Sep 26, 2008
Remember that check you got from Uncle Sam last summer, the one that was going to jump-start the economy and get it back in shape? How’s that working out?

Okay, never mind. However, we could have taken that roughly $100 billion and put it into a plan devised by the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. For the same amount of money, raised through auctioning off carbon permits, we could invest in the following six energy strategies:

• Retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency
• Expanding mass transit and freight rail
• Constructing “smart” electrical grid transmission systems
• Wind power
• Solar power
• Next-generation biofuels

Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy shows how this investment—scarcely more than the government committed to bailing out one corporate failure, AIG, in the current crisis— can result in significantly increased employment in existing areas and the revitalization of two crippled American sectors, construction and manufacturing. It will end the growth of our dependency on foreign oil, spur our transition to a low-carbon economy, and produce two million jobs.

The road to recovery is paved with gold, if we can find ourselves a way around the dead end that is the fossil fuel-based economy.
tags: Energy | Economics | Environment