy.
guide investment capital and scientific genius.
move in different directions. We need to change the current rules that undermine the ability We need to change them so they
self-governing and self-reliant, of communities to be
human, natural, and capital and we neeresources. new ones that encourage communities to get the most out of their local,
Let me give you a few examples of how the rules discourage and
then a number of examples of how
recycling is to discourage the the rules can encourage sustainability. The best way to encourage
dumping of garbage in landfills. But when states have tried to do
stepped in and said that this the Supreme Court has
And according to the although we might call it garbage, they would call it commerce.
Constitution, states do not have the right to interfere with interstate commerce, only
Congress has the power to do
Pennsylvania's garbage inside New Jersey, the Supreme Court Asaid you can't do that, that's ban the dumping of
Well, Wisconsin said we got a better idea. the flow of commerce.
Let's redesign that law such that you can dump garbage inside
of Wisconsin but only if the
content of that garbage is similar in terms of the recycled
removed because it's recyclable, content, that is the amount
And the Supreme Court overturned as the garbage in Wisconsin which has a mandatory recycling law.
that law as well. And then came Michigan which said I think we can do it even
better. I think we can do it in a way that you have to support this.
the late 1980s. And it was a law that said each county has to be responsible for It's a fascinating law passed in
It what to build a landfill or its own solid waste.
expand a landfill such that it could cope with 20 years of increased generation of solid
waste.
And in return for requiring that county to accept the
wastes, it gave it the authority responsibility for its own
to stop outside garbage from coming into its landfill, either
Michigan or garbage from other garbage from other counties in
means essentially is that the county has a very substantial incentive to maximize recycling or reuse because the more you
recycle, the longer the life of that landfill.
from outside, then you But if you can't stop garbage from coming into that landfill
essentially have done nothing to help your county overall. And the Supreme Court said no,
that Michigan could not, in fact, stop garbage from coming
in outside and the law was essentially overturned.
Well, this can be easily
remedied. Easily remedied. Congress could pass a one
sentence law that says states have the authority to manage
their wastes, even if in doing so they impinge on interstate
commerce. A very simple law, although I'm sure when Congress got through
nevertheless, it could be a relatively simple law in it would be a 1500-page law, but
concept. There's another obstacle that we
need to overcome. Today when you buy from a local bookstore or a local store of any kind, you'll pay a sales tax
in Wisconsin and in virtually every other state in the
country. But if you buy from Amazon that
same product, you don't have to pay a sales tax.
business is trying to desperately to compete with huge Now what that means is that right off the bat that local
companies and now we have, right off the bat, given them a 5% and
in some cases up to 10% price disadvantage. When states tried to require
like to collect the sales tax and give it to the states, the companies like Amazon and the
interstate commerce. Supreme Court once again said you can't do that because that's
And there's another complicated aspect of it that I don't need to get into, but in any case
they said no, you can't do that.
have been trying to convince But Congress could give you the right to do that. And for the last 25 years people
Congress to pass the one sentence law that says that states can tax the sale of
interstate goods and Congress has not done so.
And it has not do so in part because of the lobbying of
companies like Amazon and others
We think it's terrific that we but in part because those of us who use the Internet don't want to pay taxes.
can buy for a few percent less some place else.
what it might do to the local economy. We don't think about the fact of
few bucks by importing It's a little like the free trade argument where you save a
everything from China. Well, yeah but if you import
actually producing nothing everything from China, you're
yourself and eventually you go under.
relationship of our individual And so we need to understand the
behavior to our community behavior, but we need a little help here in terms of changing
the rules.
Well what would the rules be like if, in fact, we developed
community? them for sustainability and
Packers. Well, I'm in this area of the country and so there's an obvious example, the Green Bay
I don't need to tell you necessarily the history but I always find it fascinating.
The Green Bay Packers, a little teeny town has a national football league team. Little teeny town.
Well, because when it started everybody got together and put
in 25 bucks and they had a self-franchise.
It was 1920-1921. So everybody could buy a little share.
in because after all you've got a $25 share that's probably worth, I don't know, $50,000 And then the genius of it came
I don't know. Right? now.
Well, you can sell it. After all it's your share.
You get to sell it. But the money, the appreciation over $25 would have to go to
memorial. It was after World War I after a fund that would build a war
all. So it eliminated your individual
greed incentive, if you will, to
sell your share in the Green Bay Packers.
A team which is clearly an And so there you have it.
pride, to the local area all embodiment of community, a team that has generated enormous amounts of money, forget about
because of a rule that was developed almost 100 years ago. Well, let me give you some other
rules.
