Lisa Margonelli: A Green Stimulus for the People

…But so far Obama has stuck to the well-worn path of top-down subsidies for wind and solar energy, infrastructure investment and a modest revival of a home weatherization program for the poor. The problem with this plan is that it turns energy consumers as well as power producers into supplicants. Energy-industry subsidies are notoriously poor public investments–yielding few jobs or jobs of short duration because the government money can make the industry too dependent to be sustainable. Subsidies for specific technologies often benefit the well heeled–as with California’s Million Solar Roofs initiative. Green is a luxury, out of reach for many Americans struggling with rising energy bills. Energy consumers get the message that they’re victims of high prices rather than actors who could play a powerful role in moderating energy demand.


But with a bolder plan to make working families the agents of change, Obama can take a historic opportunity to remodel the way we generate, transmit and use energy, stimulating the economy in the short term and building a broad green constituency of workers and industry in the long term.

For a green stimulus plan to achieve its goals, Obama needs to popularize environmentalism and empower Americans to control their energy use. Instead of a million solar roofs and hundreds of thousands of pricey Priuses, we need 30 million well-insulated ceilings and 15 million Chevy Cobalts (or similar cars that get thirty mpg or more) for the majority of American households that make less than $60,000 a year. A populist energy-efficiency stimulus plan will create jobs as it reduces energy use and costs, eliminates emissions and puts families in charge of their energy consumption. The stimulus package also needs to address the inadequacies and inequities of our system of generating, transmitting and consuming electricity so that the greatest burden does not fall disproportionately on working families. An ambitious overhaul of America’s power grid would have short-term stimulus benefits while kicking off a long period of technological and commercial innovation.

At the heart of this green stimulus opportunity is recognizing that rising energy prices have been particularly unfair to low- and moderate-income Americans, draining their finances and putting them at the mercy of fluctuating global energy markets. While the average family spent about 4 percent of its income on gasoline in 2006, those making $15,000 to $40,000 spent 9 percent, and by this past summer they were spending 10 to 14 percent of their income on gas. Better-off families were able to change jobs or houses or buy a more efficient car, but those with lower incomes had few options. In a cruel trick of the market, rising gas prices made the least efficient gas guzzlers the cheapest cars available. Chained to high energy expenditures, low-income families saw their credit and standard of living erode so that by last summer 70 percent of them told the National Energy Assistance Directors Association that rising energy prices had changed their food-buying habits. Many said they skipped payments on credit cards, utilities, mortgages and auto loans to pay for gas, which meant that rising energy costs had spilled over into already shaky mortgage and credit markets. In 2008 utilities cut off 8 percent of accounts for nonpayment.

The Nation