Last weekend, President-elect Obama made a historic announcement that his economic stimulus program would include the largest infrastructure investment since the creation of the Interstate Highway System under President Eisenhower:
“The key for us is making sure that we jump-start that economy in a way that doesn’t just deal with the short term, doesn’t just create jobs immediately, but also puts us on a glide path for long-term, sustainable economic growth. And that’s why I spoke in my radio address on Saturday about the importance of investing in the largest infrastructure program–in roads and bridges and, and other traditional infrastructure–since the building of the federal highway system in the 1950s…”
Obama is getting increasingly bold, and he understands the importance of making long-term public investments as opposed to simply distributing another round of rebate checks. But as David Brooks pointed out yesterday, Obama’s current stimulus plan lacks creativity and doesn’t create new growth areas:
“Barack Obama has said that he would start an infrastructure project that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower’s highway program… But alas, there’s no evidence so far that the Obama infrastructure plan is attached to any larger social vision. In fact, there is a real danger that the plan will retard innovation and entrench the past… the Obama stimulus plan, at least as it has been sketched out so far, is notable for its lack of creativity. Obama wants to put more computers in classrooms, an old idea with dubious educational merit. He also proposes a series of ideas that are good but not exactly transformational: refurbishing the existing power grid; fixing the oldest roads and bridges; repairing schools; and renovating existing government buildings to make them more energy efficient.”
If Obama is to fully seize the moment and get serious about rebuilding a stronger American economy while confronting our national energy challenge, he should follow Fred Block’s advice in his contribution to this week’s Breakthrough Special Innovation Issue:
“Another important step would be to prioritize innovation spending in the economic stimulus package to build for the short as well as long term… Providing guaranteed government demand for a dramatically expanded supply of solar panels, wind turbines, and energy efficient vehicles could encourage a rapid expansion of productive capacity for these new products and yield large economies of scale. This effort would quickly pay for itself through the diminishing burden on the economy of financing oil imports. Moreover, this effort would lower the prices, assuring a rapid increase in commercial purchases.”
Or as I wrote last week in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Green stimulus” — efficiency retrofits and “green” job creation — is important, but it is only one part of necessarily large-scale investments in research, development, education, demonstration and direct government procurement and deployment of clean energy technology and infrastructure. This will require federal investments on the scale of $500 billion over 10 years — more than three times the size of Obama’s current plan.
Getting serious about remaking the economy and solving the energy crisis requires making serious investments in the deployment of clean energy technology. Not only is it not enough to only invest in the “low-hanging fruit” of energy efficiency and new infrastructure, it also presents a danger of using up the political capital we need to focus on the centrally important task of making investments to develop and deploy cheaper forms of clean energy. We cannot afford to have Obama and the new Congress think they’ve covered the energy investment issue because they’ve invested large amounts in efficiency upgrades.
We’ve come so far to get to this point, and it’s easy to get excited about “green stimulus.” But let’s not miss this critical opportunity to achieve the much bolder and larger investments we need — on the scale of $50 billion per year — to transform our energy systems and make clean energy cheap.
