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In February of this year, the United States Congress enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the stimulus program, which has provided an unprecedented amount of money for a wide range of investments, from energy-efficiency building retrofits and weatherization to renewable energy projects.Many cities across the country are wondering how to access these funds, what they are for and how much paperwork is involved in applying for them.
According to the American City Business Journal, just this week California launched the largest state-sponsored green jobs training program in the United States. Stimulus funds will help pay for the $75 million Clean Energy Workforce Training Program, which will train 20,000 workers as part of an effort to build a workforce to help the state meet goals for renewable energy development, green construction and a reduction of climate-change effects.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Inspector General Laura Chick, who has the daunting task of overseeing and tracking the disbursement of federal stimulus funds in California. She will also ensure that there is transparency in the spending of those funds. PMC recently posed a series of questions to Ms. Chick regarding her role in monitoring stimulus funds. The questions and her responses are listed below.
Q. How will you make the federal stimulus money distribution more transparent?A. President Obama has made it clear that every taxpayer dollar spent on our economic recovery must be subject to unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. This includes that the dollars are awarded in a fair and open process and the recipients and uses for the money are reported clearly, accurately and in a timely manner.
Governor Schwarzenegger appointed me as Inspector General to further push for transparency of the stimulus spending here in the state. The state’s recovery.ca.gov Web site has projects and recipients listed by county and will soon list by city and congressional district as well.
Q. What is your mission as Inspector General of California?
A. My mission is clear and simple. As Inspector General it is my job to deter, detect and disclose any waste, fraud or abuse in the over $50 billion of stimulus dollars coming to California.
Q. What do you see as the biggest challenge for California with regard to the federal stimulus funds?
A. The FBI has warned that 7-10% of the stimulus dollars could be lost to fraud. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 17% was lost to fraud. That is totally unacceptable.
I am partnering with Federal Inspectors General, US Attorneys, the FBI and District Attorneys to put measures in place on the front end to prevent fraud. To that end, I organized, with these organizations, the first comprehensive fraud awareness training for the stimulus dollars. We are holding these trainings across the state for thousands of state and local agencies.
When there is fraud, you can bet that we will be hitting it early, hitting it hard and hitting it publicly. If anyone is thinking of messing with these precious dollars, know that we will find you and bring you to justice
Q. Do you see a way for California to become more economically balanced?
A. I am always hopeful. Out of crisis comes opportunity. The stimulus dollars give us an opportunity to show the public that we can do it right. By spending these dollars wisely and well, we can begin restoring the public’s trust.
Biography, Laura Chick,
Inspector General of California
Shortly after President Obama signed the Federal Recovery Act, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger turned to Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick. He tapped her to be the first-in-the-nation Inspector General to oversee the more than $50 billion in economic stimulus dollars that California is receiving.
A trained social worker, Ms. Chick received her bachelor’s degree in history from UCLA and a master’s in social work from USC. Her experience includes managing a family-owned retail business.
Chick first entered elected office in 1993 when she defeated a 16-year incumbent for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council in the west San Fernando Valley. Seven months after taking office, her district was devastated by the Northridge earthquake. Chick went into action working around the clock, an ever-present figure in the toppled neighborhoods. She used the crisis as an opportunity to rebuild in a smarter and better way, creating what is now a thriving redevelopment zone with shops, cafes and a legitimate theater converted from an X rated movie house.
In 2001 Chick was elected City Controller, becoming the first woman to hold citywide office in Los Angeles. As Controller, she was the Chief Auditor and Chief Accountant of the City working to ensure its fiscal health. In her nearly eight years in this office, Chick released over 170 audits and reports exposing a wide range of problems throughout city government. As the taxpayers’ watchdog, she rooted out waste and fraud and championed innovation and new ideas to challenge the status quo.
Her work recently won her the prestigious ProPublica Prize for Investigative Governance. For more information about Laura N. Chick, please visit the Inspector General's Web site.
