How Solutions Happen
Chicago -- Last December workers at Republic Windows launched a sit-in when their employer, citing the loss of line of credit, shut down their factory without notice. The workers, with the backing of their union, eventually got the back pay they were owed, but not the jobs. A few days later Robin Roy, a friend of mine whose wife is Cathy Zoi, the Director of Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, came to see me about his new job -- with a company called Serious Materials. Robin was excited about Serious Materials' breakthrough line of super-insulated but very low-cost windows.
Robin showed me how, at his company's price point, it's now cost-efficient in areas with very hot or cold climates to replace existing windows with new ones with insulation values up to R 11. I asked him the routine green-tech question: "You guys are a small company, how will you get to scale?" He gave me a very un-Silicon Valley answer: "We are buying up window manufacturers who are going out of business." So I told him about Republic Windows, and I told him about its union.
Friday morning I picked up the paper -- and discovered to my joy that, thanks to the confidence provided by the Obama stimulus package and the president's commitment to green energy, Serious Materials had reached out to the workers at Republic Windows, worked with their union, and finally bought their factory from the bankruptcy court. They're now getting ready to reopen.
I asked Robin what role the stimulus package played in this happy outcome. He emailed me back, after telling me how fabulous the workers had been in the whole process: "Effective implementation of ARRA's [the stimulus package] energy-efficiency measures will allow us to expand our planned operations and hire up more rapidly than would be possible without it. This will bring jobs not just at the factory, but also in installation, and upstream supplies." Meanwhile, the non-union plant that the previous owners had opened after shutting down the Chicago plant went under -- sadly for its workers. But Serious Windows and Republic/Chicago are a lesson in how the combination of effective government action and innovative green technology can generate new jobs -- and save homeowners on their utility bills while cooling the climate.
As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his new book, Outliers, there is an "ecology of success". Three years ago, the Sierra Club committed itself to figuring out how a grassroots organization could do more to implement solutions to the critical problems posed by the climate crisis. What we're learning is that the concept of an ecology applies to social solutions as well as to individual successes.