Act was one of the great Let me start with a thought experiment. I mentioned that the Clean Air
legacies of the modern environmental movement. Well, the Clean Air Act had to
deal with the problem of
requiring factories to raise the pollution caused from smokestacks in factories. And it dealt with it by
height of their smokestacks. In fact, there was a term related to this that became very
popular in the early 1970s: the solution to pollution is
the height of the smokestacks is dilution. So what happened when you raised
that you converted a problem, which is essentially a particulate matter problem, into
an acid rain problem, into a
Well, what if instead in the problem that was now regional and in this part of the country even international.
Clean Air Act it had said not that you would have to raise the height of your smokestacks but
you would have to lower the height of your smokestacks, curve the end of it so that it
boardroom. came into the window of the
[LAUGHTER] Now, at that point, what we had done is marry authority
and responsibility. And I assure you that the nation's CEOs would have
their industrial engineers that they want zero emissions immediately given the order to
manufacturing. We wouldn't have had to wait 50
years for one or two plants to
possibility, another example of come up wrules.at idea. Let me give you, what's not a thought experiment but a
Every year thousands of pieces of property are seized for
public purpose. Sometimes the public purposes are good, and sometimes the public purposes are bad.
But in each case we are required
by the Constitution that the property owner be compensated fairly.
Well, what is fairly? Well, fairly means you get the
market value of the house, although often you have to fight
for it, but nevertheless fairly means you get the market value
through a community. of the house. Well, let's say that we're going
Let's say it's a highway that's going through a community, and in the community there are two
identical homes.
In one home people have lived there for 50 years, or the family has lived there for 50
years.
In the other home people have just moved in as renters and the house was just sold so an
outside investor. From a compensation standpoint, they both will get the same amount of money, but from a
value to the community
standpoint they are profoundly different in their impact.
compensation law which would be done at the local level, county level, state level, that said that at a minimum you get the
market value, everybody gets the
you've lived in that house you market value because that's required by the Constitution, but then for every 10 years that
recognizing, in a crude way, but get 10% more or 20% more or 30% more. In other words, we're
we're quantifying where we can the qualitative value of
The qualitative value of rootedness in the community.
somebody in that house having an institutional and neighborhood
watching the street, someone in that house knowing their memory, someone in that house
neighborhoods and knowing what goes on in that neighborhood.
If we did that, we would raise
the price of taking a property. And that would raise the cost of whatever that public purpose was
supposed to be. But that just means that we have
cost/benefit ratio to the point where we would abandon the valued community. Sometimes we might change the
transmission line or a new proposed project. For example, a high voltage
energy area, and it's an example interstate highway. Well, here's another example. And it's an example from the
of how we can, in fact, move toward self-reliance. The Institute for Local
Self-Reliance did a study, which
is available on our website, that looked at every state in the country and every renewable
resource that every state in the
country had, and we looked at the amount of renewable energy that could be generated from
inside the state from that
commercially harvestable. In other words, wind over a Acertain speed, sunlight on renewable resources which were
And what we concluded was that rooftops.
60% of all the states in the country, including Wisconsin, could be self-sufficient in
renewable electricity.
Now I know what you're saying, renewable electricity is
storage capacity or some backup natural gas plants. And that's true. intermittent so you would need
saying is there's an enormous amount of renewable energy that could be harvested inside of But essentially what we were
And it would make sense for states to, in fact, emphasize in-state development of renewable energy resources
because it marries an environmental objective to an economic development objective. It maximizes dollars that flow
through the state economy, it maximizes jobs that are created from that.
entire country actually requires But only Ohio, only Ohio in the
that part of its renewable energy mandate be met by
Now Wisconsin has a renewable energy mandate, Minnesota has a renewable energy mandate, many in-state renewable electricity.
mandates right now, over 30 of states have renewable energy
them, but only one has said it's important for us that a significant amount of this
electricity is generated
in-state. Now for those of you who might be economists, you will argue to
me that this is a very
North Dakota than they do in inefficient way to go about creating a market because the winds blow more fiercely in
Iowa and Ohio. And so, therefore, it's cheaper to generate electricity in North
Dakota through wind than it is
But to get the electricity from North Dakota to Ohio requires you to build a high voltage transmission line.
And when you take into account
the costs of that high voltage transmission line into the cost of electricity, then the cost of
generating electricity in Ohio
to Ohio. from wind is about the same and even lower than it is generated in North Dakota and transported
And moreover, if you build a high voltage transmission line, you have to, there is, as they
say in the military, a lot of collateral damage.
