There will be no recovery without jobs. It's just that simple. We've watched for thirty long years as the manufacturing jobs that made America strong were spirited away to countries with lax environmental regulations and little or no protection for their citizens. American workers were forced to compete with three hundred million underemployed Chinese who were willing to work for $132 a month.
We have to buy it here. We have to make it here. And unless those doing the making are themselves making it our downward spiral will continue.
We can make this change and local energy production is the first step we should take.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has put people back to work. There's no arguing with it – the nation is a sea of traffic cones and muddy, dusty construction sites as we dig into anything that has been deemed "shovel ready". That's good ... for this year and maybe the next. We need to make plans now, not just for the construction worker who is back on the job thanks to a school being refurbished, but for the young people attending that school.
ARRA was an excellent paramedic's tape job on an economy run down by drunken revelers from Wall Street, but we need to get the patient into reconstructive surgery right away. And the funds for the needed work must come straight out of the so called 'earnings' of the speculators who caused the problems we face.
Ask someone from Europe about America and what is the first thing you here? "They work such crazy hours!" It's unclear which America John Boehner or Orrin Hatch are talking about when they call us lazy, but no one else sees it. Our industriousness defines us – we've never been presented with a problem that wouldn't give way to an application of American ingenuity and our famously inexhaustible supply of elbow grease.
That elbow grease might be inexhaustible, but fossil fuels are not. If we don't start making better choices right now and stick to that path we're going to find ourselves in a situation where elbow grease is the only energy source we have. Gas, oil, and coal production follow a known curve for every field - they get developed, they peak, and then they decline. The time to prepare for the inevitable decline in fossil fuel is today, not the day after the currently politically powerful fossil fuel industries lose the ability to power our economy.
Preparing means that when the American taxpayers agree to spend money to improve things here, that money has to stay here. ARRA caused nearly a thousand new wind turbines to be installed ... but only a third of them were made in the United States. All of the construction work was done here, but why were the bulk of these machines built over seas? That isn't really a mystery, it's just another bad policy coming to light.
That bad policy is how we handle an obscure tax incentive known as the Production Tax Credit. Wind turbine makers in Europe and Asia have stable tax policies and they can make long term investments. The United States Congress plays a game every two years with wind energy and as a result we have Wall Street's favorite – a boom and bust cycle.
The long term well being of this country is too important to be a political plaything in even numbered years. We need to establish a long term energy policy, this will obviously be attached to a long term industrial policy, and then we need to put it forever out of reach of the sort of antics we see today.
This isn't going to happen with the current crop of corrupt, out of touch legislators we have. John McCain and his oily millions? Joe Barton apologizing to British Petroleum because we managed to hold them accountable for their mess? Can you really see them doing anything for you?
EnergizeUS is a new coalition of candidates for office across the country talking about reenergizing our economy and lessening our dependence on foreign oil by focusing on renewable energy resources. Please visit our webpage to learn more about the coalition and the candidates. Please support these candidates on ActBlue if you can afford to. You can also follow our candidates on Twitter and on Facebook. Look for future diaires from us talking about energy policy and introducing each of our candidates individually.
Coalition Members are: David Cozad (TX06), Rep. Raul Grijalva (AZ07), Billy Kennedy (NC05), Rodney Glassman (AZ-Sen), Lainey Melnick (TX21), Michael Puhr (ILSH104), Jerry Policoff (PASH41), Jim Holbert (KY05), David Gill (IL15), Hank Gilbert (TXAgComm) and Lance Enerle (MI08).
If you know any candidates who should be a part of this or are a candidate yourself interested in joining, please contact us at energizeus@gmail.com or tell us in the comments and we will contact them.