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The global economy rolls along more smoothly when it's not riding a unicycle. It needs additional wheels for momentum and stability.

That is, in effect, what Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is telling leaders of other advanced nations.

In a get rolling speech Wednesday to the World Affairs Council, Lew said the U.S. economy is moving at a good pace these days but needs support from the flat economies of Japan and the European Union.

Other countries cannot "rely on the United States to grow fast enough to make up for weak growth in major world economies," he said.

When Europe and Japan get too weak, demand drops for made-in-America products and services, and the U.S. dollar gets too valuable, making life tougher for U.S. exporters.

"The world is stronger if we all take steps to bolster domestic demand," Lew said.

He spoke in Seattle, where he was doing a warm-up act ahead of the main event this weekend in Australia. In Brisbane, he will join President Obama and other world leaders for a G-20 summit, focused on spurring global growth.

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Lew says the United States has a huge stake in the success of its first-world trading partners.

"The United States exports more than $2 trillion of goods and services to the world," he said. "It is very much in our economic and national interest when the rest of the global economy is growing."

The Obama administration is in a strange position. Just last week, it suffered big political setbacks in domestic elections. But on the world stage, Obama leads the most impressive economy. In the most recent quarter, this country grew at 3.5 percent — a very robust pace for a mature economy.

In the United States, the stock market is booming, budget deficits are melting away, corporate profits are breaking records and the unemployment rate is falling, down to nearly half the level set five years ago.

U.S. success shows "the resilience and determination of the American people," Lew said. "It also reflects the ease of starting businesses, our highly competitive product markets, and the ability to reap rewards from entrepreneurship."

Meanwhile, Japan's economy is stuck, with its inflation-adjusted growth rate running at less than 1 percent over the past decade. Europe may be on the brink of its third recession in six years.

Lew says that to grow, countries need a "comprehensive policy approach" that involves not only better fiscal and monetary decisions, but "structural" changes. When he talks about "structure," he's referring to the policy frameworks that hold back growth.

So, for example, in Japan, structural reform would mean changing laws that prevent young immigrants from replacing retired workers; helping women with children stay in the workforce and allowing more competition among companies. In Europe, it would mean making the banking sector less secretive.

In addition to speaking in Seattle, Lew talked with NPR's Robert Siegel, host of All Things Considered. Lew said that while he is offering advice to other countries, he knows this country still has many of its own problems to solve.

For one thing, "wages are not growing," he said. To help fix that, Congress should raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, he said. For low-income families, "the minimum wage makes a big difference," he said.

In addition, Congress should start spending more on rebuilding infrastructure, which would boost construction jobs, and pass laws to reform the tax code and increase trade, he said. "We still have work to do," he said.

Two bills that would authorize building the controversial Keystone XL pipeline will soon come to a vote in Congress, as their sponsors — Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La. — head toward a runoff election next month to decide who will win the Senate race.

NPR's Debbie Elliott reports:

"On the Senate floor, Landrieu called for action on the Canada-to-Texas pipeline project, saying, 'I believe with a push we could actually get the votes that we need to pass the Keystone pipeline.'

"Soon after, Republican leaders in the House scheduled a vote Thursday on a Keystone bill sponsored by Landrieu's rival, Cassidy.

"The two face off in a Dec. 6 runoff. The pipeline is a key issue in Louisiana, where the oil and gas industry dominates."

Energy company TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Canada to Texas; it has been a polarizing issue, pitting those who say it would create thousands of jobs against environmentalists who say tar sands oil is too expensive and toxic to refine. Where one side says the plan would bolster the energy industry, the other says it would increase greenhouse gases.

Wary landowners along its path have also spoken out, complaining that the pipeline would disrupt their property and damage farms — particularly if it ever sprang a leak. As the Two-Way has reported, "In February, a Nebraska judge struck down a 2012 law that allowed part of the pipeline to run through the state."

