A little while back CNN hosted an interesting discussion called "dreaming of a climate bailout." It ran through a few ideas for what $700 billion could do if spent on green initiatives. (3,700 90MW offshore wind farms! Etc.)
It's worth reading. Also dear to my heart is this elegant op-ed from James Carroll. It points out another place to find $700 billion:
By a nice coincidence, though, the U.S. financial rescue package of $700 billion duplicates a number that was also in the news last week -- the Pentagon budget. In the fiscal year just beginning, the U.S. Defense Department will spend $607 billion on normal military costs, and an additional $100 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (As of June 30, 2008, Congress had appropriated $859 billion for the wars; Congressional Budget Office projections assume further costs of $400 billion to $500 billion as the wars wind down). But for the coming year, $700 billion is the Pentagon's nice round number (this includes neither Homeland Security nor intelligence costs).
Step back. All of last week's hand-wringing hoopla over the emergency bailout stands in stark contrast to the utter indifference with which politicians approved an equivalent layout for the military -- an approval so routine that it was ignored in the press and by the public.
And just to drive it home:
The genius of America's most brilliant minds has been yoked for more than half a century to the invention of ways to kill and destroy. ... What if those minds had been put to work imagining alternative futures -- the rescue of the environment, the ending of disease and poverty, the artistic fulfillment of new media, the teaching of children?
What if, indeed? Perhaps in this time of extraordinary crisis and opportunity, American minds might be open to the heretical notion that there are better things to export than weapons and wars.
To unlock wind power, put a price on carbon
Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
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amazingdrx Posted 12:32 am
11 Oct 2008
Why not use the 700 billion over 10 years to eliminate those oil imports? Order a million plugin hybrids per year, for government use, from US automakers. Spend 20 billion per year on that.
Order a million solar cogeneration systems per year, to place on government buildings, to power the plugin cars. Use another 20 billion for that.
Buy another million ground source heating/cooling systems for government buildings. There goes another 20 billion per year.
Put the rest into smart grid technology to hook the devices together.
Jawbone corporations to join in, upgrading their vehicles, energy, and heating/cooling systems, with additional long term orders.
Divert subsidies from old energy economy companies to direct subsidies for taxpayers to buy these devices too, the cost reduced by mass production efficiency.
Tax carbon and give those revenues in tax credits to purchase these devices to everyone under 200k in annual income on a sliding scale.
That's a pretty good way to spernd 700 billion over 10 years. it would revive US manufacturing, job, and tax bases all at once. There's a stimulus package we can count on.
Much more effective than giving it to investment "banks" (hedge funds disguised as banks).
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Angelsnecropolis Posted 4:25 am
11 Oct 2008
Everyone could be living on free energy or driving their air cars or EV cars now if it wasn't for the greed and corruption.
It's a nice dream but not one worth writing about. Everyone now knows if the government can caugh up 700b for corporate America they could cough up some billions for EVERYONE ELSE in America.
What if...
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cnbcsucks Posted 6:45 pm
11 Oct 2008
This was way, way before anyone ever imagined Henry Paulson asking Congress for $700 billion to bail out Wall Street. My math on the thread was intentionally rough, and I will also purposely not be specific here about where I would invest $700 billion, but you can see I would not waste it on oil exploration, nuclear, or even burning precious natural gas to power SUVs.
If you can tolerate the strong sexism of my own blog, it is http://cnbcsucks.wordpress.com
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MAD MAC Posted 6:56 pm
11 Oct 2008
Victory in Pattani
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:59 am
12 Oct 2008
In particular, by inculcating the incentive of creating military systems that cost as much as possible, the ability to design for the civilian sector -- making things reliably, inexpensively, productively, for the long-term -- becomes lost. Thus, the huge military budgets of the last several decades have actually helped lead to the decline of the manufacturing sector.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 3:21 am
12 Oct 2008
How could one generation go so wrong? Evidently, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, increasing per capita consumption, and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors. We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of 'real' endless economic growth and soon to become unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it and the success of any manmade economy depend. My not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves.
