Discussion Question 4: Obama's "Green" Stimulus?

It appears as though the Obama stimulus package signed last week has a lot of environmental components, specifically a lot on energy policy. There are new incentives for renewable energy, in the form of tax breaks in the bill, used to encourage Americans to buy cars using alternative energy. Energy transmission and efficiency is also emphasized in the bill. President Obama also wants to create new clean energy and adapt this to the power grid in the U.S.

One of the major goals of the bill is to create large scale improvements on the different sectors of the American infrastructure, relating to the environment. This includes the electrical grid system, as well as the America's water and sewer systems. Many of these systems are nearly one hundred years old, and need to be replaced with new technology. The stimulus bill proposes that the new technology not only be advanced but also environmentally friendly.

While many of these ideas are good in principle, many are also lofty and may in fact take many years to complete. The goal of the stimulus package is to stimulate the economy as quickly as possible to get America out of the recession, however, many of these energy projects are long term projects which will take many years to make. Even creating the new technology for the changes, and then manufacturing the parts for production will take a few years. Therefore while it is great that there will be new green jobs created from this stimulus package, it is hard to see the immediate benefit of these environmental developments. Due to the technological and scientific advancement which must take place, before such drastic changes to America's energy supply and water and sewer system structures takes place, years of research and development followed by manufacturing will need to occur before any of the changes are implemented. I'm interested to see these new environmental energy solutions, however I fear the economy cannot wait the time it will take for these technologies to develop.

Amanda