If you want to be known for something, stand for something

The Wall Street Journal today has an interesting, if not outdated, view of the green economy, with a focus on cities in the hunt to become employment centers for green jobs.

"Every community in the country will benefit from the green-jobs movement," said Jose Beceiro, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce's director of clean energy. "But there are only a handful of cities that will probably emerge as a clean-technology capital."

A narrow focus on a few cities as hubs for clean-technology is misguided. A better framework is both hubs and spokes - the good old network effect - through which a broader regional economy can flourish. Here in North Carolina, with our top-drawer universities, our strong history of manufacturing, and our multimodal transportation system, you'd think we'd be on the fast track. Except, as Steve Harrison suggested yesterday, we're missing one thing: a coherent economic development policy that puts a premium on green.

To put it bluntly, our current approach to economic development feels like Black Friday at Walmart. Our guys will chase almost anything that moves, including the dirtiest and most toxic of opportunities, without even the illusion of a plan. (Okay, there may be a plan in place, but if that's true, it's a crappy plan, lacking any hint of public visibility. And it's certainly not a green plan, given the incentives we're dumping into dirty industry like cement manufacturing.)

Fortunately, some movers and shakers aren't waiting for the administration to get its economic development act together. For example, here's some exciting news about an old friend at UNC, Tom Meyer, who recently landed some big bucks for research into solar energy.

Thomas Meyer wants to convert sunlight into a liquid fuel. The soft-spoken researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill - one of the most highly cited chemists in the world - has been working on that quest for more than 35 years. Now he's getting a boost.

Last August, the Department of Energy awarded UNC-CH $17.5 million over five years to run an Energy Frontier Research Center, one of 46 new centers around the nation dedicated to energy research. Meyer will direct it.

And recently UNC-CH, Duke, N.C. State and RTI International submitted a joint proposal to the Department of Energy to host a "Fuels from Sunlight" energy innovation hub in Research Triangle Park, a $135 million collaborative center to support national solar fuels research. The consortium hopes to hear back later this year.

As I've said more times than I can count, "If you want to be known for something, stand for something." It's time for the State of North Carolina to stand for leadership in the green economy.