Never in the course of human events have so few members of a single generation stolen, consumed and hoarded so much wealth at the expense of so many other people. We have mortgaged the future of our own children. We are the "what's in it for me generation". We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with "feet of clay".
Perhaps my not-so-great generation does live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will "have our cake and eat it, too." We own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. Remember, silence is golden. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world's wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our 'inalienable rights' to outrageously consume Earth's limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire. We never lie but also never tell the truth as we see it. The "thing" that matters most of all to us is "the only game in town". We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We enjoy freedom and living without limits; of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms and any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations a finite planet naturally imposes.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth's limitations. Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making....a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre. Most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth's limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet's environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world's colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic 'wall' called "unsustainability" at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed. Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing.....changes that save the global economy, life as we know it and Earth's body.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
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Backcut Posted 4:18 am
12 Oct 2008
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But rocks now cost $10,000 a pop! Pay at the door, please!
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But, no sense in spinning any money to the Forest Service. They will only spend more on watching fires burn. (And not on putting them out!)
Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com
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John Fish Kurmann Posted 9:54 am
12 Oct 2008
Not all governments have been so cooperative, though, and some even get uppity about getting more money for their oil--cases in point, the Ba'athist regime in Iraq and the Chavez administration in Velenzuela. Consequently, one of the primary roles of the U.S. military since WWII has been to remain in place all around the world so the big stick of the U.S. military is close at hand. Sometimes it is actively used--most notably in the Persian Gulf War that started in 1991 and has no end in sight--but usually its intimidating presence is sufficient to keep the oil flowing. After U.S. oil production peaked in 1970-71, the use of the U.S. military as an oil protection service has only became more central to its mission. Professor Michael Klare has written extensively about this, most recently in his book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.
We need to wake people up to the reality that the "Defense" Department is primarily in the business of global dominance, that our "support" for the troops is support for imperialism and neocolonialism, and that we still pay those true costs of our oil use, but through our taxes rather than at the pump.
"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith
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Colin Wright Posted 11:28 am
12 Oct 2008
With some $10 billion in outstanding debt, GM is the fourth-largest distressed borrower in U.S. corporate markets. Including GM's 49 percent share of the outstanding debt of finance company GMAC, it shoots to the top of the distressed debt list, according to data compiled by Standard & Poor's rating agency. GMAC, now 51 percent owned by Cerberus, had $24 billion in outstanding debt.
Analysts have started adjusting their projections of how quickly GM is running out of cash...
Barclays Capital analyst Brian Johnson warned last week that GM would have to raise $10.3 billion for the remainder of this year and all of 2009 from an earlier estimate of $7.3 billion because of the decline in global sales.
Some analysts say GM remains too big for the government to let it fail.
"A bankruptcy by GM would be devastating to thousands of employees, suppliers -- it's not just GM that would get pulled into that hole," Crowe Horwath's Merkle said. I'd say we'd be better off (partially) nationalizing them, saving the jobs and then pumping out millions of EV's to plan for oil depletion and reduce the impacts of climate disruption. Like the failing banks, we ought to get something for our money. (Meanwhile, Monbiot thinks we should just let them fail.)
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amazingdrx Posted 8:46 pm
12 Oct 2008
But is this just a temporary response to pumping more money into the mess for one more rally.
Revive the auto industry with a bailout, that's fine. Unless their is a demand that plugin hybrids that consumers can afford to buy and drive included with the bailout, it will be throwing more of our dwindling capital (borrowed from future generations) onto the bonfire.
The way to demand that is the way it was done in WW2 war production. This is a national and global crisis, economic and environmental.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 9:51 pm
12 Oct 2008
It looks as if the Wonder Boys on Wall Street, who caused the current disaster in the world's financial system, are going to rescue the family of humanity from a meltdown of the global economy.
Is it too much to ask some of these multi-billionaires to provide wealth to save the world from the global "meltdown" of Earth's ice pack that is occurring in Greenland, Antarctica, the high mountain ranges from the Arctic Cordillera, to the Andes to the Himalayas?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 1:08 am
31 Oct 2008
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
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