Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute.

Entire sets of assumptions, beliefs, and practices will need to be overturned if the United States is to build a sustainable economy in the decades ahead, according to a new report from the Worldwatch Institute, Creating Sustainable Prosperity in the United States: The Need for Innovation and Leadership. The report assesses the country’s environmental record and calls for a broad range of policy innovations in the areas of renewable and non-renewable resource use, waste and pollution, and population growth that would help boost the sustainability of the U.S. economy while maintaining people’s overall well-being and quality of life.

The report notes that the country has a long tradition of environmental leadership, dating back to President Theodore Roosevelt, who established the U.S. National Park Service in 1916. During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. became a world leader in environmental policy, establishing a series of progressive laws and institutions, including the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Yet U.S. leaders have lagged behind many other countries, including in Europe and Asia, in developing a more sustainable economic processes and energy infrastructure, according to the report. Although the technological and policy tools needed to create sustainable economic activity have advanced rapidly around the world, U.S. output continues to be bolstered by unsustainable practices such as closed loop recycling (recycling waste from one product to make another), heavy dependence on fossil fuels, disregard for renewable resources, and resource use that is strongly connected to economic growth.

“The United States once set the world standard in confronting its environmental problems—protecting wild lands, establishing an environmental protection agency, and acting assertively to limit pollution of all types,” noted Robert Engelman, Executive Director of Worldwatch. “Americans benefited economically and in many other ways from these efforts. Yet today the country’s government plays no role in global efforts to create sustainable societies. We need a powerful citizens’ movement to help policymakers see that any efforts to make the United States enduringly prosperous are doomed to fail so long as we forget that we are living on a finite planet and cannot change the laws of physics and biology to suit our ambitions.”

The report outlines a series of cogent and practicable policy measures that can be instituted today to put the United States on a more sustainable path. These include shifting from an income tax to a progressive consumption tax, creating more standard eco-labeling for products, encouraging more producer “take-back” opportunities, and promoting a more feasible renewable energy market. A deceleration of population growth will also make the creation of a sustainable economy far easier, the report notes.

Rising awareness of the environmental challenges facing our planet, as well as the focus on finding ways to bolster the American economy, presents policy makers with the opportunity to make important and far-reaching decisions. The question is whether the United States builds sustainable prosperity through prudent choices now, or declines into sustained impoverishment because it failed to steward its assets when it had the choice.

What do you think is the most important step governments can take to support sustainable economies?

Gary Gardner is a Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute. Jenna Banning is a research intern with the Nourishing the Planet project of the Worldwatch Institute.

For the press release on the report, visit Worldwatch Institute's Press Room.

For more on the importance of developing a green economy, see “Officials cite sustainable agriculture as key to UN Green Economy Initiative,” “Worldwatch report focuses on China’s green future”  and “Rio+20: Creating Green Economies to Eradicate Poverty.”

(Also at OC Progressive& Nevada Progressive)

Late last week, we found out that Senate Environment & Public Works (EPW) Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) wants to delay her committee's vote on the Senate climate & energy bill and move it to September. And furthermore, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) supports this move as he'll have more time to round up votes. However, we don't really know if this is good news or bad news.

The delay bodes ill for passing a climate bill this year.  It shows leaders are not confident they would have enough votes to pass the bill and want as much time as possible to rally support. Boxer also noted that many key senators with a role in crafting climate policy are also leading the debate over health care, another major congressional priority for this year.

[...] Several environmental groups have written in to say that they think today's announcement is good news for climate legislation.

"We don't think that this is a problem at all," said Josh Dorner, spokesman for Sierra Club. "In fact, we think it's a good thing. It's a huge organizing opportunity, both here in D.C. and in the field. It also shows they are taking the time to make some meaningful, positive changes to the bill."

Environmental Defense Fund was equally optimistic. "From our perspective, this is the right decision," said Tony Kreindler, media director for climate at EDF. "It gives senators more time to review and understand the historic bill just passed by the House. It signals a serious intent to seek agreements on key issues going forward. And it gives Boxer and her colleagues on both sides of the aisle more time to reach those agreements. After all, the chairman has the ability to move forward today if the goal were simply to push any bill through."

Honestly, I don't mind the delay that much... So long as this delay results in a stronger bill with more votes in time for the international climate change summit in Copenhagen this December. Let me explain my thoughts some more after the flip.

There's more...

Continuing with this weekend's close reading of the stimulus package, Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech made a great catch this week:

The text in the stimulus bill doesn't require decoupling per se in order to get funds, but requires the state governors to get certification from their respective commissions that the states in question will:

"...seek to implement...a general policy that ensures that utility financial incentives are aligned with helping their customers use energy more efficiently and that provide timely cost recovery and a timely earnings opportunity for utilities associated with cost-effective and verifiable efficiency savings, in a way that sustains or enhances utility customers' incentives to use energy more efficiently."

In short, the stimulus package asks the states which are accepting stimulus money to pretty-please think about decoupling.  Decoupling is a policy which allows state regulators to set the electricity rates for utilities with allowances for investments in energy efficiency and reasonable rates of return on those investments, thereby separating (or decoupling) the price of electricity from the demand.  Under a decoupling regime, utilities can make money while lowering electricity consumption; without it, utilities have a built-in incentive to encourage consumption, even to the point of overconsumption that leads to new power plant construction.

The text that made it into the law is weak - a watering-down of decoupling language inserted by Henry Waxman in late January - but it's something, and considering the federalist problem (utilities are typically regulated at the state or municipal level), it might be about as good as what we can expect, as Fehrenbacher explains.

