Today Michigan State students took action to push their school to go 100% renewable. Here’s what my friend David Pinsky had to say about their situation last week:

“The Michigan State University (MSU) T.B. Simon coal plant is the largest on-campus coal plant in the country.

The MSU coal plant burns 200,000 tons of coal every year, and is one contributor to the 31 annual deaths in the Lansing area due to coal-fired power plants.

Since 2009, hundreds of MSU students have been waking up and saying “today I am going to shut down our campus coal plant!” For nearly three years, two student groups, MSU Greenpeace and MSU Beyond Coal, have been working tirelessly to pressure their administration to shut down the coal plant and transition to 100% clean energy.

Following relentless grassroots organizing from students, the administration finally responded – with an unambitious energy transition plan that calls for 40% clean energy by 2030. The plan also contains false solutions such as burning biomass and natural gas. Greenpeace and Sierra Club energy experts have concerns about the methodology used to create the plan. The ultimate goal of the plan is 100% clean energy. However, with a current timeline that extends to 2030, meeting not even half of the 100% goal, MSU students are calling on the MSU Board of Trustees to reject the current energy transition plan.

On April 13th, the MSU Board of Trustees has the power to reject this unambitious plan and demonstrate leadership on clean energy…. ” Read the rest of Davids blog on Quitcoal.org

This is part of a week of action and students around the country are taking action in solidarity, you can too.

You can tweet about this using the hashtag #quitcoalmsu

These plants are some of the dirtiest in the nation, and are probably part of the reason I, and so many others, grew up with asthma. What’s more, their impact on the climate will shortly be eliminated and I hope that means the demand drives further renewable energy production.  Below are many links where you can learn more, but a huge debt of gratitude goes out to the organizations who have been fighting these, and for those who mobilized the American public to get stronger rules at EPA. In particular, the communities of Pilsen and Little Village have been dealing with the health effects of Fisk and Crawford and have been fighting for their closure for some time.

Here’s more: P.E.R.R.O, Washington Post, Greenpeace , Sierra Club,  Chicago CBS, Chicago Sun Times, Reuters, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Credit: Michael Drazdzinski

Solar panels adorning the tops of Harvard buildings. A bright, towering wind turbine on the St. Olaf campus. Libraries and dormitories chock full of blue recycling options and even composting bins inside the dining halls, at the University of Washington.

Campus sustainability has come into its own over the last decade, with renewable energy, tray-less dining, and sustainability director jobs popping up at campuses across the country. While many colleges and universities can implement some or all of these programs to reduce their carbon footprint, many projects are done piecemeal, without a regular source of funding or the institutional support to make it the first step in a larger commitment.

Being a sustainable campus can be so much more than just a green garden or showcase project. Sustainability projects can often reduce the overall operating costs for the campus, saving energy and money, keeping tuition low. But high upfront costs can be a barrier to administrators experiencing steep budget cuts and rising energy costs.

One way for any college or university to achieve these results is through a sustainability financing mechanism called the Green Revolving Fund.

On the main stage at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s national conference in Pittsburgh, PA, the Billion Dollar Green Challenge will be launched in front of the largest gathering, to date, on sustainability in higher education. The Challenge is inviting colleges to establish green revolving funds to invest in significant energy efficiency upgrades on campus.

At the time of the launch, 32 institutions have joined the Challenge’s Founding Circle. Founding Circle participants range in size from large institutions such as Arizona State, Harvard and Stanford, to small and innovative institutions such as Northland College, Green Mountain College and Unity College.

Green revolving fund projects are diverse and versatile, and can be easily adapted to a school’s priorities. Have an active student body? Consider operating a student-driven fund, like at Oberlin College’s EDGE Fund, where students work with faculty and staff to initiative sustainability projects. Want to retrofit your campus buildings? Take a page from the University of Pennsylvania’s Energy Reduction Fund, which reduces energy through building upgrades.

Existing green revolving funds prove that sustainability efforts can be profitable and even fund larger and more ambitious projects, as they have an average return on investment of 32 percent annually.

Clearly, the benefits of joining the Challenge and operating a green revolving fund are numerous. They are a bright spot in a rocky economy, helping to create green jobs in campus communities while substantially reducing operating costs. The Challenge is a broad network of like-minded institutions focused on improving campus sustainability throughout their operations.

For participating institutions, it will be a best practice forum for what kinds of projects have proven successful, what programs have had difficulties, and what programs you should consider on your own campus, based on real-life examples.

