Let’s consider the leading Senate advocates of nuclear energy in the current climate legislation debate (and we’ll exclude Republicans who would under no circumstances support such legislation). Topping that list would be Graham, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) — all potential key votes for a climate bill. What do these senators have in common? They all represent states among those 19 that couldn’t support themselves with renewables. (Kerry’s Massachusetts, which could produce 105 percent of its energy demands from renewables, just barely exceeds that threshold.) It’s not hard to understand, then, why they’d turn to the other clean (but non-renewable) energy source.

Interestingly, none of the top five Senate recipients of campaign donations from the Nuclear Energy Institute in the 2010 campaign cycle — and just one of the top ten — comes from any of these 19 states. Perhaps as the nuclear debate comes into focus, the nuclear industry will shift its targets.

Here’s the map from the New Rules Project:

Sen. Jim Inhofe has called global warming a "hoax." (WDCpix)

Can targeted federal investments in green energies and technologies create jobs and pull the United States out of its current economic funk?

That’s the message coming from a growing number of economists and Washington policymakers, who are urging Congress to make green investments a focus of legislation — expected to be debated next month — that would inject hundreds of billions of dollars into the flailing economy. Not only would such investments, as part of of a new stimulus package, boost jobs and drive development in the short-term, these experts say, but they would go a long way to make the United States more competitive in the decades to come.

Illustration by:Matt Mahurin

The issue has been a thorny one in Washington, where many Republicans — and a few well-placed Democrats — view environmental protectionism as a threat to economic progress. Indeed, the Bush administration has been a leading proponent of this theory. In 2008 alone, the White House has pushed efforts to expand offshore oil drilling, tap Western oil-shale reserves and permit mountain-top miners to destroy miles of valley streams — all done to relieve burdens on various traditional industries.

But now — with the economy in turmoil, oil prices in dramatic flux and lawmakers coming to accept the realities of the global warming crisis — many experts argue that the best way to tackle these problems is with an enormous federal investment in green industries. That transition would not only wean the country from an addiction to filthy fossil fuels, it would cut now-vital oil imports from the volatile Middle East. An increasing number of experts contend that the environmental-technology industry will be the next big boom, creating enormous economic growth for those countries at its forward edge. As lawmakers mull another economic stimulus package, these sources say, renewable technologies should be central to any plan they develop.

Energy efficiency projects, like retrofitting existing buildings, would be a good place to start, according to Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He pointed out that those projects can begin immediately, helping the nearly 400,000 construction workers estimated to have lost their jobs in the last year.

“The first priority for now, in terms of short-term big kick in the energy area, is energy efficiency,” Pollin told the House Education and Labor Committee last Friday. “You’ll get the most jobs. It’ll be done fast. The technologies are there. And you will fight global warming. You will increase energy independence. You will create a lever against future rises in the price of oil.”

Daniel C. Esty, an environmental economist at Yale Law School, agreed, saying there are enormous opportunities to outfit old structures with better windows, insulations, water heaters and other technologies. “There’s an economic logic in improving energy efficiency in almost every building in America,” Esty said.

According to Pollin’s analysis, every $1 million invested in the green sector would create 16.7 domestic jobs. By contrast, Pollin found, the same $1 million in tax cuts returns 14.0 jobs; for military programs the return is 11.0 jobs, and for oil and natural gas development the figure drops to 4.4 jobs.

The reason for the sharp disparities, Pollin said, is two-fold. First, green businesses tend to be more labor intensive than most other industries. And second, the money tends to stay in the country, as opposed to moving abroad for outsourced services and imported goods.

Environmentalists hope that message reverberates in Washington. “For a long time, people on the right made it seem like environmental protection and job creation were competing objectives,” said Nick Berning, spokesman for Friends of the Earth, an environmental group. “It’s just not true.”

Slowly, this message is sinking in. At the start of this month, as part of its $700-billion bank bailout, Congress extended popular tax breaks on renewable energies like wind and solar. Still, many economists — including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke — agree that, despite the bailout effort to get the banks lending again, Washington should provide another Main Street infusion to create jobs and prop up states struggling with budget shortfalls.

