*You put the federal levers of power near Al Gore, man, he doesn't waste any time meditating over his granola. A hundred billion for green industry?!
Okay, it's not much compared to Mideast oil wars – but jeez, that's all the windmill money any contractor could eat.
http://globalwarming.change.org/blog/view/the_daily_climate_a_stimulating_gore-y_day_in_dc
Busy day yesterday on Capitol Hill:
Democrats in the House of Representatives were busy passing President Obama's $819 billion economic recovery plan. The bill leaving the House includes over $100 billion in spending aimed at straight at green goals including creating a smart grid, weatherizing low- and moderate-income homes, retrofitting public buildings and public buildings for energy-efficiency, promoting clean energy generation, improving clean water infrastructure, and environmental restoration. (("Okay, we'll be broke – but we'll be breathing clean air while we're broke.")))
Mass transit funding was bolstered at the last minute to total $14.6 billion (up from $11.6 billion). $37.9 billion is directed at energy efficiency and $27.8 billion for renewable energy. There's another $20 billion for renewable energy and energy efficiency tax credits and related sweetners; verbiage inserted into this bill also allows for the refunding of last year's clean power investment tax credit.
The bill now moves to the Senate, where $50 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear power industry have been added on to the bill, along with $4.6 billion for the coal industry – aimed at variations on the "clean coal" theme.
(Grist)
Not one House Republican voted for the plan. (The New York Times) (((They'll be back in power someday, so it'll be interesting to see if they march out and literally rip the solar panels off of people's homes.)))
Meanwhile, over in the Senate, "VP-turned-climate-guru Al Gore urged lawmakers to move quickly on both the economic-stimulus package and a cap-and-trade climate bill," reports Kate Sheppard at Grist. "His testimony – which included an updated version of his Inconvenient Truth slide show, now with even scarier data – was warmly received by Republicans as well as Democrats."
Gore's position coal power was striking, and probably chilled the hearts of coal-power advocates and enemies alike:
"I think it's quite responsible to support robust research into whether or not it might, in the future, become possible to safely capture and sequester CO2 from coal plants, but we should not delude ourselves about the likelihood that that's going to occur in the near term or even the mid term...It is extremely expensive. There is not a single large-scale demonstration plant anywhere in the United States. The one plant was canceled by the Bush-Cheney administration."
*Nice Apple product placement.