As energy prices rise and concerns about resource scarcity increase, it is a risky venture to not invest in environmental initiatives on campus. By joining the Billion Dollar Green Challenge, institutions can both save energy and grow money.

I fully recognize the tremendous importance of working with communities to implement clean energy solutions.  I have huge respect and admiration for people who dedicate themselves to this kind of work.  If that’s your calling, I’m behind you 100%.  But I can’t and won’t agree that having people who are willing to take a principled stand against dirty energy is any less a part of the solution than implementing alternatives to fossil fuels.  We will never build a real movement for climate justice without being willing to say “no.”

If you don’t believe me, imagine what would happen if every US climate activist focused only on renewables and efficiency, while declining to speak out against unjust energy.  The result would be a heyday for fossil fuels.  Relieved of the inconvenience of people willing to stand in the way of injustice, coal companies would finish blowing up the last Appalachians and converting the Powder River Basin to a wasteland.  Largely unopposed, Big Oil would build its long-sought network of pipelines linking the Canadian tar sands to US refineries, solidifying US oil dependence for the next several decades.

Meanwhile we’d be installing lots of solar panels and wind turbines.  But it wouldn’t matter much, so long as fossil fuel companies could go their way unopposed and externalize the costs onto others.  When seen as one wing of a broader movement that also includes confronting injustice directly, renewable energy solutions are hugely powerful.  But if the climate movement becomes unwilling to condemn injustice where it exists, all the solutions we implement are for nothing.  They’ll be swept away in the tide of dirty energy infrastructure fossil companies would build without principled opposition from our movement.

Perhaps more to the point, people on the front lines of the fossil industry’s expansion can’t afford a “yes-only” solution to climate justice.  If you live at the site of a proposed coal export terminal, simply promoting clean energy isn’t a full solution to your problem.  That won’t make the immediate issue of a pending dirty energy proposal go away.  I’m unwilling to abandon solidarity with front line communities, with the vague promise their problems will be alleviated “someday,” when the tide of clean energy finally overwhelms fossil fuels completely.  For many people at the front lines, this day will come too late to save their livelihoods, health, and ability to survive.

No social movement has achieved success without directly confronting injustice.  Where would we be if leaders of the Civil Rights movement had avoided talking about segregation for fear of being called “too problem-oriented”?  What if Gandhi had decided condemning British rule would make the India liberation movement seem “too negative”?  Every movement must identify just alternatives while standing in the way injustices that exist.  Abandoning either side of the equation won’t get us anywhere.

Gandhi urged his followers to harness the power of Satyagraha, translated as “truth force” or “soul force.”  Acting with love and compassion, the Satyagrahis used nonviolent resistance to clog the wheels of the British empire, openly defying an unjust system while showing the way to a society based on moral values.  When arrested by the British in 1922 and tried for his “seditious” critique of the empire, Gandhi made the case for non-cooperation with injustice.  ”In my humble opinion,” he testified during his trial, “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.”

I can think of no better advice for the climate movement, where solutions will be found in standing up for clean energy while standing in the way of unjust systems.  Individual activists may of course decide to focus on one or the other piece of this equation.  But in losing sight of the need for both, we can only become ineffective.  Gandhi’s movement liberated India by offering solutions while steadfastly opposing injustice.  Our movement must do the same thing.

Are there any Satyagrahis out there?

Tim DeChristopher understands why he’s going to jail. As he told Rolling Stone in a recent interview, “What I did was a threat to the status quo, so I understand why those in power want to put me away.”

Tim represents a new breed of disruptive, bold climate activists who are putting their lives on the line to bring about the transformational change we need. And he considers Solar Mosaic part of that transformation. Asked what it would take to fundamentally transform our energy system, he pointed to Solar Mosaic as proof that we’re on our way. For the folks at Solar Mosaic, this is both a huge compliment and a great expectation to fulfill.

A quick recap on Tim: One the eve of Obama’s inauguration, a 27-year old economics student from Utah entered an auction set up for oil and gas companies, became the top bidder, and won the lease rights. He had no intention of paying for the land; he was acting to protect public land from destructive extraction. Despite the fact that the leasing plan was flawed and has since been revoked, Tim faces up to ten years in prison for his actions. His sentencing was recently rescheduled for the tenth time and is slated for late July. To read Tim’s full story, click here.

