Are We Feeling (Green Energy) Stimulated Yet?

The stimulus package has lurched, slightly damaged but ambulatory, out of the Congressional conference committee and should be signed into law by (or on) President’s Day, as Obama hoped. I haven’t tried to pick through it to figure out how much is left that goes to what might be labeled green energy projects—and numbers in this context demonstrate an unseemly plasticity anyway.

During the (last) Great Depression, one of FDR’s alphabet soup agencies was the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps. In the New York area, this “make work” program was responsible for building a lot of the roads, trails, and recreational buildings in the Palisades, on the western side of the Hudson River.

In the 1970’s, during Jimmy Carter’s Great Malaise, I served in the YCC, the Youth Conservation Corps, a summer “make work” program which did painting, trail maintenance and some, literal, bridge building (or throwing new planks across brooks, if precision is important here) in the Palisades.

What I would like to see—in the current stimulus bill or as a freestanding program—is something along the lines of an NCC, a National Caulking Corps.

We often bog down in arguments about what constitutes “real” and worthwhile investment in saving energy, which technologies are worthwhile and can be scaled up, which ones yield net energy gains, which gains are merely illusory. This can be odd, irritating, and (sometimes intentionally) diversionary, which is not to say that such calculations should not be made.

The consensus is pretty clear, however, about the “low hanging fruit” offered by energy conservation. Americans still use roughly twice the energy of people with a similar standard of living in places like Japan and Western Europe.

A Manhattan Project (street to street and building by building) aimed simply at “Bringing America Up to (Green) Code” would generate a large number of jobs and would save a huge amount of energy. You could do this in three layers which would also target several groups of people in need of work:

1. You don’t even need a high school diploma to caulk and weatherstrip.

2. Installation of insulation and replacement windows takes some training (and supervision of new hires) but that training too has a variety of positive multiplier effects.

3. Finally, there is abundant HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) work to be done, overhauling and retro-fitting existing systems, replacing outmoded equipment, designing and installing new heating, cooling, and hot water devices, and—perhaps most crucially—manufacturing these cutting edge devices.

You can’t outsource caulking and insulating. But we are in danger of trading dependence on foreign energy sources for dependence on foreign green technologies. In today’s New York Times, for example, Tom Friedman points to the American and Chinese embassies, across the street from each other in New Delhi. “The U.S. Embassy’s roof is loaded with antennae and listening gear. The Chinese Embassy’s roof if loaded with . . . new Chinese-made solar hot-water heaters.”

This is an area in which I support the Nanny State: energy upgrades should be universal and mandatory. As to cost, one approach would be to tax utility bills such that they did not rise but also did not fall (to reflect energy savings) until the upgrades had been paid off.

If that amounts to a thirty year energy mortgage. . . well the government owns plenty of mortgages at this point anyway, and green mortgages would be both a lot less toxic and a lot more reliably profitable in every way.

Sometimes the Anti-Regulation Crowd Has a Point

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has made a number of admirable stabs in the direction of creating a greener New York. He hasn’t always succeeded and he hasn’t always been helped by the state (which nixed congestion pricing for cars in midtown) or the feds (who just quashed the requirement that we move to hybrid taxis).

The recent experience of the Episcopal General Theological Seminary in Chelsea suggests that Mayor Bloomberg would help his own agenda if he could clear some cobwebs from —and create some efficient interconnections between—a variety of city bureaucracies.

The Seminary has been trying to replace its heating and cooling systems with geothermal power: safe, clean, efficient, and close to free once you’ve paid off the (substantial) capital costs. To do this, they need to drill a number of very deep wells, to tap the groundwater under Manhattan (drill there, drill quick!). The system is online, though not yet complete.

So far, according to the project manager, quoted in the New York Times, they have gone 50% over the initial budget estimate, and taken three times as much time as they should have. They ascribe both of these problems to the inefficiencies of the 10 regulatory agencies from which they required permissions.

I am in favor of the MTA making sure that a drill bit doesn’t tear through the roof of the A Train. And I’m inclined to see most anti-regulatory quailing as the self-interested cant of cynical ideologues (I know, lets deregulate the financial sector! That’ll work out really well!).

But when the response of the city Department of Transportation, after a three month delay, is reported to be (again from the Times) that they can’t report on status, because the project “has no status,” when their answer to what can be done to get the project moving? is, “you can’t get it moving,” well. . . sounds like a regulatory failure to me.