Decoupling is a highly successful environmental responsibility policy, and its implementation in California over the past three decades has contributed to the slow-down in California energy usage - the average Californian now uses about 33% less electricity than the average American (PDF).  Energy innovators are very aware of the impact of California's decoupling policy, too - pretty much every energy startup presentation I've attended has a line along the lines of "we think we can get our kilowatt hour price down to here, which as you can see is impractical for most of the US market but is profitable in California...."  Particularly in the solar industry, the decoupling policy has been a tremendous incentive for clean energy.

We shouldn't be insensitive to the cost that decoupling might impose on low-income people, so decoupling should be paired with additional policies that allow low-income people to reduce their energy consumption along with everyone else - targeted tax credits and rebates to begin with, but also closer-to-home projects like the weatherization assistance program.  Congress will almost certainly revisit this issue in the midst of the budget debate and the next energy bill, and it should take the next step in promoting a decoupling policy that is friendly to low-income consumers.

There's more...

One of the lower-profile sub-plots within the stimulus package debate was about the use of open standards in the smart grid.  The package sets aside $4.5 billion for the smart grid.  Although that's only a fraction of the total investment needed to build the smart grid - perhaps as little as 5 or 10% - it's still a big chunk of change, and the strings attached to that money by Congress will make a big difference in the evolution of the new grid.  So it's no surprise that smart meter builders tried to weigh in on open standards earlier this month.  An early version of the House bill required that utilities must use an Internet-based open protocol (meaning IP, almost certainly); a later version required "Internet-based or other open protocols and standards if available and appropriate."  A group of electricity meter providers sent the Senate a letter complaining about the IP-only language, saying that it would interfere with existing projects.  As far as I can tell, the final language is actually a bit weaker than the flexible "IP or something else" provision (from page 30 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act):

OPEN PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS.--The Secretary shall require as a condition of receiving funding under this subsection that demonstration projects utilize open protocols and standards (including Internet-based protocols and standards) if available and appropriate.

Earlier this week, Secretary Chu said that he wants to start deploying smart grid standards, although his actual language left plenty of wiggle room on the question of IP versus other open standards.

Meanwhile, out in the field, the battle is already joined.  San Diego Gas and Electric announced earlier this month that it will start installing 2.3 million smart meters in its customers homes.  In a country with about 7 million smart meters in operation, that's a pretty hefty deployment.  The meters will be Itron OpenWay meters, built on the ZigBee standard (which is an alternative to IP); the rollout is expected in March of this year.  At around the same time, Google announced its PowerMeter project and eMeter announced a major new deal which will allow some Houston-area customers to better monitor their electricity consumption.

We are not far, I hope, from the point when smart grid technology becomes widely available - meaning not just that there are a lot of meters installed in a lot of homes, but also that the entry costs for small-scale entrepreneurs to build applications on top of the grid will be getting lower and lower.  As far as I can tell, there are no open source software projects for extracting data from smart meters, but smart meter start-up Tendril announced a new API for its products (which are, it appears, ZigBee-based) earlier this month.  Unfortunately, the API is currently only available to Tendril partners.  But I suspect that smart grid applications will open up significantly in the next year; I imagine that it won't be long before we see Facebook and iPhone applications for monitoring and calibrating residential electric consumption.

This is great news for the environment and the green economy, of course.  I also think it's great news for the progressive economy, because it means more opportunities for liberal entrepreneurs to profit from environmental protection, and more opportunities to cycle those profits through the progressive economy.

There's more...

I worked on Capitol Hill for a long time, and I do not consider myself naive about the inner workings of Washington. But even I was surprised by two revelations this week exposing the amount of money the oil industry is spending to buy political influence.

The first eye-opener came from recently released lobbying numbers. The OpenSecrets blog reported that the oil and gas industry poured $174 million into the political system in 2009. That's eight times more than the green groups.

What did the oil and gas industry get for its money? A handful of Senators who blocked all attempts by the Senate to pass a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill that would have made fossil fuel industries start cleaning up their global warming pollution.

This week's second revelation made that difference abundantly clear. Jane Mayer wrote aninvestigative piece in the New Yorker about the brothers David and Charles Koch who run Koch Industries -- the biggest corporation you've never heard of -- and who have spent more than $100 million on anti-government causes.

Koch Industries owns oil refineries and 4,000 miles of pipeline, and was named one of the top 10 air polluters in the nation in a 2010 UMass-Amherst report. The Kochs' political donations are often aimed at promoting their libertarian views, but they also directly benefit their own profit margins. They have donated millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that fight environmental regulation and seed doubt about climate science. In fact, a Greenpeace report called them a "kingpin of climate science denial." And though green groups tend to paint ExxonMobil as the worst of the worst when it comes to lobbying against climate legislation, Koch outspent even ExxonMobil.

One of David Koch's pet projects is the group Americans for Prosperity, a group he founded and funds but positions as a grassroots movement. An ad for one of its training sessions for Tea Party activists says, "The voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests. But you can do something about it."

But when Americans for Prosperity hosts at least 80 events protesting climate legislation, is it really acting in the interest of average Americans or the interest of oil industry donors?

When it funds an attack ad against Representative Betsey Markey from Colorado because she supported climate legislation last summer that would have brought 30,000 jobs to her state, who is it benefiting?

And when the group pledges to spend an additional $45 million before the midterm elections, is that money really coming from grassroots activists, or from deep corporate pockets? These fat cats pretend to fraternize with the ordinary folks who dangle tea bags from their tri-cornered hats, but, in fact, they are just using activists to put a populist face on their industry agenda.

Manipulating other people's fears about the economy when you are a billionaire -- I would call that the depth of cynicism. But considering those billionaires are getting in the way of climate solutions, clean energy and green jobs in America; I have to instead call it dangerous.