I take a lot of inspiration from Tim, for his personal resolve and his commitment to confronting the inadequacies of the grey economy and spurring on a new energy transformation. I’m also inspired to witness this new paradigm taking hold in concrete ways around the country. Indeed, Solar Mosaic – which aims to democratize clean energy in Oakland, California and around the country – represents a radical departure from traditional top-down fossil fuel systems.

DeChristopher speaks of a future that promotes local power, justice and prosperity for all, and an economy based on human goodness. Solar Mosaic embodies these tenants, putting the energy in the hands of people, creating jobs and helping community institutions save money, and building an economy that reflects the values we strive to live by.

The Self Express project is a grassroots effort launched by youth organizers based at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon who have a vision for a better future.  Traveling across the US in an essentially carbon-neutral vehicle, they plan to create a real-life example of community-oriented living.  The group intends to connect with local nonprofits and charities in locations they visit across the United States, performing service and volunteer work that gives back to the community.  They will also travel to and participate in key events in the US climate movement happening over the next few months. 

“I’m really interested to see what’s going on in our country,” says Katie Kann, a recent graduate of Linfield College who will be setting out on the Self Express later this month.  “I’m tired of only hearing about the negative stuff in the news, stuff that makes me sad. I want to see the good things that fellow citizens are doing to help people and improve quality of life across our country.”

In this way the Self Express project connects the hands-on solutions work needed to jumpstart a transition to a clean economy with the political organizing and activism that’s essential to building the sustained movement that will get us off fossil fuels for good.  Considering the scale of the challenge we’re facing, it’s neither logical nor useful to argue about whether climate activists should be addressing problems or building solutions.  We urgently need to do both these, things, which is why youth organizers aboard the Self Express will be connecting with community solutions projects while also facilitating communication between grassroots groups fighting fossil fuel infrastructure.

At the same time, the Self Express serves as a microcosm for the kind of future we need to create.  The Linfield students and alumni will be harnessing social media to track the progress of their mission, and will post frequent updates as the bus makes its journey cross-country.  To follow them on their journey (and get a glimpse of the vast amount of work that’s already gone into preparing the bus), visit and like the Self Express Facebook page.  Once the journey begins on June 20th, the group will also be posting on a separate web site.

For all those who engage with students on the bus in communities they visit, or who decide to follow their progress online, the Self Express project should serve as an inspiration, and a reminder of the initiative it takes to build a better future.  Six youth activists in Oregon have found a way to use their summer to create positive change while putting their ideals into practice.  How will you do the same?

After Representative Eherlich spoke, members from Environmental League Massachusetts and the Sierra Club outlined the health risks posed by coal power plants. The Sierra Club also offered reference to their recent publication on how renewable energy sources can replace the base load power for the grid which is presently generated by fossil fuels and nuclear power. Four members from Students for a Just and Stable Future then spoke on behalf of their drafted legislation, house docket #2625, which is entitled “An Act to Phase Out Coal Burning and Use”. Unlike other bills in front of the committee that ask for this to be done by the year 2020, Students for a Just and Stable Future believe that the issue demands more urgency and should be accomplished by 2015. The students who spoke addressed the many externalities pushed onto local communities and the environment throughout the coal commodity chain covering everything from the devastation due to mountain top removal to the effects emissions are having in the form of acid rain and global climate change.

This all comes in the wake of last week’s announcement that Dominion Resources will not be challenging ISO New England’s decision and will be closing the Salem Harbor Power Station just north of Boston before June 1, 2014. This announcement is a great victory for community organizations and their partners who have been calling for a closure of the plant.

The continued effort by Students for a Just and Stable Future, and students across the country, shows how important to role of the youth movement is in getting our country off of dirty fossil fuels. Campuses must continue to work with their local communities in order to ensure a healthy safe future for the people and the environment.

At the hearing industry representatives from New England Power Generators Association spoke out against the bill explaining that the free market was well suited to determine which fuel sources are best, and that government intervention will only cause harm.  They later denied to comment on the environmental injustices or social injustices brought on by the continued operation of the power plants.

