Hey, Barack, When Do We Get the SOLAR Stimulus?
The latest stimulus proposal, announced this week by Barack Obama, will put $50 billion into the hopper for improvements to “the nation’s roads, railways and runways,” as the Associated Press story alliteratively noted.
And certainly, those improvements are needed. Europeans and east Asians laugh openly at our rail system. Our roads and bridges need shoring up. And plane travel in general has become a chore.
But before we go off improving more roads (which seemed to be where the bulk of the first round of stimulus went), shouldn’t we be looking at energy? How about a program to deep-energy retrofit many existing buildings, become a world leader in nonpolluting renewable energy, and reinvent public transit in ways that encourage its use. A massive program to cut fossil fuel and nuclear dependence by, say, 75 percent would have these extra advantages:
And those are only a few among many.
The really good news? Such a plan could be put into place with surprisingly little capital outlay, because creative financing structures already exist that can let private investment step to the plate. I’ll talk more about this in my next post (after Rosh Hashana is over).