There may be tens of thousands of homes and businesses and
farms that are taken in the path
of that high voltage transmission line from North
There are people who will lose Dakota to Iowa.
part or all their land and everybody in that path is going to lose a certain amount of the
value of their land.
has increasingly given the power Now in the rush to build high voltage transmission lines, the Congress of the United States
to the federal government to force high voltage transmission lines on states like Wisconsin.
So Wisconsin might say we don't really think we want one because
all it's going to do is pass from a North Dakota through
Minnesota through Wisconsin and end up in Chicago.
This is no benefit to us and it's us that we have to worry
about.
And what Congress is saying increasingly is no, no, it's not you have to worry about,
it's the broader us you have to worry about.
And we all want renewable, isn't that a major national goal, and
so therefore you are forced to
accept high voltage transmission lines.
We should say to Congress let's do it inside of the state until such a point where we exhaust Welit.no.
Or until such a point where it's
so dramatically different in terms of its economics to take
than generate it from inside the it from another state rather
state that we are forced to do it. There are other rules related to
renewable energy that we need to
change. There's a tax incentive. The whole reason we have
renewable energy right now is the mandate, which is the major reason, and then the other is the incentives that are given by
the federal government. But the incentives that are given for renewable energy right
encourage large scale absentee-owned systems. The current federal incentives now are incentives that
credits. are tax deductions and tax
you have. Many people don't, 40% of all andAmericans don't itemize is deductions on their income tax.t
So for them it's worth nothing
credit for example, can be taken at all. And it's even worse than that because the wind energy tax
only against what's called passive income. Now, you and I don't earn
passive income. We earn ordinary income because we're ordinary. We earn wages.
Maybe we'll get some interest from an account.
We might get a dividend from a stock.
All of that is ordinary income. But passive income comes from selling goods.
essentially. It's business income
profitable large corporations, And so that's why wind turbines are now almost invariably financed by large corporations,
because they tend to have the tax liability. Well, from a government's
perspective, they're going to lose a dollar, they give a
dollar of a tax deduction or a tax credit, they're going to
lose a dollar.
So why not just change the incentive.
it so it becomes a refundable tax credit so it's available to everybody. Don't increase it, just change
the federal government's Well, what happens then is from
or solar would be dramatically perspective they still lose a dollar but the dynamic in terms of widespread ownership of wind
different. There are changes that we can make in terms of renewable
energy which I think are
extremely important. In this area, you have a city utility, those of you who live
here locally. There's a city utility. A municipally-owned utility.
very interesting vehicle for A municipally-owned utility is a
doing many of the things that we want to do because a
treat the community as a whole municipally-owned utility can
when it does strategic planning. It can, once again a word that I
of moving toward renewable hate to use, socialize the costs
very much so what they tend to energy. Utilities, even municipal utilities don't like to do that
do is they have a green energy program.
I don't know. But in any case almost all of them do where they said, Does yours?
green electricity you can pay two cents more a kilowatt hour, buy a hundred kilowatt hours a essentially, if you want to buy
yourself. Well, okay. But I always find it somewhat mperverse that those people who
want to do a good thing have to pay a much higher price than
That's not a good message to those people who accept doing bad things.
which means we, the community, give. So rather than green pricing, what about green citizenship,
the city as a whole have decided that we want to maximize
So rather than your having to pay two cents a kilowatt hour more, we will all pay a 10th of a cent a kilowatt hour more.
And rather than us ending up
having 200 kilowatts or so of wind because there aren't that many people who want to pay
two cents a kilowatt more,
we've got 10 megawatts of wind or 50 megawatts of wind because we're all coming up
with the money for it.
Green citizenship, not green consumerism, if you will. We need to think about things
like this in terms of the new rules for sustainability. And one other thing is that when
communities, we need to adopt full-cost accounting, not partial-cost accounting. we talk about sustainable
accounting systems that allow us We need to be able to have
We need to make accounting to understand the actual cost to the community as a whole as well as individuals.
transparent. Now this is the time of the year, actually last month I
believe, the Texas
Transportation Institute comes up with its figures for congestion in major cities
and major metropolitan areas. And there is then a state of
articles about the billions of dollars we're paying in lost
time as a result of being stuck in traffic. Look at the data a little more
We're at a university here. I presume everybody looks at closely.
data and doesn't just accept the conclusions the newspaper tells
you, I assume.
If you look at the data very closely, what you find is that, in fact, it's true, commuting
time has increased. In the case of the Twin Cities, where I live, it's increased by three minutes each way in the
last 20 years.
Six minutes. But they don't tell you that, the Texas Transportation
Institute.
What they do is they take the six minutes increase for me, then they give a dollar figure
of four times the minimum wage, $21 an hour, as the dollar
thousands and millions of cars figure for lost time, then they multiply the hundreds and
that commute every day by that six minutes and they come up
justified at the legislature with a very big figure which is
for building new roads. It's always at every legislature it's justified for building new
roads.