The AP notes that the Obama administration isn't welcoming news of a vote on the matter:

"While the White House stopped short of directly threatening a veto, spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama takes a 'dim view' of legislative efforts to force action on the project. Earnest reiterated Obama's preference for evaluating the pipeline through a long-stalled State Department review."

From NPR's StateImpact project comes this background:

"The Keystone Pipeline already exists. What doesn't exist fully yet is its proposed expansion, the Keystone XL Pipeline. The existing Keystone runs from oil sand fields in Alberta, Canada, into the U.S., ending in Cushing, Okla.

"The 1,700 new miles of pipeline would offer two sections of expansion. First, a southern leg would connect Cushing, where there is a current bottleneck of oil, with the Gulf Coast of Texas, where oil refineries abound."

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Rep. Bill Cassidy

Sen. Mary Landrieu

Keystone XL Pipeline

In 2011, solar panel company Solyndra defaulted on a $535 million loan guaranteed by the Department of Energy. The agency had a few other high-profile bankruptcies, too — electric car company Fisker and solar company Abound among them. But now that loan program has started turning a profit.

Overall, the agency has loaned $34.2 billion to a variety of businesses, under a program designed to speed up development of clean-energy technology. Companies have defaulted on $780 million of that — a loss rate of 2.28 percent. The agency also has collected $810 million in interest payments, putting the program $30 million in the black.

When Congress created the loan program under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it was never designed to be a moneymaker. In fact, Congress imagined there would be losses and set aside $10 billion to cover them.

Still, when the Solyndra case emerged, Republicans on Capitol Hill had pointed criticism for the Obama administration. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., called the Solyndra case "disgusting," and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, labeled it "a colossal failure." The conservative group Americans for Prosperity produced a television ad accusing President Obama of paying back campaign contributors.

There was an FBI raid on Solyndra's headquarters and an investigation but, so far, no prosecutions. Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent. They either declined or ignored NPR's requests for comment. And with that, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz wants to change people's perception of his agency's loan program.

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"It literally kick-started the whole utility-scale photovoltaic industry," Moniz says. The program funded the first of five huge solar projects in the West. Moniz says before that, developers couldn't get money from private lenders. But now, with proven business models, they can.

The Energy Department actively monitors all the companies in its portfolio for potential default risks, "and when there are warning flags, then the disbursements are suspended — possibly ended," Moniz says.

But he says the Energy Department doesn't want to go too far in the direction of only lending to safe investments. "We have to be careful that we don't walk away from risk, because otherwise we're not really going to advance the marketplace," he says.

Moniz points to a small company called Beacon Power as an example. It got an Energy Department loan, went bankrupt and defaulted on about $14 million in debt. Today the company is back in business, providing a valuable service to electricity grids and repaying the rest of its loan.

In eastern Pennsylvania, one of Beacon's facilities sits on 4 acres in an industrial park. Underground are 200 black flywheels that each measure 7 feet tall and 3 feet around, and weigh 2,000 pounds. They spin faster when storing energy and slow down when releasing it.

"We're recycling excess energy that's on the power grid and then putting it back into the grid when it's needed," explains President and CEO Barry Brits. He says the flywheels are essentially mechanical batteries.

But unlike the battery in your cellphone, the flywheel doesn't wear out over time. "What's unique about the flywheel is that it really is unlimited in terms of the number of times it can charge and discharge," Brits says.

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Beacon Power's plant in Hazle Township, Pa., stores electricity for brief periods, making it easier for the local power grid to integrate intermittent forms of renewable generation, such as wind and solar. Flywheels located in the blue cylinders store energy and operate like a battery — pulling in power from the grid when there's too much and releasing it back out when there's not enough. Jeff Brady/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Jeff Brady/NPR

Beacon Power's plant in Hazle Township, Pa., stores electricity for brief periods, making it easier for the local power grid to integrate intermittent forms of renewable generation, such as wind and solar. Flywheels located in the blue cylinders store energy and operate like a battery — pulling in power from the grid when there's too much and releasing it back out when there's not enough.

