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’
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But at this critical juncture of global crisis and epochal political transition in the United States, while the White House waits for a new occupant, a few European countries have taken the strongest lead pushing forward with substantive initiatives. According to a recent United Nations report, Germany's $240 billion renewable-energy industry already employs 250,000 people, and by 2020 is expected to provide more jobs than the country's auto industry, which is currently the country's biggest manufacturing business. Britain plans to spend $100 billion on 7,000 wind turbines by 2020, and the government claims that will create 160,000 jobs. "I know that some people may be saying that the difficult financial circumstances that the world now faces mean that climate change should move to the back burner of international concern," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently said. "I believe the opposite is the case."
But just how plausible are such plans? Even if they create jobs, will those jobs really contribute to a system that slows or stops global warming? Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, has overseen the studies calling for a global revolution in the way energy is supplied and used. But he remains pessimistic. The wholesale transformation of the energy economy as a response—as the response—to the global recession "is only in our minds," he says. The fatal dynamic is perfectly straightforward. In a recession, consumption of just about all commodities goes down, but so do energy prices—and that discourages the development of alternatives. Nuclear-power plants, vast solar collection farms, forests of wind turbines, ethanol production, R&D for electric or hydrogen-powered cars and the infrastructure to support them—all require enormous quantities of capital awaiting a fairly distant payoff. When capital and credit are tight, and oil prices suddenly drop (they are less than half what they were in July), private investors are less likely to put billions into a distant clean-energy future. Alternative programs for renewable sources of energy that might make business sense when oil is at $140 a barrel make less sense when it's at $70, and none at all if it drops below $40. Even if it's clear that over the long term oil prices will continue to rise, the volatility of the market undermines long-term planning.
To push ahead, governments have to provide incentives and regulations, and a whole lot of money up front. If global warming is to be confined to about 2 degrees Celsius by 2050—instead of rising by an apocalyptic 6 or 7 degrees—carbon-dioxide emissions will have to be 50 percent lower in 2050 than they are today. And according to the International Energy Agency, that will require investment of about $45 trillion by 2050. Such expenditures could well be offset by energy cost savings, but that would happen later, and the enormous layouts have to happen now. This is not a problem that unregulated free markets and private capital are going to solve short of a Malthusian meltdown.
If there is good news, in Birol's view, it's that after the epic interventions in the financial markets over the past few weeks, the notion that the state might intervene massively to redirect the energy market no longer seems extreme, even to the normally laissez-faire British and Americans. Once you open the floodgates of government funding for the banks, why not for green industry, too? And while the U.S. government has a weak record picking investment targets—its 1970s foray into synfuels is remembered as a classic boondoggle—other states have proved that government can pick winners.
It's the French who offer perhaps the most detailed blueprint for the moment. The particular advantage that Gauls have is that dirigisme (state planning) has never been a dirty word in Paris. The government often tries to guide the markets, and without apologies. Massive public investment in rebuilding and reorienting the economy is what gave the French what they still call les trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years of phenomenal growth after World War II. That was when they made the expensive but prescient decision to build the nuclear-power plants that now supply 80 percent of their electricity, and with no direct emission of greenhouse gases. So, too, the French dirigiste decision to crisscross the country with capital-intensive but energy-efficient high-speed train lines.
Although France was seen as an environmental laggard in the '80s and '90s, when green causes seemed more about lifestyle than survival, over the past year the problems have been defined and addressed with stunning celerity. "We have gone from recognition to action," says Nicolas Hulot, the mediagenic environmentalist and host of the widely distributed "Ushuaia" TV documentaries, who has been a key figure pressuring the government.
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