Upcoming Book Salon: David Goldstein’s “Saving Energy, Growing Jobs”

Goldstein: Saving Energy Growing Jobs

Sunday afternoon’s Book Salon (link here) features David B. Goldstein’s "Saving Energy, Growing Jobs: How Environmental Protection Promotes Economic Growth, Competition, Profitability and Innovation." It will be hosted by John Wilson, a long-time official from the California Energy Commission (CEC) and expert in energy efficiency. Their 30-year collaboration is largely responsible for California’s success with energy efficiency standards. You won’t want to miss this Salon.

David Goldstein is the Energy Program Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and a MacArthur (“genius award”) Fellow; he’s long been one of the nation’s preeminent energy and environmental experts. Part of David’s work has focused on convincing government and business leaders that the widely-held assumption of a conflict between economic growth and jobs versus environmental and energy regulation is false, and in Saving Energy, Growing Jobs, he meticulously lays out the evidence to prove it.

John Wilson is Director of the buildings program at the Energy Foundation in San Francisco. For 30 years he was the Policy Advisor for several CEC commissioners (including the inimitable national treasure, Art Rosenfeld) and two CEC chairmen; we were colleagues during the CEC’s first two decades. John has advised governments from here to Kyrgyzstan.

David is writing his next book, Invisible Energy, due this Spring, and in the meantime he’s working to shape the Obama energy efficiency and global warming initiatives. We’ll get a chance Sunday to ask David and John about how they see that effort developing.

FDL asked John to host David Goldstein’s Book Salon because of the long and highly successful collaboration between David/NRDC and the CEC folks who were tasked with setting energy efficiency standards for new buildings and appliances, as well as getting California’s investor-owned utilities to redirect billions of dollars towards energy conservation efforts.

And what a collaboration. California’s regulatory agencies would develop draft efficiency standards, NRDC would push to make them tougher (which we did), and David would supply economic and technical expert testimony to prove the standards were both technically feasible and economically cost-effective. Wilson pushed from the top and helped manage the politics. Then David and John (and NRDC and CEC lawyers) would team up to get the federal DOE to take it national. You can see some of the results in these charts, showing California’s success in stopping the growth in per capita electricity consumption and reducing average refrigerator energy use, even as refrigerators became larger with more features:

But that’s just part of this amazing story. David Goldstein and John Wilson have been on the front lines of energy efficiency theory and practice for over 30 years; they have more war stories and unexpected victories than you can imagine. And they know how to get stuff done. So don’t miss the opportunity to tap into their experience Sunday afternoon, 2:00 p.m. Pacific.