What Should Be Our Next Steps?
On campuses across the country students are realizing that something needs to be done. We can play a pivotal role in the organizing and networking of different communities. Humanity needs someone to stand up and stop the destruction of society. Right now we are destroying nature. It is nature that we are very dependent on as a means of our survival. With its’ collapse we are only asking for the same. The world is changing at a very fast pace as the ice at our poles melt, the ocean is becoming unbalanced, our forests are disappearing, while communities are being forced to face bioaccumilation of chemicals that they never asked for. It is time to start taking a stand like never seen before.  Malcolm X said “We declare our right, on this earth… to be human being, to be respected as human being, to  be given the rights of a human being, in this society on this earth, in this day and we need to intend to do this by any means necessary. This is exactly what needs to be done. The youth environmental justice movement is constantly being referenced as the revolution of our generation as was Malcolm X’s civil rights movement to his generation. This however is not the civil rights movement. Like the civil rights movement we have organized and a created a vast grassroots network. Like the civil rights movement we also have realized that those in power, our elected officials, are failing us. What we have not started to use is a tool that was used to great success in their struggle, the judicial system. This goes further then taking the lead corporations of the polluter industrial complex to court over regulation infringements but actually putting ourselves into the system. We need to use it as a theater to tell our public narrative and start to frame how these issues are discussed.

By organizing a mass resistance movement on every stage of the coal commodity chain, we may be able to achieve the system change that many envision. Communities may not be able to stand up to industry funding however they do have more numbers then industry does. Not only should the infrastructure that supports this system be targeted but also an effort to discredit the public relations industry that helps to support it. This is an effort that crosses environmental and social justice lines. Literally everyone is being effected in some form as well as contributing to the issue. It is time that people reclaim power from the polluter industrial complex back to where it rightfully belongs.

North Carolina students bear witness at Facebook's Data Center.

Emma Wicker, one of the activists, grew up 10 minutes away from the construction site. Emma is stoked to have Facebook bring some much needed jobs to the area, she just wants those jobs to drive an energy revolution, not increase demand for dirty coal power. Duke Energy, the local electric utility, relies on coal for over 50% of its generation mix and is currently building another large 800MW coal plant just 10 miles away in Cliffside, North Carolina.

The action didn’t just happen in North Carolina on Friday. Students across the country stood up to demand more from Facebook. In Austin, Texas, students gathered outside Facebook offices in an effort to talk with employees about the campaign. The students were denied access to the building, but they were able to deliver a letter for Mark Zuckerberg to the security guard that works on Facebook’s floor, and get the attention of Facebook staff passing by.

Carson Chavana delivers a letter for Mark Zuckerberg.

As the student activists in Austin said on Friday, “Facebook is in a relationship with coal? Dislike!” Join us in asking Facebook to Unfriend Coal by Earth Day 2011.

‘We need to start training young people, not just FOR green jobs, but TO CREATE green jobs. We should start in the Twin Cities this summer.’

Fast-forward three years, and over 250 young people have been trained over three years in Summer of Solutions programs around the country to create innovative and self-sustaining solutions around energy efficiency, green industry, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and smart transportation and design that advance job creation, social justice, and community empowerment. A network of over 70 youth leaders has coalesced to launch a national organization from nothing and develop 2011 Summer of Solutions programs that will support hundreds of youth in creating the clean energy economy in 15 cities nationwide. These programs have expanded rapidly in number, quality, and sustainability over the years without grant support, and with a major influx of funding and leadership in late 2010, we’re just hitting our stride.

As you read on, I’d encourage you to think of any young people (individuals or groups) who might be interested in a summer program based on community-based innovation in the clean energy economy. If so, please invite them to apply to any of our 15 programs nationwide by April 24th at www.grandaspirations.org/apply2sos

In the Twin Cities, where I have been working, the Summer of Solutions has helped launch several initiatives that have been sustained throughout the year:

