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:
Immediate economic stimulus, in the form of dollars saved on energy costs that become available for other uses
Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of new jobs: in production, installation, weatherization, analysis, and more
Reduced dependence on foreign energy sources, thus freeing up foreign policy decisions to be made on other criteria than protecting our oil interests
Ability to curtail unsafe deepwater oil drilling until the bugs are worked out
New life for existing residential, commercial, government, and industrial buildings
Drastic reductions in prices for solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale hydro, as larger markets enable economies of scale
Reduced air and water pollution
Reduced carbon footprint and maybe even the potential to reverse catastrophic climate change
Far less energy wasted in transmission losses, because more of it will be generated at the point of use and won’t need to be transported
Conversion of energy from a constantly rising ongoing cost to a fixed one-time cost amortized over many years
Elimination of any possible argument in favor of extremely dangerous and/or highly polluting power sources such as nuclear or tar sands
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).