Ron Blackwell, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, argues that an effective stimulus bill would have to be in the $300-billion range. “If housing prices continue to fall like the way they’re falling,” he said, “[and] people continue to lose the jobs the way they’re doing, then all of the effort that Congress made to stabilize our credit markets by committing this [bailout] money will be lost.”

Last month, House Democrats passed a $58-billion spending package containing a number of provisions to increase green-industry funding. Senate Republicans killed the measure, which the White House had threatened to veto in any case. Most of the GOP opposition, though, was directed at other provisions, including new funding for infrastructure projects and state Medicaid programs.

With the economy still in trouble, Democratic leaders stress the urgency of returning to some new stimulus bill. “It’s clear that it has to be done,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Cal.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, “and it’s going to be done by the Congress in relatively short order.”

Upper-chamber Democrats are pushing for green investments as well. In a speech from the campaign trail Tuesday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) blasted the Bush administration for “years of denial and delay” on the green economy front — a delay allowing countries in both Europe and Asia to take the lead on environmental innovations.

“There are 750,000 green jobs in the U.S. today,” Kerry said. “In 30 years we can have six times that many. The choice is simple: we can be left behind, or we can lead.”

Yet Congress shares responsibility for the country’s slow adaption to green-industry trends. For decades, for example, the Michigan delegation, led by 27-term Rep. John Dingell (D), defeated efforts to increase Detroit’s fuel economy standards. This week, the Bush administration announced that it may use some of the $700 billion bailout to help the Big Three automakers, who are failing, largely from business plans that focused on gas-guzzling SUVs. Meanwhile, as climate change became more pronounced in recent years, the Senate’s most powerful voice on the environment for much of the last decade was James Inhofe (R-Okl.), a conservative who says global warming is “a hoax.”

Still, the green-economy push, once limited to environmentalist circles, is reaching wider audiences. Perhaps most prominent, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has evolved into one of the country’s loudest proponents for green investments. “When this bailout is over,” Friedman wrote on Sept. 28, “we need the next president — this one is wasted — to launch an E.T., energy technology, revolution with the same urgency as this bailout. Otherwise, all we will have done is bought ourselves a respite, but not a future.”

There is increasing evidence that Congress must step in with a stimulus plan. The nation’s unemployment rate is 6.1 percent — up 1.2 percent since January — and many experts expect that number to rise to at least 8 percent by the end of next year. Housing prices have plunged 20 percent from their peak, and are expected to fall another 10-15 percent in coming months. Home equity has evaporated with the sinking housing market, leading to a slump in retail sales. Home foreclosures are up 71 percent from a year ago. And consumer confidence is at its lowest point since records have been kept.

Democrats still hope to pass their stimulus bill when they return to Washington for a lame duck session after the elections. Those efforts seemed to get a boost Monday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) announced that President George W. Bush has voiced willingness to compromise on legislation. “Now we must find what is both fiscally responsible and politically possible,” Pelosi said.

But if Friday’s House hearing was any indication, that might be tougher than she hopes. No Republican even bothered to show up.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) recently said that Democrats would be willing to delay the legislation until January rather than settle for a weak bill. With both unemployment and foreclosure rates on the rise, however, lawmakers might not have the luxury of postponement. Indeed, experts are warning that time is of the essence — both for the economy and the environment.

“The green sector is the future of this economy,” Pollin said. “We may not have any future unless we build that green sector starting now.”

The stocks of alternative-energy companies, which had enjoyed boom times, have been slashed.

In the last three months, according to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, renewable-energy stocks have dropped 45 percent, according to New Energy Finance, a London-based consultancy. But this could change.

Congress’ renewal of federal tax credits for solar- and wind-energy companies a couple weeks ago is expected to attract tens of billions of dollars in new private investment.  But it’s unclear what will happen to these companies if tighter credit standards dry up bank lending. Green businesses that use newer technologies have the most to lose because they may entail more risk in the eyes of bankers.

I’ll be reporting more on the economic future of renewable energy. Meantime, green businesses still say that while there’s a lot to worry about, there’s also a lot to be hopeful for.

But green business owners know that they face obstacles. This week, E&ETV looked at some of them in an interview with Natural Resources and Defense Council energy analyst Jim Presswood.

