Green jobs and energy independence in the rebounding economy.

The 44th President of the United States is taking office at a time when critical decisions about the future of our economy will have to be made rapidly and accurately.  There is little margin for error.

One of the things we heard during the campaign was a push for “Green” jobs.

President Obama can stimulate the economy by making the obvious connections between short term economic stimulus combined with energy conservation, mid term alternative energy subsidies and long term planning to make the country energy independent.

The economy is in dire straits due to the housing bubble pop.  Now that pop has triggered a crisis in the automotive industry.  So we have a built infrastructure (stationary) problem and a transportation (mobile) sector problem.

Our energy challenges break into two segments: stationary and mobile.

The overarching message of Obama’s green economy push could be:

“We should use our economic stimulus dollars to solve two problems at once, get the economy going again and move our country toward energy independence.

In the short term, we will use federal money to help our automobile companies build energy efficient cars.  We will also provide funding for the construction industry to improve the energy efficiency of  buildings, both residential and commercial, throughout the country. (As far as I can tell from Census Data, in 2006 Automotive Manufacturing accounted for .7% of GDP and Construction accounted for 4.8% of GDP).   This will keep automobile workers and auto dealership employees on the job and help to revive the incredibly important construction industry.

In the mid term, we will subsidize alternative energy technologies funded in part by a cap and trade greenhouse gas program.

On the strategic long term planning level, the government will establish a “Manhattan Project” to chart an energy independence road map that ends our dependence on non-renewable energy.

These moves will put American on a path to short term economic recovery while assuring our long term ability to maintain our standard of living sustainably.

We cannot do this without everyone pitching in to help.  As a nation, we must dedicate ourselves to making the sacrifices and tough choices that will allow us to pass a livable world on to future generations.”

Here is a great video by Shell Oil which shows the importance of charting a course for our energy future instead of following our current haphazard scheme.

http://www.shell.com/home/content/aboutshell/our_strategy/shell_global_scenarios/
scenarios_videos/video_2/

How about starting a war for “endependence” = energy independence that ends dependence on polluting fuels.

Have you noticed that when you see pizza ads on T.V., the bigger the pizza, the lower the price?  You can get a lot of bad pizza for $9.95, but can you survive on lots of bad pizza?

What if you fed the family cheap bad pizza every night for dinner?  It might be good for the budget, but soon the health effects of a lousy diet would start to show.  It wouldn’t be long until everyone decided that the cheap bad pizza diet wasn’t working.

When society was choosing energy sources during the industrial revolution, cheap was good.  Oil and coal were less expensive than whale oil and wood.  But like with pizza, cost is not the best way to judge the value of an energy source.

With energy, we have lots of cheap bad fuel choices. We have coal, oil, oil shale and natural gas.  This stuff is cheap because there is so much of it (especially coal), and the energy yield of fossil fuels is very high.

Here is a good outline of how fossil fuels formed:

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html

There are a couple of problems with the cheap bad fuel choices.  First of all is the fact that they are non renewable, so eventually we will run out of them (all of the pizza places will close, and there won’t be any frozen pizzas either).  Second is the fact that as with eating pizza for dinner every night, burning fossil fuels has unhealthy side effects.  They release greenhouse gases which are a cause of global warming and they release other toxins into the air.

A scientist friend of mine explained it to me this way - “it took the earth millions of years to trap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we are in the process of putting it all back into the atmosphere in a couple of hundred years”.

Here is a video about the different types of fuels we are using currently:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-6.html

What we need is a more balanced energy diet.  We can use fossil fuels sparingly.  But we need to add lots more renewable energy to our plates (think of renewable energy as fruits and vegetables).

Renewable energy sources may not be as cheap as fossil fuels, but in the long run we will be much healthier when we change our cheap bad fuel choice diet.