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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In October 2007, Sarkozy kept his campaign promise to convene all branches of government, unions, the private sector and other interested parties in a conference similar to the one on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris that ended the quasi revolution of 1968. This Environmental Grenelle, as it's now called, came up with 268 recommendations, many of which have been passed by the Parliament. And those have provided Sarkozy with the detailed specifics needed more than ever in the current crisis.
The clear priorities in the new legislation are on practical programs that have an immediate effect on, yes, the job market. First on the list is the construction business: an estimated 25 percent of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions comes from energy consumption in buildings. "We're trying to have a 40 percent drop … by 2020," says Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the state secretary for ecology. Hundreds of millions of euros have been earmarked to make homes, offices and especially public housing better insulated and more energy-efficient. Kosciusko-Morizet says that this project will generate some 200,000 of the 500,000 jobs the Grenelle initiatives are supposed to create in France over the next dozen years. The initiatives in Obama's campaign platform are similar, but in France they're already becoming law.
Transportation is another sector that's already been addressed creatively in France. A system that went into effect on Jan. 1 offers a financial bonus for the purchase of cars with low emissions, while there is a tax disincentive (called a malus) against buying a car with high emissions. Virtually overnight the French taste in automobiles has been transformed. The sale of pollution-prone used cars has dropped off while the number of new cars sold in France by Renault, for instance, was up 8.4 percent in September and 3.4 percent for the year. That means more manufacturing jobs can be sustained or created.
Success doesn't come cheap. The bonuses will cost the government up to €200 million this year. And when other huge costs of redirecting the energy economy are added to the monumental expense of bailing out the financial sector, there is no way France will come close to the Maastricht criterion of a 3 percent deficit for each country in the euro zone. But Paris says the new expenditures are betting on future energy savings as well as the "formidable follow-on effect" of raising employment and creating dynamic new sectors in the economy. "This time it won't be about sacrificing the future for the present," said Sarkozy, "but on the contrary, putting our country in the best possible situation to face the future."
Can the rest of the world be persuaded to take even more dramatic steps? What of countries like Poland, which produces 94 percent of its electricity from coal, or China, which pumps more carbon dioxide into the air in eight months than the European Union is likely to save in the next 12 years with all its programs to reduce emissions 20 percent by 2020? Complicated schemes to price carbon emissions and trade carbon credits, some of which are in place, may provide a useful mechanism. So might the costly and almost entirely untested schemes to capture and store the carbon dioxide produced by power plants and factories.
But the political and financial reality is that no government will be so moved by the dire predictions of the world's scientists and the doomsday scenarios on computer models that it will allocate trillions of dollars just to meet those postulated challenges. What governments might do, and some certainly will do, however, is spend huge sums soon to kick-start their economies and create millions of jobs. "The nation is asking for action, and action now," said Franklin Roosevelt when he took office in 1933 and launched the New Deal. Today the global economy—the planet itself—is asking for the same thing.
With William Underhill in London, Christian Caryl in Tokyo, Jacopo Barigazzi In Milan, Jessica Ramirez in Washington, D.C., And Melinda Liu in Beijing
© 2008
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