Former White House adviser Podesta touts advantages of renewable energy at Las Vegas ’summit’

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Renewable energy touted at Nevada policy ’summit’

LAS VEGAS — With clean-energy legislation trapped in a political deadlock, renewable-energy advocates called big business the new leader in the nation’s green revolution during a national summit meeting Tuesday.

John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, said untapped potential in the sustainable energy market could revive the stalled economy and end the recession.

“The focus now has got to be on getting these worlds and mechanisms together to finance innovative, renewable technology,” Podesta said.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hosted the third in a series of national clean-energy summit meetings Tuesday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. More than 40 people rallied outside the event, with some wearing green hard hats and waving signs that equated clean energy with green jobs.

Reid said encouraging the development of emerging clean-energy industries could ease the nation’s security problems and help overcome economic woes.

“We need to take that little spark and turn it into a wildfire,” Reid said.

Retrofitting just 40 percent of the country’s homes and commercial properties for energy efficiency would create 625,000 jobs over a decade, said Podesta, who was White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and headed President Barack Obama’s presidential transition team.

Among the panels scheduled for the summit were ones on green energy, investments, jobs and state and national policy. A panel of business executives and owners chided Congress for failing to pass a substantive energy policy that would allow clean-energy manufacturers to compete with traditional energy giants.

“Energy should be a bipartisan issue, but it is not,” said Kevin Smith, chief executive officer of SolarReserve, based in Santa Monica, Calif.

The Senate was unable to pass a sweeping energy bill in July after Republicans and Democrats sparred over a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Reid said he would introduce a thinner bill this year that would incentivize property improvements for energy efficiency and promote the use of natural fuel.

“We’ve got to start getting the things done that we agree on,” Reid said.

The legislation is modeled after the Pickens Plan, an oil independence campaign pushed by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens.

“How can you use oil from the enemy that is dirty and more expensive?” Pickens said. “I am telling you, we are going to go down in history as the dumbest crowd that ever was.”

Panelists also celebrated green energy as the answer to the Silver State’s narrow economic base. Nevada is grappling with a 14.3 percent unemployment rate and a tourism-based economy that shows few signs of recovery.

Austan Goolsbee, chief economist on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said green technology is unique because it has the potential to employ both highly skilled scientists and blue-collar workers hurt by the stalled construction industry.

“It offers a wider distribution of opportunity than almost any advanced future-leaning industry that you can think of,” Goolsbee said.

Jim Murren, chief executive officer of MGM Resorts International, said consumer demand for sustainable innovation helped make the CityCenter resort on the Las Vegas Strip one of the world’s largest green projects.

“What happens here does not stay here as it relates to energy,” said Murren, who boasted of sold-out rooms over the Labor Day holiday weekend.

The event occasionally felt like a pep rally for embattled Democrats, with panelists lauding Reid’s economic and environmental accomplishments in between cheering for renewable energy.

Reid, who is running for a fifth term in a tight race, received a standing ovation when he opened the summit. He later showed a short film that heralded clean-energy projects funded in Nevada through the $787 billion stimulus bill passed in 2009.

Rep. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat who is also fighting for re-election, said the film countered naysayers who claim the stimulus has not been successful.

Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, offered one of the few dissenting views at the summit. He said America should look for domestic oil off its shores.

“We need every source of energy that we can get,” Donohue said.

Pickens, however, argued that America cannot drum up enough oil to support its dirty habit.

“You can only produce so much,” Pickens said.