BlueGreen Alliance, Apollo Alliance merge

Foster will stay on as executive director of the new organization, which will continue to be called the BlueGreen Alliance.

United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard and Sierra Club Chairman Carl Pope will continue on as co-chairs of the organization. Apollo Alliance Chairman Phil Angelides, and two other Apollo officials, will join the BlueGreen Alliance board.

The Apollo Alliance, — which is made up of environmental, labor and business groups — has called for a wide-ranging push to move toward a “clean energy economy” on the scale of President Kennedy’s call to land a man on the moon in the ’60s.

“We are thrilled that two great organizations will become one effort to build a stronger, renewed movement to create the good jobs of the 21st century economy – the jobs that will help us to move to a clean, renewable energy economy, reduce pollution and break our country’s dependence on foreign oil,” Pope said in a statement.

The newly formed organization endorsed Thursday a bill introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) that outlines a series of rules aimed at ensuring the purchase of American-made goods and services for the development of the country’s transportation infrastructure.

“Today, with this collaboration and our support for Senator Brown’s SMART Act, we are sending a powerful message that our highest priority must be to build an economy of good jobs and broadly shared prosperity in place of the financial speculation and recklessness that brought our economy to its knees,” Angelides said in a statement.