Yet another encroachment on our freedoms

[kandrathe]

... you're utterly unable to fix your pollution problem, ...

I don't believe that is true. I also have little faith that a political solution will resolve a scientific problem. It was NASA who put a man on the moon. Where is the NASA of pollution and climate change?

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of provision in the stimulus package for clean energy.

Whoa. 70 billion / 763 billion -- and, what has actually been done? Looking in detail at the list, it seems most of these "energy" projects are municipal pork. For example, looking at many of the Minnesota projects, the retrofitting of more energy efficient equipment for ice arena's and down hill ski slopes seems to fit the mold, one must ask if the economy will really prosper from investing in sports facilities for the wealthy. Whereas, I would expect more of the projects to be like the Abengoa Solar designed 100MW solar parabolic trough electric generation plant.

That's not peanuts, but if your economy's back is going to be broken by this, what the heck are you still doing spending twenty-five times that much on the world's most powerful military?

You seem to suffer the myopia that our politicians do. Any perturbation in the price of energy has a multiplicative effect in the economy, since energy inserts its costs in multiple steps in the supply chain. So, I am dead set against any attempts to force the price of energy higher, but whole heartedly support any provisions to replace fossil fuel generation with alternative sources. Adding the infrastructure for cheap renewables will be a GDP booster (both in the construction of the infrastructure, and in adding energy to the production environment), while trying to force change by inflating the price of energy will be a GDP depressor. Once the alternative fuels exceed 50% (even with government funded incentives), then begin the phase out of pollution based sources of energy production.

The bottom line is that if we don't have energy that is as cheap as the energy we have now, it will express itself as a decrease in productivity and employment. The energy does not need to be fossil fuel based, but it does need to exist.

Edit: It seems that one possible project is also set to eat the lions share of the 70 billion. <blockquote> "The population of Cidra, PR is 38,000. The total they are scheduled to receive, including this project is about $18,546,035,000. That works out to almost $500,000 per person for one city."</blockquote>As a testament to how well thought out stimulus is by officials, the 4th ranked project in terms of importance is an animal shelter.