You go to your legislature and you find out why it is they want
answer is because congestion is a very serious problem. Well, okay, I get it but I'm to build a new road, and the
same concept of applying a value bemused that we don't use the
to a very small amount of time in other aspects of our lives and use that to guide public
policy. For example, I am old enough to remember that when you called some business you got a person
on the other side.
Last generation maybe. But in any case, I remember that.
20 years ago, about that time I moved to the Twin Cities, but I would travel a lot so I would call the Star Tribune to hold
the newspaper for a few days. It took me approximately one
and there was a menu. And there was a menu and you had minute to make that change. Then they got rid of the person
to put in what's the hour of the day, what's the day, and so
forth.
It took me about, not that long. Three minutes, three and a half minutes to make that change.
Well, now let's multiply the
number of people who go every day and try to use the phone and get into a menu and you get your
five minutes or 10 minutes or there are the horror stories of the half an hour and the hour and the two hours because people
are expensive and so what essentially the society has done
What if we said, well, maybe we should think of this in the same is imposed those costs on you and away from the business.
way we think about roads and time saved.
And maybe we should come up with
Maybe. the legislature providing money so people answer the phone. It's ridiculous, isn't it?
But a few years ago the mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, was
the mayor's office of business infuriated when he tried to call
[LAUGHTER] services which was created to help small businesses cut through red tape.
electronic messages and Hevoicemails and so forth.t of endurance. He had to put up with convoluted
Infuriated he instituted a policy the next day that all
phone calls to the city would be
answered by a person. He said, and I quote, I just think that between 9:00 and 5:00
there should be someone answering the phone.
do that, right? Which means he had to raise We forget ttaxes.an factor. Well, he had to hire people to
people, he certainly should have, but he raised taxes in Now, he didn't say that to
order to have people to answer the phone so that you would,
first of all, feel a lot more like a citizen in that
And the citizens of Boston seem to have accepted that. government, but also that you would be able to save your time.
unprecedented fifth term with 60% of the vote. Last November, six months ago Menino was elected mayor for an
And so we need to begin to think They're beginning to call him mayor for life.
about how we can think of ourselves as individuals but also think of ourselves as a
community.
One final example. And this is an example about
equity. Once again, you don't remember, but there was a time when all gas stations had full service
pumps.
I know, I know, you've got to be very old to understand that,
Now, of course, almost no gas station has a full service pump, right?
arm in a leg to get the gasoline and if they have a full service pump, it's going to cost you an
from that full service pump. There were two states in the
have full service and self-service pumps and you will charge the same price: Oregon country and New Jersey.you will
And they did that as a matter of
equity, as a matter of civility. They did that because there are old people and there are infirm
people who can't, in fact,
pump their own gasoline. Now, should they be penalized,
30, 40 cents a gallon more penalized by having to pay 20,
We're all going to pay a little bit more for that gasoline so that we can treat grandpa and grandma and the infirm among us
with a certain amount of
decency. Now it turn us out that Oregon
are actually lower than in the and New Jersey's gasoline prices
states surrounding them. But let's say it wasn't lower.
So what? Let's say they were higher.
So we need to begin to understand that when we talk
are talking about environmentalism, we are talking about sustainable communities we
about energy, we are talking about recycling, we are
talking about food production,
we are talking about biking, we are talking about walking, but in a larger sense
we are talking about us.
We're talking about a sense of community.
ground this morning but my Now, I've covered a lot of
carbon footprint, they are essential message is that sustainable communities are not only those that lower their
communities that have a sense of community, and a sense of community comes from thinking
and acting for the common good. They're a community that tries
this country that call to maximize community wealth. There are a number of states in
themselves still commonwealths. It's a community that strives to get the most from its local
natural capital and financial resources.
It's a community that tries to make decisions as transparently
as possible.
It's a community with a municipal corporation called your local government, looks
beyond its internal balance sheet to the community balance
sheet when it makes resource decisions.
At every conference, we hear
pundits, and we read in the newspapers, and on TV, we hear politicians and commentators
tell us about how we live in an age of change, great change,
dramatic change, and that certainly is true.
We must remember the distinction
between change and progress. Bertrand Russell describes the
Change, he said, is inevitable, while progress is problematic. differences as well.
We will have change whether we Change is inevitable, whereas progress is ethical.
will it or not, profound change, but we will only have progress
channel human genius in the directions that maximize the if we create the rules that
common good and build strong local economies and strong
self-confident and self-reliant communities.
Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]