• Launching Cooperative Energy Futures, a community-based energy cooperative focused on helping neighborhoods create economies of scale in hard-to-reach markets (residential and small business) through community organizing, bulk buying, and cooperative ownership of energy. After a series of pilots around group contracting, bulk buying, neighborhood training, and community mapping starting in 2008, we started focusing on broad-based adoption in the Phillips community of Minneapolis during the summer 2010 while helping provide technical assistance to help the neighborhood understand efficiency and clean energy alternatives to a proposed high-voltage transmission line. With Cooperative Energy Futures now an independent though collaborative entity, this process led us to convene local business, neighborhood, and efficiency groups to form Our Power, a community-based campaign. This campaign focuses first on mobilizing a broad base of young people in the low-income and multi-cultural communities in Midtown Minneapolis to take charge of saving money by saving energy and engaging residents and businesses in doing the same. Starting in January 2011, Our Power has secured a marketing partnership with the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Minnesota’s oldest minority-owner business and a local weekly paper, and hired youth interns from the local school systems. We have also helped facilitate a series of biweekly meetings pulling together multiple constituencies to create a community energy plan for the neighborhood.
• Building the Alliance to Re-Industrialize for a Sustainable Economy with local labor leaders from the UAW 879, affordable housing and transit advocates, and St. Paul City developers to create a mixed-use development plan for the St. Paul Ford Manufacturing site that will close later this year. Since 2007, we have worked to create and research a net-energy positive, transit-oriented, affordable living and working community that would create more jobs from green industry than the site currently hosts including fiscal impact modelling, analysis of job multipliers, on-site clean energy assessment, housing and transit assessment, and carbon inventories. During a hiatus where the future of the plant was uncertain, we turned this plan into the first draft of a template for how it could be replicated at other old industrial sites in the Twin Cities and in other Rust Belt cities. Now that the fate of the plant is more certain, we’re moving forward on a community engagement campaign to build “Yes In My Back-Yard” (YIMBY) support for the vision while working with the city and recruiting developers, designers, and investors.
• Growing our networks within the entrepreneurial urban farming movement in an effort to create jobs and turn hobby-style community gardens into viable urban farms. We started exploring the field in 2009, but expanded substantially in 2010 by working with the Harrison Neighborhood Association to bring residents in North Minneapolis, a major food desert, together around urban farming. We also started learning urban farm business development basics from Collie Graddick, a leader of the Co-op Project, and experimented in permaculture with other local groups in the Phillips Neighborhood and North Minneapolis. In 2011, we’ll be supporting the launch of Concrete Beet Farmers, a new Phillips urban farm while helping expand urban farming ventures with several other organizations (and maybe exploring urban anaerobic digester options).
• Working to expand access to bike transit in partnership with Sibley Bike Depot. We helped Sibley, a community Bike Shop based on University Avenue in Frogtown. This new program in 2010 helped Sibley develop a listening project among local residents, improve their volunteer training program, increase adoption of their low-income bike loan program, and start a bikeshop session for women and trans-gender people.

And that’s really just the beginning at just one of fifteen amazing programs across the nation. From organizers helping communities create new economies in the coal-fields of West Virginia to the emergence of local food economies in Arkansas to community revitalization in Detroit to neighbor-to-neighbor asset-based carbon reduction campaigns in Oregon, we’re getting to work. You can learn more about each of the Summer of Solutions programs at www.grandaspirations.org/programs

If you or a young person you know wants to join in this summer, please apply by April 24th at www.grandaspirations.org/apply2sos

So what is the Summer of Solutions trying to achieve?

First, Summer of Solutions is about winning the hearts and minds of our communities for whom climate and energy concerns are frequently lost amidst an overwhelming tide of economic uncertainty, job losses, political conflict regionally (like the labor/ state government conflicts in Wisconsin and elsewhere), and global unrest (in the Middle East and Japan) that further threatens to destabilize our economy. Through tangible, on-the-ground solutions that help people see how the green economy allows them to redirect the energy, food, and transportation dollars that they already spend away from the problems and towards the solutions. It allows people to see how being smarter, more efficient, and more collective in our approaches to meeting these basic needs can create more jobs, improve the quality of life, and reduce the cost of living, even as it helps confront big picture problems like climate change, energy depleting, economic dependency, and military conflict. It allows people to see, feel, and trust that a clean energy economy is more than just talk – it’s productive, realistic, and fun.

Second, Summer of Solutions is about building a new generation of leaders who bring people together across differences and both organize and innovate real, deep, and lasting solutions. At a moment when the climate movement needs to be bigger, more networked, and more inclusive than ever, focus has largely remained on a reluctant political system and the backlash that has ensued rather than on building a movement that is big enough, broad enough, deep enough, and solutions-oriented enough to win. We need leaders who can do the dirty work on the streets and face to face, but who can also think strategically on the big picture of how this work transforms development, progress, politics and culture to work towards a change as systemic as the Industrial Revolution. We need organizers with business models who are in it for the long haul and are innovative and resilient enough to sustain themselves and each other regardless of grant funding. And we need tens of thousands of them working in coordinated, distributed action. Green jobs visionary Van Jones said it beautifully:

“Because to win over a wounded and frightened nation, our cause itself must become irresistibly beautiful, vital, healing, and sustainable. Success will come when our networks are practical enough to “organize” hundreds of thousands — and soulful enough to “magnetize” tens of millions. So let us dare to imagine … a movement that celebrates more than it condemns … inspires more than it critiques … and solution-izes more than it problem-atizes. Imagine a movement for justice with its arms wide open.”

