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Frugal is cool in cash-strapped US
Paul Harris, the Guardian
When writer Héctor Tobar returned to America last year after seven years living in Latin America, he came back to a profoundly changed land. He had left a United States riding an economic boom. House prices were soaring, suburbs were gobbling up farmland and good times were rolling on Wall Street.
Now all that has gone. Tobar, an acclaimed author and essayist, was stunned to find America in the grip of an economic turmoil that was changing his native country before his eyes, plunging it into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. “There is a sense of mourning and confusion and a real feeling of living in the last days of empire,” Tobar said.
This new America is what Barack Obama has inherited. It is in many ways a broken country. When Obama takes the oath of office on 20 January watched by millions of Americans, his burden will be heavy in the extreme. The scale of the disaster is so large that Obama being America’s first black president will almost be a historical footnote. The numbers describe the extent of the catastrophe best. Seven trillion dollars has been wiped off a stock market that has dropped 33%, its biggest fall since 1931. Two million jobs have disappeared, wages are frozen and millions have lost their homes. The Federal Reserve is printing billions of dollars to keep the economy afloat. Banks have been part nationalised and the car industry of Detroit – once the symbol of the all-American lifestyle – is on life support and may not see the end of 2009.
(4 January 2009)
Why Obama’s green jobs plan might work
Marla Dickerson, Los Angeles Times
Some states — including Michigan — already see renewable energy as their future: It’s the only sector that appears to be making room for more employees despite the recession.
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… Whether clean energy can pull Michigan out of the ditch remains to be seen. But the push is on to retool America with so-called green-collar industries.
President-elect Barack Obama wants to spend $150 billion over the next decade to promote energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources as well as energy conservation. Plans include raising vehicle fuel-economy standards and subsidizing consumer purchases of plug-in hybrids. Obama wants to weatherize 1 million homes annually and upgrade the nation’s creaky electrical grid. His team has talked of providing tax credits and loan guarantees to clean-energy companies.
His goals: create 5 million new jobs repowering America over 10 years; assert U.S. leadership on global climate change; and wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported petroleum.
“Breaking our oil addiction . . . is going to take nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy,” Obama said during a campaign stop in Michigan’s capital, Lansing, last year.
Americans have heard it before.
(4 January 2009)
States should lead green recovery investment
Lewis Milford, Burlington Free Press (Vermont)
Today, our nation is facing two crises: One is our failing economy, and the other is global warming.
The good news is that President-elect Obama appears ready to explore how to use this challenge and opportunity to help rebuild the U.S. economy and energy infrastructure through a green recovery package, with 21st-century green technologies.
The real challenge is where and how the money from the various stimulus packages should be invested. Any new funding must be put to use quickly and effectively in order to have an immediate impact on the economy. Governors from both parties met last month in Philadelphia, and the members of the National Governors Association advised President-elect Obama to invest the stimulus money in state infrastructure improvement programs immediately — a “bottom-up” approach.
We have a very simple suggestion to make this happen. The federal government should deploy a portion of the green stimulus money directly through the many state clean-energy programs that already exist — without any new federal bureaucracy.
(4 January 2009)
