GM Hummers

 On a conference call last week about its decision to cut 5,000 jobs and close 20 factories, the CEO of Midland-based Dow Chemical said “the entire industrial supply chain … is in a recessionary model. Across the board, everywhere.”

But the bad news for American workers and stockholders is good news for the planet.

The evidence is visible everywhere. Mining companies are slashing jobs here in Michigan and worldwide in response to plummeting demand for metals. People are driving less. The gas-guzzling Hummer is commercially defunct. Electricity use, both residential and commercial, has declined this year, calling into question the need for new nuclear or coal-fired power plants. And with new housing and business construction stalled, landfills are filling up much more slowly.

Some worry that economic recession will shelve plans for necessary green technological development and hinder progress in meeting goals to reduce greenhouse gases. Others say curtailment — a scaling-back of consumption — is the only sure way to reduce dangerous emissions and are hopeful that changes in the economy will end up preserving the environment.

Few care to celebrate the environmental benefits that result from factory closings and a reduction in shopping, especially in Michigan, where the economy is tied so tightly to inefficient automobiles. With good reason, many are focused on survival.

But the environmental benefits are real and massive, leading some observers to say the slowdown — and its side effects — may give Michigan a chance to see how to make better choices when it comes to energy.

“The only hope is that we will use this to deeply retool companies that survive for a future that works,” said environmental writer Bill McKibben via e-mail. “Not half-hearted, incremental changes that just prolong the torture for another year or two, but the deep stuff: electric cars, locomotives. The stuff we’ll actually need in a world that might work again someday.”

McKibben said he’s concerned that hard times will also lead some to embrace the dirtiest and cheapest fossil fuels even more tightly.

“I think (Barack) Obama is our main hope here,” he said. “he’s talked about trying to break us out of ’shock and trance’ reaction to oil prices, and I hope he carries through with it.”

At the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit efficiency institute in Colorado, staffers are debating whether industrial decline will do more for the environment than the green technology projects, according to spokesman Corey Lowe.

“With the economy consuming less energy, rates of driving are going down, and all those indicators of environmental impact. But we’re also seeing companies not able to secure capital to pursue projects — GE didn’t sign a whole bunch of deals to develop renewables.”

“Overall environmental performance is improving,” he said. “It’s maybe not for the best reason, and we never want to celebrate somebody being broke,” but he noted that bringing down overall energy use is what the environmental movement has been trying to achieve for years.

Dr. Martin Kushler, a policy analyst with the American Institute for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said, “It’s not desirable to have the reduction in energy use come about because factories are closing because that has an adverse impact on the economy.”

“We’d like to see energy use be reduced through better technology, and the economy can put a damper on that type of technology,” he went on. “I don’t know of any responsible energy efficiency expert who would celebrate [economic decline].”

Still, the economic slowdown may give Michigan an opportunity to reexamine the state’s approach to energy, especially construction of new power plants, Kushler said:

“People [are] being more vigilant about trying to keep bills down. Forecasts for growth are becoming smaller and smaller, and I think that the combination of these factors and the pretty good efficiency policy signed in October provide a good opportunity for Michigan to avoid most power plants proposed in the state.”

Such plants are expensive, and operating them will be increasingly expensive as carbon costs rise, Kushler said. Michigan gets 60 percent of its electric power from coal-fired power plants — the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, which trap heat on the Earth’s surface and drive climate change. Electricity use is the principal source of greenhouse gas emissions in Michigan. The next largest sources are transportation and the industrial services sector.

Detroit Edison, which supplies 1.3 million Michigan households with power, estimates it will see a 2-percent reduction in electricity demand this year.

Rob Content, a spokesman for Community Solutions, an Ohio-based policy group, said voluntary curtailment is the best solution. The group advocates a 90-percent reduction in energy consumption by the average American in order to stablize the climate.

He sees an upside to the downturn.

“Our research suggests the humans regularly find that their lives are enriched when consumption goes down,” he said. “This means more time in face to face activity and less time rushing around in malls and instant gratification of fast food meals, more time at home, cooking, talking.”

When curtailment extends to reduced reliance on mass media for entertainment and news, Content said, the benefits are even greater.

“It can take a while for curtailment to bear the fruits I have described,” he acknowledged, “… Often people are busy experiencing the change, making the adjustment, and it can seem strange and awkward and uncomfortable … before the new (or more traditional) becomes the norm and benefits are experienced.

“We do think that ecological soundness is fundamental for any economic system that has a future.”

McKibben said he thinks adjusting to dramatically lower levels of greenhouse gas production will be a long haul.

“I don’t think we’ll be sustainable in ten years, but I think we better be well on the way,” he said. “[This] means enormous changes, not least in the U.S. commitment to private transportation as the key way of getting our bodies and our stuff across the surface of the planet. We need all that skilled labor in Michigan doing something more useful than building cars.”