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Fuzzy Math? …Mixed signals from the White House on clean energy investment
By Alex Trembath – Introduction by Doug Krieger
This is a third in a series from CGAW introducing our new “Green Articles & Commentary” category…
WattHead.org Energy News & Commentary took an original print from Energetics by Alex Trembath; in sum: The President and Congress should put their money where their mouth is!
What Cal Green At Work doesn’t understand is how the President can run off to Wisconsin (Aug. 20, 2010) and celebrate a $1.3 million give-away to a renewable and battery storage producer (ZBB Energy) and then declare that by 2012 we’ll have 800,000 new clean energy jobs?
How different is that when Rep. Doris Matsui of Sacramento champions the Renewable Energy Incentive Act (H.R. 5931 – the Senate version is S. 2899 that Senator Feinstein of CA introduced in 2009) whose design is to “provide incentives for the development of solar energy?”
Her bill (which was the original Senator Harry Reid energy bill, now less “cap and trade” – so much for carbon credits) is supposed to create at least 200,000 new jobs, according to Rhone Resch, President and CEO of Solar Energy Industries Association.
Matsui’s office claims, “If enacted, this bill will result in more than 200,000 new domestic solar jobs and enough solar capacity to power almost 2 million homes. This couldn’t come at a more crucial time as unemployment is still rampant and Americans are more concerned now than ever about our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels.”
Read the full story…
The long and expensive search for clean energy miracles need not delay action today
The slow uptake of energy innovation (we call it shovel-ready-commercial application) – of clean technologies – only seems to get bogged down by the same cabal of oil-auto-coal-utility resistance to real alternatives – alternatives which amply exist if we but admit to their utilitarian use in the here and now…David Fridley, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a recent essay that media reports of energy “breakthroughs” often miss this point. I’ve made the mistake myself, not because I don’t realize it, but because these breakthroughs are potentially so important that I want them to become real tomorrow. Continue reading
Green and Clueless
But it is energy efficiency that offers the only possibility for dialing back our voracious consumption of energy and the fossil fuels that generate it. The reason is basic psychology: we are just not going to become a nation of pedestrians, let alone do without all our electronic toys. Continue reading
