Democratize the Grid.

• Position: Vox Populist

The Bible tells us that on the Sixth Day, God created man, allowing him to live in the lush garden and be steward of the whole Earth. But God's great mistake on that day was failing to demand a security deposit.

At last, though, humankind seems to grasp the fact that we're perilously close to environmental catastrophe, and governments around the world are beginning to respond. A green transformation is under way as growing majorities of people demand everything flora strict regulation of climate-change pollutants to aggressive development of a new clean-energy economy.

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In the past few years, freelance inventors, small companies, co-ops, professors, backyard mechanics, and a few mad scientists have made tremendous strides in the development of alternative fuel technologies. These technologies are already cheaper than fossil fuels when we factor in the tremendous savings they provide in the health and environmental costs we are now paying for oil and coal.

The fossil fuel lobbyists wail that renewables will hurt America's workers by eliminating jobs in oil refineries, strip mines, etc. "Save the workers," they cry! Such a show of compassion for labor might be heart warming if these same corporate interests had not spent the past couple of decades ruthlessly slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs, while relentlessly busting the wages, benefits, and unions of the declining workforce that remains.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Pew foundation found that clean energy jobs grew nearly two and a hall times faster than those produced by all other sectors. Green energy is labor-intensive, employing not only engineers and scientists, bur also huge numbers of skilled steelworkers, machinists, electricians, pipe fitters, operating engineers, sheetmetal workers, carpenters, and laborers.

This new energy can create a full-employment economy, including training and work programs for unemployed and low-income folks in our inner cities and rural areas.

To his credit, President Obama has boosted spending on alternatives. But the United States still invests less in renewables than most of the nations of Europe, including small ones like Denmark. And China already has higher fuel efficiency than we're supposed to have in a decade.

But chanting "USA...