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The article discusses re-branding the clean energy industry so it is as American as the interstate highway system and the jobs that it provides are as valuable

The article discusses re-branding the clean energy industry so it is as American as the interstate highway system and the jobs that it provides are as valuable as those in the automotive or coal mining sectors but didn't go so far as to suggest what that branding could be. A television ad campaign showing lots of blue and white collar workers at solar farms, wind farms, and hydro plants performing various maintenance, construction, and engineering activities might help more than the shots of wilderness and nature that seem to be designed to appeal to environmentalists more than the average joe. need a slogan and an audio signature (a la intel bong or netflix drum) and clean green power could become the engine powering America's future!

Brakenshire 8y ago
Very good point, the political power of coal seems to be as much about cultural concepts of masculinity as anything else. It already employs many fewer people than alternative technogies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-beats-coal-on-u-s-jobs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-bea... I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. At the least solar and wind need to be seen as rugged. Maybe they should also play up scale, the latest offshore wind turbines, for instance, are absolutely massive.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cpeterso 8y ago
  > I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. For example, see the attitudes around "Rollin' Coal". Practitioners cite "American freedom" and a stand against "rampant environmentalism" as reasons for coal rolling (aka "Prius repellent"). I'm not sure what argument one could make to change a coal roller's mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Appeal to masculinity. "Real men" maximize horsepower, and coal rolling reduces horsepower.
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    Someone who's gone to the trouble of modifying their vehicle in that manner may be beyond the point of reasonable discussion. On the other hand, that's likely to be a pretty small proportion of people, overall.
    - 51lver 8y ago
      You could certainly appeal to their appreciation for reliability. Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain? The unreliability of the emissions gear is usually what comes up when I talk to diesel folks. Rolling coal is a fun extra for them. Just musing now, but the diesel guys today seem to say a lot of the same things the gas guys said in the 80s with their EGRs and cats and vacuum lines galore under the hood destroying their reliability. Gas got variable timing and direct injection, and is no longer so fragile. Maybe there's some room left for innovation there, maybe not.
      - mitchty 8y ago
        > Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain? Yes, you need to keep it clean, drag affects all things equally, and dirty anything means more drag.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Jail.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
cpeterso 8y ago
For example, the phrase "Don't Mess with Texas" originated from a 1985 anti-littering marketing campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas > In 1985 the Texas Department of Transportation asked Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M to create a slogan for an anti-littering campaign. McClure said that "bubbas in pickup trucks" who regularly littered beer cans and other items out of vehicle windows and ordinary Texans who believed that littering was a "God-given right" were targets of the advertising campaign. ... McClure recalled that "The crowd was sprinkled with 'Keep America Beautiful' and 'Keep Texas Beautiful' folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males." McClure added that "The 'Keep Texas Beautiful' lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'
floatrock 8y ago
So first, the author Jigar Shah is a heavy-hitter in the energy industry and knows what he's talking about. He founded SunEdison in the early 2000's and popularized solar-as-a-service PPA's (SunEdison pays the upfront capital costs to install solar on your roof and you pay it back by paying them for the electricity you consume at lower prices than the utility but still high enough to pay back with margins). Today he runs a big cleantech investment firm. But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example. A different rebranding angle that people are talking about now is just pure cost. Most of the new energy generation capacity added in 2018 has been renewable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-sources-account-for-most-new-u-s-power-capacity/#6d92a86e5971 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-so... This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country. This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...) Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
look no longer, when can I start? off-shore triple-damage elbow-grease tidal wave sooperpower merciless monkey wrenched czochralsi silicon titty solar panels full frontal 24/7 double penetration doctor x' geothermal energy strike-breaking conflict mineralized all-american circumcized powerwalls Mach-4 Modern Times side winder electrical wind mills National Park flooding blue-collar nine-to-five hydroelectric damnation brutal triangle trade carbon credit master race cards storm trooper deployed stars and stripes space shades high-maintenance super cool transmission lines soundtrack: https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA

Brakenshire 8y ago

Very good point, the political power of coal seems to be as much about cultural concepts of masculinity as anything else. It already employs many fewer people than alternative technogies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-beats-coal-on-u-s-jobs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-bea... I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. At the least solar and wind need to be seen as rugged. Maybe they should also play up scale, the latest offshore wind turbines, for instance, are absolutely massive.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cpeterso 8y ago
> I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. For example, see the attitudes around "Rollin' Coal". Practitioners cite "American freedom" and a stand against "rampant environmentalism" as reasons for coal rolling (aka "Prius repellent"). I'm not sure what argument one could make to change a coal roller's mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Appeal to masculinity. "Real men" maximize horsepower, and coal rolling reduces horsepower.
- mikepurvis 8y ago
  Someone who's gone to the trouble of modifying their vehicle in that manner may be beyond the point of reasonable discussion. On the other hand, that's likely to be a pretty small proportion of people, overall.
  - 51lver 8y ago
    You could certainly appeal to their appreciation for reliability. Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain? The unreliability of the emissions gear is usually what comes up when I talk to diesel folks. Rolling coal is a fun extra for them. Just musing now, but the diesel guys today seem to say a lot of the same things the gas guys said in the 80s with their EGRs and cats and vacuum lines galore under the hood destroying their reliability. Gas got variable timing and direct injection, and is no longer so fragile. Maybe there's some room left for innovation there, maybe not.
    - mitchty 8y ago
      > Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain? Yes, you need to keep it clean, drag affects all things equally, and dirty anything means more drag.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Jail.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

cpeterso 8y ago

For example, the phrase "Don't Mess with Texas" originated from a 1985 anti-littering marketing campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas > In 1985 the Texas Department of Transportation asked Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M to create a slogan for an anti-littering campaign. McClure said that "bubbas in pickup trucks" who regularly littered beer cans and other items out of vehicle windows and ordinary Texans who believed that littering was a "God-given right" were targets of the advertising campaign. ... McClure recalled that "The crowd was sprinkled with 'Keep America Beautiful' and 'Keep Texas Beautiful' folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males." McClure added that "The 'Keep Texas Beautiful' lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'

floatrock 8y ago

So first, the author Jigar Shah is a heavy-hitter in the energy industry and knows what he's talking about. He founded SunEdison in the early 2000's and popularized solar-as-a-service PPA's (SunEdison pays the upfront capital costs to install solar on your roof and you pay it back by paying them for the electricity you consume at lower prices than the utility but still high enough to pay back with margins). Today he runs a big cleantech investment firm. But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example. A different rebranding angle that people are talking about now is just pure cost. Most of the new energy generation capacity added in 2018 has been renewable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-sources-account-for-most-new-u-s-power-capacity/#6d92a86e5971 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-so... This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country. This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...) Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

look no longer, when can I start? off-shore triple-damage elbow-grease tidal wave sooperpower merciless monkey wrenched czochralsi silicon titty solar panels full frontal 24/7 double penetration doctor x' geothermal energy strike-breaking conflict mineralized all-american circumcized powerwalls Mach-4 Modern Times side winder electrical wind mills National Park flooding blue-collar nine-to-five hydroelectric damnation brutal triangle trade carbon credit master race cards storm trooper deployed stars and stripes space shades high-maintenance super cool transmission lines soundtrack: https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA