BlueGreen Alliance, Apollo Alliance
Merge To Strengthen Push for Green Jobs
By James Parks
SolidarityEconomy.net via AFL-CIO blog
May 26, 2011 - The BlueGreen Alliance and Apollo Alliance today announced a merger to strengthen and unify the movement to build a clean energy, good jobs economy to fuel U.S. job creation. The newly unified organization will call on Washington to focus anew on creating good jobs, securing America’s energy future and preserving the environment for future generations.
Beginning July 1, the two organizations will combine to become the BlueGreen Alliance, which will be home to the Apollo Alliance project. United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard and Sierra Club Chair Carl Pope will continue as co-chairs, and David Foster will continue as executive director.
Earlier this year, the BlueGreen Alliance launched Jobs21!, a nine-state grassroots campaign calling for a national jobs plan to put America back to work building the industries of the 21st century here in the United States. This initiative will be strengthened through coordination with the Apollo Alliance’s strong network of state and local affiliates–now dubbed BlueGreen Apollo Alliances.
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Solar power tower systems such as the ISEGS on the other hand focus a large area of sunlight into a single solar receiver on top of a tower to produce steam at high pressure and temperatures of up to 550 ° C (over 1,000° F) to drive a standard turbine and generator. The ISEGS also uses a dry-cooling technology that reduces water consumption by 90 percent and uses 95 percent less water than competing solar thermal technologies. Water is also recirculated during energy before being reused to clean the plant's mirrors.
“We want everyone to work at a green job in a green and clean economy,” declared David Foster, executive director of the sponsor, the Blue-Green Alliance, opening the first plenary. “But what stands in our way?” The answer was a new Congress stalemated by neoliberal resurgence centered in a bloc of the GOP and the far right. “It’s not going to be easy. We’re going to have to fight for it the old-fashioned way, from the bottom up, brick by brick, and floor by floor.” 
Richard Buckminster ‘Bucky’ Fuller was born July 12th 1895 in Milton Massachusetts. A natural mechanic, he was sent to Milton Academy, and later Harvard from where he was expelled twice; once for spending all his money partying, and again for his “irresponsibility and lack of interest”. By 32 years he was bankrupt and unemployed and drinking regularly in order to remedy the pain of losing his youngest daughter to polio and spinal meningitis. He was finally moved from depression by a suicidal vision and embarked upon “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” He would become an early green environmentalist and futurist, engineer, prophetic visionary, poet and author, architect and designer, mathematician, map-maker and teacher. 
![[Today's announcement offers hope that further investment will pour into the lagging US wind-energy programme. Consistent wind through Montana and the Dakotas, off the South Carolina coast and across the Texas panhandle gives the US windfarm industry an opportunity to supply significant amounts of electricity to the grid.]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/google-green_large.jpg "google-green_large.jpg")
Today's announcement offers hope that further investment will pour into the lagging US wind-energy programme. Consistent wind through Montana and the Dakotas, off the South Carolina coast and across the Texas panhandle gives the US windfarm industry an opportunity to supply significant amounts of electricity to the grid.