Jeff Brady/NPR

Being able to store electricity is important because wind and solar generators only produce power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. That can make life difficult for grid operators who must balance the amount of electricity produced with how much is used. Storing power — even for brief periods — gives them more flexibility and makes it easier to include intermittent forms of renewable generation on the grid.

Brits says the Department of Energy loan allowed his company to test and then improve its flywheels. "Our technology is now well-proven. We have over 7 million operating hours," he says, adding that building a plant costs half of what it did three years ago.

Despite early missteps, the Department of Energy is ready to invest in more projects that could advance clean energy technology in the U.S. Moniz says his agency has about $40 billion to lend in coming years.

Department of Energy

Solyndra

Americans grow up knowing their colors are red, white and blue. It's right there in the flag, right there in the World Series bunting and on those floats every fourth of July.

So when did we become a nation of red states and blue states? And what do they mean when they say a state is turning purple?

Painting whole states with a broad brush bothers a lot of people, and if you're one of them you may want to blame the media. We've been using these designations rather vigorously for the last half-dozen election cycles or so as a quick way to describe the vote in given state in a given election, or its partisan tendencies over a longer period.

It got started on TV, the original electronic visual, when NBC, the first all-color network, unveiled an illuminated map — snazzy for its time — in 1976. John Chancellor was the NBC election night anchor who explained how states were going to be blue if they voted for incumbent Republican Gerald Ford, red if they voted for Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter.

That arrangement was consistent with the habit of many texts and reference books, which tended to use blue for Republicans in part because blue was the color of the Union in the Civil War. Blue is also typically associated with the more conservative parties in Europe and elsewhere.

As the other TV operations went to full color, they too added vivid maps to their election night extravaganzas. But they didn't agree on a color scheme, so viewers switching between channels might see Ronald Reagan's landslide turning the landscape blue on NBC and CBS but red on ABC.

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The confusion persisted until 2000, when the coloring of states for one party of the other dragged on well past election night. As people were more interested in the red-blue maps than ever, the need for consistency across media outlets became paramount. And as the conversation about the disputed election continued, referring to states that voted for George W. Bush as "red states" rather than "Republican states" (and those voting for Democrat Al Gore as "blue states") seemed increasingly natural.

And it never went away. Instead, it became a staple of political discourse, not just in the media but in academic circles and popular conversation as well.

By the next presidential election, the red-blue language was so common as to be a metaphor for partisanship. That provided a convenient target for the most memorable speech of that election cycle, the 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, delivered by a young senatorial candidate from Illinois named Barack Obama.

"The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states," he said. "Red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too — we worship an awesome God in the blue states and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states."

Of course, that did not stop "the pundits" or anyone else from using these catchy labels. If anything, the practice has become more universal.

Not a few Americans see this as a symptom of a real disease in the body politic, an imbalance in favor of conflict that makes compromise more difficult.

Painting whole states with an ideologically broad brush is also offensive to many. No liberal in Idaho needs to be told that state leans conservative, just as conservatives in Minnesota are fully aware theirs was the only state not tinted for Ronald Reagan in 1984.

But being on the minor-fraction side of the party balance does not make these citizens less Idahoan or less Minnesotan. On the contrary, they may be among the fiercest loyalists of either state.

#ColorFacts: A Weird Little Lesson In Rainbow Order hide caption

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No one thinks the red or blue designation makes a state politically single-minded. But the message sent by such media-driven characterizations is not without consequence.

Bill Bishop, the Texas-based writer who co-authored the influential book The Big Sort in 2004, says political affiliation is a powerful part of the allure certain communities have for Americans seeking a compatible home.

"All of this is a shorthand, right? So a 'blue community' is a shorthand not only for politics but for a way of life ..." says Bishop.

And for many people, that way of life includes a sorting out by political affinity.

"We thought at first that this was all lifestyle, but the more I talked to people, the more I talked to people who said it was a conscious decision to go to a Democratic area or a Republican area."

Which may mean the red and blue labels will be even harder for the media to resist using in the years ahead.