LANSING – There are three major problems in Michigan and labor and environmental activists united Wednesday to back environmentally friendly jobs as a way to solve all three issues at once, said officials with the BlueGreen Alliance at a news conference Wednesday.

“There are three crises in Michigan,” said Mark Schauer, a former U.S. House member and the co-chair of the BlueGreen Alliance’s Jobs21! Initiative. “There’s the job crisis, energy crisis and climate crisis. If we don’t get to work on this now, Michigan and the United States will fall further and further behind.”

The BlueGreen Alliance unites labor unions and environmental organizations in the pursuit of good, family supported jobs for the environment, said Sue Browne, regional manager.

The United States is third behind China and Germany in renewable energy investments, Schauer said. In the last decade, the Michigan economy has decreased by 3.6 percent and clean energy grew by almost 11 percent, he said.

“The cost of doing nothing, and in fact I wouldn’t say what Lansing is doing right now is ‘nothing,'” he said, “but the cost of doing nothing is a cost we can’t bear.”

The BlueGreen Alliance jobs plan includes renewable energy, broadband, energy and water infrastructure industries, Schauer said.

“This administration has been ignoring clean energy to death and have made it clear energy isn’t even in their radar right now,” said Anne Woiwode, state director for the Sierra Club Michigan Chapter “The Snyder administration has shown a remarkable lack of interest in a growing industry. The statistics are clear, this is an industry we should be involved in.”

The group said it supported the efforts put forward by former Governor Jennifer Granholm to boost alternative energy, and encouraged Snyder to push the same agenda.

Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, said he thinks Republicans in the Legislature and Governor Rick Snyder are “just plain wrong.”

“This administration thinks they can give $1.8 million in tax cuts to every business in Michigan and watch the market take us into the next century,” Gaffney said. “We need policies that encourage us to move into the industries of the next century.”

Gaffney said renewable energy doesn’t initially pay for itself, but provides jobs and saves money in the long run by making us less reliant on foreign sources of energy and helps address the climate problem, he said.

“Creating jobs isn’t enough, we want to secure our existing jobs,” Schauer said. “We want new jobs to be good jobs that strengthen our economy, and our communities and support our families. Jobs that improve health and safety in the work place, that protect our air, water and land, safeguard our health and pay a living wage; in other words we want them to be union jobs.”

Gaffney said a positive thing about BlueGreen Alliance is its plan to take care of all three problems at once, with policy and a plan.

“As a state employee I have studied policy, and policy is the foundation of how you build your economy,” said Michael Bolton, United Steelworkers district director. “We would not plant corn in Iowa if we did not have policies to encourage it. We’re looking for policies to make these things happen.”

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