Apollo Alliance

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1, 2008 – The Apollo Alliance today introduced a comprehensive national economic strategy, founded on the principles of clean energy and good jobs, to chart a promising path to new prosperity through an American landscape buffeted by high energy prices, stagnant wages, widespread foreclosures, institutional collapses, and dangerously warming temperatures.

The carefully constructed plan, The New Apollo Program: An Economic Strategy for American Prosperity, was prepared over the last year by a coalition of experts from business, labor, the environmental, and social justice communities. The title was inspired by the Apollo space program, in which the United States embraced a similarly ambitious national purpose to surmount a formidable technological challenge within a decade. The plan calls for investing $500 billion over the next ten years on specific steps for generating clean power, improving energy conservation and efficiency, cutting energy bills, restoring America’s technological and industrial preeminence, and creating 5 million high-quality jobs.

The New Apollo Program : Apollo Alliance.

We’ve been in the wilderness of Conservative nonsense for so long it’s feels surprising to find that there are so many well developed alternatives. The Apollo Group is a great example. The energy and climate problems are closely intertwined; so is the solution.

I wouldn’t want to draw the parallels between FDR and Obama too closely– there’s no great depression yet– but it does seem that his job in the next several years is to try to save Capitalism from itself. Our job, I think, is to be as informed as possible about the sources of these ideas.