On September 8 and 9, PMC will be blogging from the 6th Annual California Climate Change Symposium at the Sacramento Convention Center. This year's symposium, hosted by the California Energy Commission and Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program, is entitled "The Future is Now: Mitigation and Adaptation Research in California." Scientists from around the globe will gather to present the cutting-edge findings that shape our climate change policy and program decisions in California. PMC will be blogging several times a day on presentation findings and their applicability to local governments. Among the many great presentations, you can look forward to learning about the following:
- The Interactions Between Science and Policy – Chairman Karen Douglas (CEC)
- A Perspective from Senator Pavley – Senator Fran Pavley (California State Senate)
- Climate Change Adaptation in the Upcoming IPCC Assessment – Prof. Chris Field (Chair of the IPCC Working Group II)
- Climate and Wine Grape Phenology in Napa Valley – Kimberly Cahill (University of California, Davis)
- Using Future Climate Projections to Support Water Resources Decision Making in California – Francis Chung (California Department of Water Resources)
- Meeting California's Long-Term GHG Reduction Goals – Snuller Price (Energy and Environmental Economics)
- Adaptation Planning in the San Francisco Bay – Steve Goldbeck (Bay Conservation and Development Commission)
- Methodology and Preliminary Findings for Potential Threats to Power Plants and Transmission Lines in California – Jayant Sathaye and Larry Dale (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Jillian Rich is a member of PMC’s Climate Change Services team. Check the Carbon Conscious Web site Tuesday, 9/8 and Wednesday, 9/9 for blog updates. Feel free to send your questions or comments directly to Jillian at jrich@pmcworld.com.
*This article was derived from an article titled McKinsey must-read: U.S. can meet entire 2020 emissions target with efficiency and cogeneration while lowering the nation’s energy bill $700 billion! on the Climate Progress Web site (climateprogress.org) posted by Joseph Romm on Wednesday, July 29, 2009, at 1:34 p.m.
Over the past few years, the McKinsey Global Institute has consistently documented how an aggressive energy efficiency strategy significantly lowers the cost of climate action.
Most recently, they released a comprehensive analysis of the United States’ energy efficiency opportunity titled "Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy." The main point in this report is that if the United States could get serious about working toward energy efficiency, whether through passing legislation or mandates (such as the Waxman-Markey climate bill), reduction of existing emissions would be economically feasible and provide significant savings for the public and businesses.
McKinsey has a new cost-curve of efficiency measures:
The width of each column on the chart represents the amount of efficiency potential (in trillion BTUs) found in that group of measures. The height of each bar corresponds to the average annualized cost (in dollars per million BTU of potential).
McKinsey explains that these measures, if fully enacted over the next decade, would save 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, which is 17% of U.S. CO2 emissions in 2005. Put simply, the entire 2020 target in the Waxman-Markey climate bill could be met with energy efficiency at a net savings to U.S. consumers and businesses of $700 billion. In addition, McKinsey’s analysis doesn’t include the transportation sector, which would be responsible for huge savings opportunities if legislation was enacted.
The gist of McKinsey’s work, as summarized by green blogger Joseph Romm, is that energy efficiency can offer a huge, low-cost energy resource for the U.S. economy, but only if we can come up with a comprehensive and innovative approach to unlock it. In explaining the conclusion of their work, McKinsey states, "Significant and persistent barriers will need to be addressed at multiple levels to stimulate demand for energy efficiency and manage its delivery across more than 100 million buildings and literally billions of devices. If executed at scale, a holistic approach would yield gross energy savings worth more than $1.2 trillion, well above the $520 billion needed through 2020 for upfront investment in efficiency measures (not including program costs). Such a program is estimated to reduce end-use energy consumption in 2020 by 9.1 quadrillion BTUs, roughly 23 percent of projected demand, potentially abating up to 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gases annually."
The United States is just starting to tap into the energy efficiency opportunity. McKinsey has a separate, shorter report released just last month on the stimulus, "Energy: Investing in Efficiency," which finds "nearly $100 billion in new spending on energy-related projects will have a huge impact."
The new McKinsey report provides an excellent explanation of the barriers to efficiency and how to address them, which is summarized in the following figure:
What is timely in light of all of this research and information is that the Department of Energy just allocated $10.5 million in competitive grant funding which is available to cities to prepare energy assurance and reliability plans. This funding is made available through the Local Energy Assurance Planning (LEAP) initiative as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
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