E&ETV’s Monica Trauzzi asked how the financial crisis will affect solar and wind industries. Although some businesses could feel the credit pinch as banks continue to struggle, Presswood said he thinks the rapidly growing solar and wind industries could help pull the economy out of its doldrums, especially as Americans look for alternatives to fossil fuels. The extension of the tax credits means that private investment will still be attracted to clean energy, Pressman added.

Trauzzi also asked how a Democratic-controlled Congress could battle over tax credits for solar and wind power for almost two years yet move quickly to lift a 30-year-old ban on offshore oil drilling.

I expected Presswood to say that the Democrats are a bunch of weanies. Instead, he talked about some of the legislative politics at play — with fights between the Senate and House, Democrats and Republicans and members trying to please commercial interests, including oil and gas companies.

Ultimately, the political game-playing resulted in the lifting of the ban on offshore drilling becoming “must-pass legislation” and the renewable-energy tax credits becoming “a vigorous game of ping pong.”

Presswood believes that alternative energy will receive even more attention in 2009 under a new president, and with that knowledge, green companies can more comfortably focus on growing.

Solar panels (Flickr: Chandra Marsono)

Dennis Markatos-Soriano has been worried. And so are, probably, the hundreds of thousands of other workers in the renewable-energy sector.

Markatos-Soriano, an employee of Carolina Solar Energy, and his fellow clean-energy workers could lose their jobs if the existing federal tax credits for wind and solar energy companies are allowed to expire. He works as a campus outreach coordinator for his company, which distributes solar power.

On his blog for the public-radio business show “Marketplace,” Markatos-Soriano echoed the fears throughout his industry. In a post titled “Congress: Please save my Main St. job, not that fat cat’s Wall St. job,” he wrote:

I got that call today.

The one no one wants to hear from their CEO — that it’s possible the company I work for will run out of money for my part-time position and have to let me go. But, unlike some investment bank officials who got a similar call, our solar energy company didn’t do anything wrong.

We are just prisoner to the waiting game that Congress keeps us in by not renewing the green energy tax credits that help our country deal with the energy crisis…And now many members of Congress are instead considering bailing out a financial industry that has acted recklessly and twisted rules to gain tremendous, unsustainable profits.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But last night, the Senate tacked the renewable energy bill extending the tax credits onto the $700 billion financial bailout plan that congressional leaders hope to pass by the week’s end. Leaders in the Senate voted to pass the bailout bill, along with the tax credits for solar and wind power. Now the entire package is scheduled for a vote by the House on Friday.

All year, the Senate and the House have been battling with different versions of this tax bill.. This week is the last chance for Congress to save the green economy from an uncertain future, according to employees and representatives of the solar and wind industries.

If the tax credits aren’t renewed, 116,000 jobs and $19 billion in private investment could be lost through 2009 (pdf here). With the country’s economy faltering, unemployment rising and energy prices wildly fluctuating, representatives of the solar and wind industries say they would be surprised if lawmakers let a “bright spot” in the economy fall to the wayside.

There’s been a lot of talk about creating green jobs this election cycle. But the reality is that many such jobs already exist because the renewable-energy industry is rapidly growing.

Solar installations grew by 40 percent in 2006, and by an additional 40 percent last year. And wind-powered generating capacity jumped 45 percent in 2007.

According to green workers and trade associations, this growth is the product of the federal tax credits for renewable energies. Allowing the credits to expire. they say, would result in huge layoffs, strain the budgets of green companies or put them out of business.

Markatos-Soriano talked to TWI about the fate of his job at Carolina Solar Energy. He works with universities in North Carolina to hook them up to solar-powered electrical grids at no cost to the institutions.

“We’ve used a financing model that includes the federal tax credit and other incentives to sell electricity directly to the grid,” he said. “So, my job is definitely at risk.”

As for his company if the tax credits went away?

“It would have to get creative,” he said. “I had a conversation with the CEO last week, and [he wanted to push ahead] but the business model is really set to work with tax credits.”

Carolina Solar isn’t the only company running into problems because Congress has not renewed the credits. A solar installation company in Revere, Pa., lost a $300,000 project, according to the Solar Energy Industries Assn., or SEIA, the industry trade association.

