Greenness in First Obama Economic Revival Plan

December 7, 2008 – Vol.13 No.38

GREENNESS IN FIRST OBAMA ECONOMIC REVIVAL PLAN.

Really want to increase the fuel economy of your car? Don’t sit in traffic. Cars stopped and idling get zero miles to the gallon. Of course everyone would avoid traffic jams if they could, but tie-ups are an unintended consequence of driving. On a personal level, free flowing traffic saves gas. On a national level, free flowing traffic saves lots of gas.

Highway planners say the only way to keep traffic moving is to build better roadways and improve the ones we have. Transportation planners will argue that the best way to really to cut fuel consumption is to move people from personal transit to mass transit. But face it, the nation has been built around cars. For now, and for the foreseeable future, cars are it for most of the country. So improving roadways will use fuel more efficiently. Better roadways can be surprisingly green,

President-elect Obama has put forth his first in a series of plans he hopes will be approved by Congress next year that will help revive the U.S. economy. The major impetus of this first effort will be a massive national infrastructure improvement project: The biggest since the 1950’s, he says. The project will include repairs, rebuilding of crumbling roadways, bridges, pipelines and perhaps improvements to railways. The effort, if enacted, will certainly create jobs in construction, planning, engineering, supplies and construction equipment. The effort will also be the President-elect’s first green-job initiative as he has promised. When done there will be fewer time-wasting, fuel-wasting traffic jams (and perhaps some new rail links too).

There’s more green in this first economic revival plan than just concrete and steel projects. Obama wants to increase the energy efficiency of all federally-owned buildings by replacing out-of-date lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. Shiny new equipment that will be more efficient will have a price tag initially but will save taxpayers billions in energy costs in the long run, he says. With building efficiency improvements the Federal government will be going green. (Solar panels or small wind turbines for electricity on federal buildings could come in a later plan. We’ll wait and hope on that. However, you can bet there will a push on to install LED lighting wherever possible in this initiative.)

Energy efficiency improvements too should go beyond just new lighting and HVAC equipment. There’s no sense installing state-of-the-art equipment if the building leaks out all that efficiently-produced hot or cool air. Drafty, cold old buildings should get more insulation, a few tubes of caulking, and better windows.

The energy efficiency plan for federal buildings will create obvious jobs in the design, engineering and installation of new HVAC, lighting systems and weatherization upgrades. (Like building highways, building improvement jobs can’t be outsourced. You can’t ship a building to China or India for renovations.) However, the side-effect of this plan is that more jobs will be created in US factories that BUILD the state-of-the-art HVAC equipment. This you may not know, most of the HVAC equipment used in the US is built here too. Companies like Carrier, York and Trane come to mind as home-grown HVAC manufacturers.

(Lighting, like LEDs, might be a mixture of US-made and imported. That’s OK. We’re borrowing money from places like China to keep the nation afloat. We should pass some work their way too.)

The Obama plan, phase one, also includes rebuilding the nation’s schools where needed. Those efficiency upgrades for Federal buildings? Ditto for schools.