The Summer of Solutions is about building a massive swarm of leadership that will create the tipping point that we must see. It’s not about
creating more foot soldiers or organizing mass rallies, it’s about creating a self-sustaining and exponentially expanding network that
sends the seeds of the clean energy economy into every community where it creates visible benefits for all. One of our central theories is what
we can the Dandelion Strategy; that by the end of a Summer of Solutions program, every participant will be ready, willing, and able to:

1. Support themselves (materially, emotionally, etc.) through a sustainable livelihood that they create.
2. Create cascades of sustainable livelihood benefits (income, jobs, lower cost of living, better quality of life, ownership, social capital, skills, etc.) for the broader community through the work that they do.
3. Inspire, teach and prepare others to do the same.

What This Says About Youth Organizing

The power of the millenial generation is not that we have Facebook or that we know how to use it. It’s that growing up in a networked world is allowing us to imagine and equipping us to implement people-oriented coordination of real-world action at a massive scale. At the center of this story is that all of us – regardless of age – are creators, that we have the tools, the ability, and the skill to create beautiful outcomes that had seemed impossible through our coordination. We’re seeing the results start to emerge in the Arab Spring protests led by young people, which built off of the lessons from Serbia’s Otpur movement several years ago. Let’s not kid ourselves, overthrowing an oppressive regime that the vast majority already dislikes is far less complicated than reinventing the foundations of a fossil energy economy, but it’s certainly an impressive start.

Vast, decentralized networks of creative agents are effectively coordinating to achieve simple common goals in the form of either/or choices about how their societies will work. Vast decentralized networks of creative agents have also demonstrated their effectiveness at compiling and synthesizing and vast and complex volumes of knowledge and opinion at record speeds. What we have yet to create are vast and decentralized networks of creative agents effectively coordinating to achieve complex, multi-faceted, and interdependent society-changing goals that require both intense creativity and intense selective pressures for feasibility, scalability, replicability, and sustainability. These systems are emerging, and I believe that they will be necessary to solve problems at the magnitude of the climate and energy crisis.

The Summer of Solutions seeks to create the conditions for that system – thousands of super-empowered grassroots innovator-organizers who know how to create solutions and are able to communicate, coordinate, and synergize their work. In the spirit of the network, we trust that there are many others seeking to achieve the same end. We’re looking to work together – with you.

Now, instead of restoring his cuts, he is asking for 12 times as much money for nuclear boondoggles. Loans that the CBO reported that half of them are likely never to be paid back.  So, bailing out the nuclear industry to the tune of over $20 billion dollars in non-recoverable bailouts while not proving basic support to clean energy programs that actually are likely to be paid back and support good, green jobs.

Read this from last year:

Obama Talks Big About Clean Energy While Cash Stripped From Key Program – ABC News.
“While President Obama has touted his deep commitment to a clean energy industry, the administration has quietly drained more than half of the $6 billion allocated to a key renewable energy program and senior White House officials have proposed either fixing or scrapping one of the President’s most widely heralded initiatives involving solar and wind power.”

Then this now:

Obama Seeks to Expand Loan Guarantees for Reactors, Chu Says – Businessweek.
“The Obama administration will press ahead with efforts to expand loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors while investigating the failure of Japan’s power plants after an earthquake, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.

The U.S. Energy Department is seeking to add $36 billion in loan-guarantee authority to the program’s existing $18.5 billion, Chu said today at a House committee hearing. President Barack Obama asked lawmakers to expand the program in Obama’s February budget request…

Obama supports an expansion of nuclear power and increased loan guarantees, and “that position has not been changed,” Chu said. Energy officials “don’t believe there is any danger” posed by U.S. reactors, Chu said today.”

Got it? President Obama cut renewable energy loan guarantees, a critical clean energy investment program, in half, – by $3 billion dollars while now seeking to expand Nuclear energy loan guarantee programs by $36 billion dollars. That is an increase of twelve times! over what he left for clean energy.

Angry yet? I thought so.

I expect to get some crap about how nuclear power is awesome in my inbox, but right now, I am not interested in hearing it. All I have to say is that I thought President Obama and Chu were being tone deaf and short sighted when they came out ahead of the Deepwater disaster endorsing offshore oil drilling. Now, they have stripped renewable energy guarantees and are working to increase nuclear power loan guarantees in the wake of the largest nuclear disaster in modern history. Are they just trying to piss us off and lose the next election? Because, they are doing a heckuva job.