In Merrimack, N.H., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of solar-panel equipment told SEIA, according to the trade group’s report, that it would build its next factory in Asia if the tax credits expire.

And in San Diego, Calif., a solar company estimated that its revenues would drop by $60 million in 2009, and $90 million in 2010, if the tax credits die. The company told SEIA that it would have to lay off about 30 workers, starting in 2009, and postpone plans to expand its workforce by 30 to 55 employees. (SEIA did not publish the names of these companies in its study — pdf here.)

SEIA spokeswoman Monique Hanis said in an interview that she and her colleagues were astonished that it had taken Congress so long to extend these tax credits — it has been in the works for almost two years — since they face little opposition from either Democrats or Republicans. “Honestly, we are really surprised,” said Hanis. “We saw huge momentum in both chambers [of Congress]. …. There’s huge public support to move into renewable energy — and solar in particular.”

There’s another reason Hanis is surprised: The renewable energy bill that would prolong the tax credits “won’t cost the government anything” because the bill includes revenue offsets. House and Senate Republicans introduced incentive provisions that are expected to generate enough revenue to offset the $70 billion in tax credits.

Some solar companies have told SEIA that they would move their factories and jobs overseas if Congress fails to act. That would hurt the global competitiveness of the U.S. renewable-energy business.

“[The industry] is sort of on the tipping point of really expanding with a lot of investment from global companies,” Hanis said. “[Renewing the tax credits] would signal to global investors that the U.S. is committed to renewable energy.”

The American Wind Energy Assn. paints a similar picture for the wind-power industry if the tax credits for wind energy expire.

All the new projects planned for next year would be “in limbo,” says AWEA spokeswoman Christine Real de Azua. “Come January,” she said, “new projects will come to a full stop, with construction jobs stopping, contracts being on hold, and increased costs for the companies. And with each month that goes by, things will get worse and worse.”

Real de Azua says such a bleak scenario is not far-feteched. When the credits were allowed to expire in 1999, 2001 and 2003, “new [wind] installations declined by as much as 70 to 90 percent in the following year.”

But not everyone thinks that the end of the tax credits would be the end of the world as far as wind and solar energy is concerned. A wind-turbine-blade manufacturer for General Electric told The Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson that the industries will likely roll with the punches.

Richard Morrison, chief executive of Molded Fiber Glass Companies had this to say:

The failure of the U.S. Congress to extend the production credit is not a good thing. Now how bad of a thing is it? It’s hard to predict because things are a little bit different now in 2008 than back in the 1990s when it was a fledgling industry. There is a real business here and a big business and a growing business.

For one thing, according to Morrison, the cost of wind-turbine technology has come down. For another, states will continue to provide incentives even though the federal government doesn’t.

Dept. of Energy solar expert Peter Wong, who works in the agency’s Energy Information Administration, agrees that state incentives would be key in sustaining renewable-energy businesses if the credits aren’t renewed.

“I would say that the industry is not going to collapse because there are still some state incentives in place,” Wong said. For example, solar and winds programs in California and Texas are bolstered by significant state incentives.

In addition, he says that the absence of the federal renewable energy tax credits could drive companies to develop more efficient technology more quickly to bolster their bottom lines.

Opponents in Congress have another reason for voting against the tax-credit extension. During negotiations in June, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued that the tax credits for wind and solar power won’t reduce the cost of gasoline because it doesn’t focus on increasing the country’s oil supply. “This bill isn’t a serious response to high gas prices,” McConnell said. “It’s just a gimmick.”

Many people working in the renewable-energy industry say companies won’t require tax credits forever–they are just short-term insurance to sustain the boom.

“Solar will get better,” said Markatos-Soriano. “But at this point, the technology needs a boost from federal and state policies that can help [the companies] grow — not only to provide a great deal of energy and reduce the use of fossil fuels but to provide good jobs.”

The DNC Committee hired a “director of greening,” Andrea Robinson, to cut down on waste, track and offset carbon emissions and promote local food.

Many attending the convention are looking for this kind of action on a larger scale. Americans waiting for comprehensive energy solutions hope Sen. Obama will address their concerns in his speech this week — and then by actually taking some action…whether he wins the presidency or continues his work in the Senate.