Economic Stimulus (Part II): Show Me the Vision

Part II of a three-part series

The best part of the economic stimulus package moving through Congress is that it calls for a significant down payment on a new energy economy. One of its weaknesses is that it doesn’t give the American people a clear, exciting vision for what that new economy can do.

The stimulus package is clear on goals. The bill passed by the House last night talks about developing clean energy, transforming the economy with science and technology, modernizing roads, lowering health care costs, helping workers and investing in education.

But are those goals descriptive enough to show how the new energy economy will improve the fabric of our lives or how the benefits to our children are worth the mortgage we’re taking out on the future? I don’t think so.

The stimulus needs compelling themes that make clear how tomorrow will be better than today and how every American can answer President Obama’s challenge that we all do our part.

Here are some suggestions:

Revitalizing Rural America: Rural America has been the orphan of the economy for generations. I can’t think of any other sector that has given us so much and prospered so little. But the new energy economy offers the potential for rural America to become our wealthy new Persian Gulf and our principal source of profitable carbon sequestration services.

Wind farms already are providing new jobs, tax base and income in parts of rural America. In the new energy economy, renewable energy production will join the production of food and fiber as the three legs of rural prosperity. Wind farms, solar farms and locally owned biorefineries, and the conversion of agricultural wastes to energy all will provide new industry. Dedicated non-food energy crops will mean new markets and income for farmers. Careful husbandry of private forest lands and responsible cultivation of soils will help America keep carbon out of the atmosphere, and farmers will be paid for that service in a growing carbon market.

The stimulus package moving through Congress allocates billions of dollars for renewable energy generation and transmission, grants and loans to rural small businesses; and economic development assistance. The Presidential Climate Action Project is among those who have conjured up all sorts of additional ideas for federal policies and programs that would pump blood back into rural America.

Clean Energy Enterprise Zones: Let’s be frank. The workers and communities that continue relying on fossil energy production will be losers in the new energy economy. In the short term, the things we must do to reduce carbon emissions and environmental blight – including a ban on new conventional coal-burning power plants, a withdrawal from dependence on oil, and an end to destructive practices like mountain-top removal and drilling on sensitive lands – will mean fewer jobs in the coal and oil industries.

The message to those workers should not be that they’ll lose their jobs; we will help them change jobs, shifting to growth skills and industries in the new economy.

Regions whose economies are dependent on fossil energy production already are showing signs of trouble, despite the Bush-era boom in oil and gas extraction and our failure so far to put a price on carbon. For example, an analysis of counties in the Western U.S. by the independent research group Headquarters Economics finds that: