In rough order of priority, here's what I'd be proposing in Congress.
Start with a national program.
Fund it by Federal surcharges on stock transactions, interest and dividend payments, profits from sales of property, taxation on Estates, and progressively apply these taxes. Here's a rough guide .. additional taxation for families making more than $100K/year add 1%, $250K/year 2%, $500K/year 3%, $1M/year 5%, $10M/year 10%, over $100M/year 25%. The rich will still be rich. They'll just be paying part of their fair share. Is that 'socialism'?
First, take these funds, and use them to hire Americans, using American made materials to upgrade, retrofit and reconfigure existing residential, government and business spaces to be more efficient. This will require labor, materials, technical management and engineering assets, it would employ unskilled as well as skilled labor. Our level of energy waste is horrendous and must be curtailed.
next ..
Invest serious R&D into converting waste plant based materials into useful energy; these plants act as sinks absorbing CO2 as they grow, but add to the overall carbon budget as they breakdown when they die and rot. Rather than waste all this potential sequestered carbon, techniques need to be streamlined and made more efficient to convert this into useful energy.
Create in rural/agricultural areas plans to grow the appropriate starch or oil bearing plants which have the lowest requirements and impact. Cattails are a great example of a plant which requires not much more than standing water: they clean polluted marshes as they grow, and offer a tremendous amount of potential energy.
An example:
Segment for NPR's Science Friday: a show about 2 years ago
Start at 13:20 for the part about cattails.
http://www.npr.org/...
http://www.sciencefriday.com/...
http://www.sciencefriday.com/...
Cattails can yield as much as thousands of gallons of ethanol per acre under optimal conditions. The best practical yield one can get from corn is less than 500 gallons per acre. Even if cattails are an order of magnitude less efficient than claimed, it still offers an alternative to corn or sugar cane based ethanol. Unlike corn, cattails require no fertilizer, special handling or maintenance. They just grow, and thrive in places where there is a lot of pollution to clean up.
http://www.ethanolproducer.com/...
http://www.diamondcutlife.org/...
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/...
Alcohol Week (October 20, 1980):
"DOE MAY FUND CATTAILS-TO-ETHANOL TECHNOLOGY: SEES LOWER COST, BIG YIELDS".
.. "Since they grow in wetlands, cattails do not compete for land that could be used for crops or forests, and drainage is unnecessary. Cattails use some pollutants as nutrients. Cattail farms near sewage treatment plants could clean troublesome nitrogen and phosphorus from effluent. Unlike nuclear power and fossil fuels, cattails do not add heat and carbon dioxide to the earth but recycle them. The plants use the sun's energy and the atmosphere's carbon dioxide to produce starches and sugars through photosynthesis. .. According to one estimate, the United States has 140,000 square miles of wetlands from Alaska to the tip of Florida. Minnesota is estimated to have 10 million acres where cattail could grow, which theoretically could supply enough of them to meet the state's entire energy needs. .. Cattails are an annually renewable resource, whereas coal, oil and peat take thousands or millions of years to form."
(Washington Star, September 4, 1979).
30 years ago people were pushing for adoption of this technology.
Oh yeah .. cattails are capable of cleaning up OIL.
Here's the irony. It's BP's scientists saying it.
http://www.bp.com/...
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Hire people to plant and propagate cattails in the marshes, which will help to clear the oil from BP blowout.
Harvest these plants.
Use low tech solar stills to convert these plants to ethanol. It's interesting that this still was patented in 1982, and it appears the patent is held by Mattel.
The stills powered by thermal solar energy. |
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Just a sliver of what could be done.
Cattails are not a 'silver bullet', but they clearly could be used in an effort to help clean the Gulf waters, produce jobs, help shift our infrastructure towards increased use of ethanol to power vehicles, burn in conjunction with existing coal fired electrical power plants, to heat homes.
Cattails: just one plant.
There are others that can be converted into ethanol or oil to make biodiesel fuel. Kudzu and hemp are two other notable plants which can produce prodigious amounts of energy, and require little if any fertilizer or maintenance.
We have know this for decades, yet our ethanol production is still mostly corn based and the amount of use increases only incrementally each year.
We could employ hundreds of thousands of Americans growing our energy crops, manufacturing the equipment and distribution channels needed to get off fossil fuels. Every President from Carter onwards has said "we've got to do something about our addiction to oil" .. now is the time to make these changes.
We can take steps to use less energy.
We can shift away from fossil based fuels.
The technology exists.
The need to employ Americans is urgent.
It's a natural fit to take use what we have right in front of us.
It's fair to use taxation on landed wealth, on those who have profited as a way to start this process.