Our nation better wake up and smell the coffee. With all our bail outs along with the 168 billion economic stimulus package, that btw did nothing for our economy it is hard to understand why our government can't see the need to bail us out of our dependence on foreign oil. I am appalled at all the articulating stories of green technology losing hope of being furthered because of lower gas prices. How long does anyone really think this decline will last? OPEC holds the key and we are at their mercy. They just cut 1.5 million barrels in production a day and vow to cut more if prices don't rise again. Instead of spending billions upon billions on bailouts, why don't we instead invest in renewable energy. We have GUARANTEED returns if we do this. I just read a fascinating book by Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence NOW . I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in seeing our country become energy independent. He has a web site he can explain it better than I .. www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com
‘A Green New Deal’
Some of the world's most powerful leaders argue that this crisis is a call to speed up the creation of a new energy economy. Why they're right.
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In rented offices on a quiet side street in Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower, analysts for the International Energy Agency spend long days and nights crunching numbers about oil production and greenhouse gas emissions. They're basically the staid, sober global accountants who watch over the power supply for the 30 rich countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and their many reports are dry and technical. But there is one term that has taken on ominous overtones in recent studies. The phrase "business as usual" has started to read like the end of the world.
With a sense of urgency bordering on desperation, the IEA has been calling for radical changes in the way the world drives its cars, its factories and, indeed, the global economy. In November the agency will issue a collection of comprehensive reports that declare in no uncertain terms, "a global revolution is needed in ways that energy is supplied and used."
But the financial crisis plunging the world into recession right now has caused a wave of doubts, second-guessing and backsliding among many political and business leaders. Italy and several Eastern European states have threatened to sink previously agreed upon European Union initiatives. With bank collapses, home foreclosures and unemployment on the rise, and the public coffers drained by bailout packages, even America's vaunted venture capitalists are getting cautious. A few months ago, many were ready to invest in huge green-technology projects. Now they say they're scaling back if, indeed, they can get the money together at all. China's leaders, after what seemed a crisis of environmental conscience during the Beijing Olympics, may be inclined to dispense with their qualms as they see their economic growth drop from double digits to single ones.
But there are also powerful voices being raised amid the din of despair, saying that now is precisely the time to seize the initiative and launch that "global revolution" the
IEA is calling for. And not just because it will stave off disasters two or three decades away, but because it can provide the impetus to pull the global economy out of the slump it's in now and put it on a more solid foundation than it's had in at least a generation. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and American presidential candidate Barack Obama have taken up the cause of what United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week called a "green New Deal" that would rebuild and reshape the economy of planet Earth in ways reminiscent of the programs that President Franklin Roosevelt used to revitalize the economy of the United States during the Great Depression.
It took a great war, and all the military industries that fed the carnage, to bring America out of the Depression. But to a surprising degree, the world economy has been riding the strength of its hottest sectors ever since. By the 1990s, it was the rise of the Internet and the network economy, which collapsed in the dotcom bubble and gave way to housing and the financing that paid for it. In each of these recent cases it was the market that discovered and promoted a new engine for growth—creating millions of jobs and trillions in profits worldwide. Between 1996 and 2000, the tech sector created 1.6 million new jobs, according to Moody's Economy.com—roughly 14 percent of new U.S. job growth. In this decade, the financial sector accounted for a lion's share of U.S. corporate profit, while housing accounted for a staggering 40 percent of new U.S. job growth. Now, those two stalled drivers are leading producers of unemployment: Goldman Sachs, the royal house of finance, announced a 10 percent staff cut last week.
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