Rural Communities Should Focus on Clean Energy, Job Creation

Climate change is now all but irrelevant with Congress, advancing the merits of energy independence, clean energy, and job creation is the rural ticket to success

I’m as guilty as the next person. I stereotype rural folks even though I’ve lived the majority of my life in podunk Idaho communities so small that we anchor directions from the one or two stoplights in town. So when I prepare myself for a day of discussing climate change and clean energy policy at the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition’s policy gathering, I find that I’m not prepared at all for the deep, thoughtful discussions rural Westerners are having about the subjects.

I come to the annual conference hardened by hearing the same snide comments at home about sending our November heating bills to Al Gore if he thinks the Earth is so warm. Over and over again. So listening to a group of ranchers, forest products people, conservative elected county officials, and others at the RVCC conference talk about shifting strategies from failed climate change legislation to creating clean energy language freaks me out, just a little. Like anyplace else, we have social mores in the rural West. For the most part, for instance, you don’t have to worry about walking into an Elks’ Club and hearing opera, or going to a City Council meeting and hearing anything rational. We know our comfort zone.

JP Leous, from The Wilderness Society’s DC office, is not in our comfort zone. At all. Yet he’s part of a panel that kicks off a discussion about how this quirky coalition can affect national policy. Leous dives headfirst into the subject of climate change policy, apparently unaware that hicks like myself lurk in the audience. The reality of the November election is that comprehensive climate change legislation is dead, he concedes. Environmental groups like The Wilderness Society, who at one time focused mainly on climate mitigation (putting a halt to emissions, for example), now find themselves addressing adaptation measures (counterbalancing climate change effects by things like planting trees).

“Major conservation organizations are coming to grips with adaptation,” Leous said. “That’s because 1) cap and trade legislation is on ice, and 2) we have come to realize that we could turn off the CO2 tap tomorrow and there’s enough of it out there already that we’ll be dealing with it for at least another generation.”

Leous predicts that it won’t be long before Americans, both rural and urban, come to the realization that “China is eating our lunch when it comes to creating a clean energy economy – an economy that creates jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.”

Wynne Auld needs little convincing. The young woman moved to Wallowa County, Ore., a few years ago because she thought the remote and beautiful eastern Oregon community seemed cool. And because as an environmental economist, she found a job in Wallowa County’s rapidly emerging renewable energy industry. The company that employs Auld, Renewable Energy Solutions, is just one of a handful of companies in the renewable energy sector. Four companies employ around 30 people in the county, working on a portfolio of solar, micro-hydro, and woody biomass technologies that produce homegrown, renewable energy.

This is Auld’s first experience at the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition, and she enters RVCC’s energy arena with lions like Jim Walls of Lake County, Ore., a community that just broke ground on a 20 megawatt biomass power plant, and Andi Colnes of the national Biomass Energy Resource Center. They, and at least a dozen others, are supposed to figure out how to effect policy changes in the wake of melted climate change legislation.

Colnes challenges participants to think about where they are and where they want to be. Many rural Western communities today depend upon shipments of propane to heat buildings both residential and commercial, while slash from nearby forestry projects gets burned on the ground. Communities rally around forest restoration projects that yield precious little marketable value and could use a boost from some kind of end-use (like turning waste wood into pellets) that generates revenue. Tax code and legislative solutions might get complicated, but the scenarios sound remarkably simplistic.

Dave Atkins is a long-time U.S. Forest Service employee and a champion of the agency’s Fuels for Schools program that funds wood-fired boilers to provide heating for schools. Atkins says communities get tied up in a chicken-and-egg dilemma about supply and demand in regard to a fuel-source like wood pellets. In reality, even in communities dominated by forested lands, the issue is dicey if only one facility is making the switch to wood. “If one entity needs 20 tons of pellets per year, that’s not nearly as advantageous as a community that has 10 entities each needing 20 tons of pellets per year. That’s obviously going to make things less expensive,” Atkins tutored.

At the end of the day, the group agrees that while talk about climate change is now all but irrelevant with Congress, advancing the merits of energy independence, clean energy, and job creation is the rural ticket to success. The non-partisan coalition is well-positioned to help decision-makers take off their “carbon goggles” and look at not just the potential ecological benefits of expanding woody biomass as a renewable energy, but the sidecar of other benefits, like more people working in the woods near rural communities.

As Todd Schulke of New Mexico, a founder of the enviro group Center for Biological Diversity, observed, “The power of this group is to come up with the other way.” 

Gina Knudson is the executive director of Salmon Valley Stewardship, a place-based conservation group that has participated in the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition since 2005.