Government expenditures on energy infrastructure and incentives for energy projects are not new.

There is talk in Washington of using the money to stimulate the economy to improve the energy infrastructure of the United States.

How would this work?

Proposals are for things like a 1930’s style Work Projects Administration (WPA) that would build things like power lines, solar farms and wind farms.  This is a 21st century version of the things that the WPA built during the great depression using the labor of millions of workers on “relief”.

“Over $4 billion was spent on highway, road, and street projects; more than $1 billion on public buildings; more than $1 billion on publicly owned or operated utilities;” -Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Other proposals are to spend taxpayer money on incentives to increase the use of “green” energy technologies such as wind and solar power and to encourage energy efficiency measures.

Here is a database of all of the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy incentives at the state and federal level.  Maintained by the NC Solar Center at the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University.

http://www.dsireusa.org/

If you hear someone calling proposals for the government to get involved in building energy infrastructure or providing incentives for energy related programs as “unprecedented”, you can respectfully point out their error.

There is precedent for large scale federally funded projects for energy infrastructure.  There is also an ongoing effort by local, state and federal governments to provide incentives for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

We need to focus our economic stimulus efforts on achieving endependence.

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.