Leadership Dialogue IV: Mobilizing a World-Class Energy Force

BREAKING UPDATE: Energy Secretary Steven Chu will make a major funding announcement from the Summit.

On this panel:

• Daniel McGinn — Senior Articles Editor, Newsweek
• Dr. Michael M. Crow — President, Arizona State University
• Lou Anna K. Simon - President, Michigan State University
  
• Kevin Surace — CEO, Serious Materials
• Randi Weingarten — President, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO

We're not just trying to save the planet -- we want to create jobs from our efforts.

Kevin Surace: This is the third industrial revolution. The steam engine and internal combustion engine used fossil fuels, but these ideas haven't been touched for over one hundred years. Everything's up for reinvention -- and reinstillation. (And someone needs to make those reinstillations.) Companies want diverse workforces -- don't just do one thing well, do several things well.

Lou Anna K. Simon: Workers need to know how they're going to be retrained, so that they see their future in green tech. We're not just training them for the next job, we're giving them the skills to move from job to job.

Randi Weingarten: career technical schools are making a comeback. It's not just an alternative, it's a way to compete. High schoolers in western PA are going toe to toe with companies in a worldwide racecar competition. Plus, career tech schools have higher graduation rates and higher college admission rates.

Kevin Surace: This is the new web 2.0. Innovation and sustainability are going to be the new fields students want to get into.

Michael Crow: Students today think differently than everyone in this room. They have fewer preconceived notions about how to do things, and their new ideas need support just as much as new industries.

Randi Weingarten: Students have an enormous amount of information, and we need to deepen their learning -- it's already broad.

Michael Crow: We're getting students who have a shallow base of knowledge: we need teaching structures that will create better experiences for students.

Randi Weingarten: Teaching through problem-based learning, not just doing the math behind it, gives students a better understanding of how things actually work.

Kevin Surace: A green economy isn't just "green-collar jobs" -- it spreads across blue-collar jobs, white-collar jobs, and academic and business elites. All aspects of the economy are part of the sustainability model.

Randi Weingarten: Focus on community colleges and the labor movement as a way to retrain workers.

Kevin Surace: His company bought a window manufacturing company. For every job in the factory, there are two in the field. It doesn't matter what degree you have -- you can't just go and install a window without being trained. We need to focus on that training. 

Lou Anna K. Simon: We need sustained support for R + D. 

Michael Crow: We don't have an economy that's capable of dropping to second or third and sustaining itself. There's a need for speed -- we need to make these changes quickly.

Kevin Surace: Green tech requires more than just the technology. If you're an American company building things in China, and you fly them back to the US, that's not really green.

Robert Zimmer: We're having trouble adapting our current system to this challenge because we haven't figured out how to approach the competition. We're lazy -- we got this far, but it's not good enough and we have to keep moving forward.

Randi Weingarten: We should -- whatever our unit of work is -- take a problem and see how we can collaborate to fix it.

Lou Anna K. Simon: Our competition wants to emulate what we have. Creating top-tier universities in other countries means that U.S. universities are under more pressure. We tend to talk about liabilities, not assets.

Question: is this a longer-term play than we think?

Michael Crow: It's not about green jobs, it's about sustainability, which is just as important as liberty or justice. We're not training for jobs, we're educating people about how we live and how we advance as a civilization.

Lou Anna K. Simon: It's not "or," it's "and." Students think inclusively, not exclusively, and we need to use that thinking about energy and manufacturing.

Up next: lunch, with remarks by Senators Murkowski and Warner and a keynote by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.

— Sarah Spooner

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