Members of a panel discussion held Monday said investing in a clean energy economy is crucial to bringing the country out of recession and competing on a global scale

University of Wisconsin law professor Thomas Mitchell, who introduced the panelists, said a greener economy could help economically disadvantaged communities through one of the roughest times in the nation’s history.

“We’ve seen our economy being stricken with the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression,” Mitchell said. “Solar and wind energy companies, clean technology and other environmentally reprehensible industries simultaneously address energy security, environmental quality and job creation.”

The panel started with a 10-minute segment from “Solarize This,” a documentary directed by Shalini Kantayya, which focused on personal stories of job loss during the recession and the emerging clean energy companies hiring more and more workers.

Center on Wisconsin Strategy Director Joel Rogers said he loved Kantayya’s film and agreed America could learn from China. 

Rogers said America’s federal labs are “more or less a joke,” and he was skeptical of the idea that America would be able to give the assembly work to China but keep all the “energy innovation” business.

Van Jones, president and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, an initiative started to restore jobs throughout the country, agreed competition with China on this issue would be key to America’s future. 

“I love my brothers and sisters in China and I want them to have jobs, but we need some too,” Jones said. “They have a dictatorship, we have a democracy, so are we proving something if we let a dictatorship beat us”?

Jones said there are three main candidates that people generally assign blame to for our lack of competitiveness in the green energy market. The first is China, the second is natural gas and the third, which Jones said he believes is the biggest problem, is Washington, D.C. politics. 

Looking back two years ago during the presidential election, Jones said people did not see a heated debated over the existence of climate change because President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., both agreed it was a problem that needed to be addressed.

Jones said in the 2010 midterm elections this was reversed and a movement toward debate over whether climate change existed or not, and away from policy solutions to the problem, was seen.

Burke O’Neal, director of Madison-based solar electric business Full Spectrum Solar, said Wisconsin could do several things to compete at a higher level and create jobs. 

O’Neal said since the biggest problem the U.S. and Wisconsin can address is that of creating a green economy that is built for the long-term dedication to renewable energy.

“We need to have long term incentives that allow renewable energies to be competitive,” O’Neal said. “I’ve seen since 2002, without subsidies, the price to install solar energy systems drop by half. The industry, if given that extra support, can be even more efficient and competitive.”