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March 17, 2009
Inside Obama's Energy Budget
The president's proposed spending bill for the 2010 budget year marks a dramatic shift away from support for fossil fuels to new renewable and "green" energy. Here are highlights.
After a $787 billion economic stimulus package and a $410 billion appropriations measure for the current year, President Barack Obama is now focusing on what could be a more far-reaching, and if successful, revolutionary goal than even his much-ballyhooed economic stimulus plan: transforming the United States into a "green economy," based not on fossil fuels but on renewable energy, conservation and careful restraint in the production and consumption of energy.
"It won't be easy," Forbes aptly noted last month. "Opponents say the expense of meeting emissions standards, and relying on more costly renewable sources of energy, could make U.S. business less competitive and cause them to shed jobs."
But President Obama believes the public is fed up with fluctuations in gasoline and home-heating oil prices and is worried about reliance on unsavory oil-rich regimes. The thinking goes that the public is concerned about climate change driven by burning fossil fuels and that enough Americans are willing to modify their lifestyles to cope with the sagging economy and, hopefully, save some money.
Obama's proposed government spending for the 2010 budget year, announced last month, looks to fund a number of new energy programs, including modernizing the electricity grid, advancing carbon capture storage (CSS) technology and increasing support for the Office of Science.
The Department of Energy's $26.3 billion spending plan would pay for "significant increases in basic research" to develop clean and renewable energy, including solar, wind and geothermal sources, and to make motor fuel from plants.
In addition to the energy-heavy 2010 budget, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes $39 billion in support for energy programs.
While overall spending for the Energy Dept. would change little from what Congress is currently providing, the newly proposed budget would be about 5 percent higher than what President George Bush proposed a year ago. Compared to the Bush budget, it proposes a dramatic spending shift from financial support for fossil fuels to new renewable and "green" energy, including support for loan guarantees to help deploy innovative "clean" technologies.
According to highlights, the budget would pump more money into the following:
- Investment in the sciences — Substantially increasing support for the Office of Science, along with the $1.6 billion provided in the Recovery Act for the Energy Dept.'s basic science programs, as part of the president's plan to double federal investment in the basic sciences;
- New energy infrastructure — Investing in smart, energy-efficient, reliable electricity delivery infrastructures, including storage, cyber-security and investments in research and development (R&D), as part of the president's plan to modernize the nation's electric grid;
- Clean energy technology — Encouraging the early commercial use of new and innovative energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and, along with the $3.4 billion provided in the Recovery Act for low-carbon emission power demonstrations, advancing the development of low-carbon coal technologies; and
- Increased nuclear security — Reducing proliferation risks and ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear-weapons stockpile without nuclear testing, and focusing on the cleanup and management of radioactive waste and nuclear materials. The budget calls for "a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal" from commercial power plants and would cut spending on the proposed Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada.
Energy is at the core of Obama's first proposed budget for a number of government agencies, though.
Under Obama's budget, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s estimated $10.5 billion in new funding (a 34.6 percent increase from the 2009 budget) would go toward funding states, local governments and tribes to improve sewage treatment plants and drinking water systems, and to protect drinking water sources. These programs already received $6 billion in the recently approved stimulus package. The EPA budget also would provide families, communities and businesses billions to offset the higher energy prices expected if Congress passes legislation to control greenhouse gases. Starting in 2012, the budget proposes to invest $15 billion a year in clean energy.
The Department of the Interior's estimated $12 billion put more money toward windmills and solar panels so that the nation's public lands will produce cleaner energy and brace for climate change's effects on the land's plants and wildlife.
In addition to housing the poor, investing in poverty-stricken neighborhoods and helping eligible families refinance their mortgages into new 30-year or 40-year loans with lower payments, part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's proposed $47.5 billion (an 18.5 percent increase from 2009), in partnership with the DOE, would go toward helping low-income families improve the energy efficiency of their homes, a program the Bush administration wanted to eliminate.
Last week, Congress passed President Obama's $410 billion spending bill. Laden with earmarks — which Obama vowed to fight on the campaign trail — the measure met resistance on both sides of the aisle. Nonetheless, he signed the bill.
For now, it seems, Obama is sticking to his campaign pledges, which included helping to create 5 million new jobs by investing $150 billion over the next decade in new energy development.
Resources
Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2010
Office of Management and Budget, Feb. 26, 2009
A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise
Office of Management and Budget, Feb. 26, 2009
Inside Obama's Green Budget
by Andy Stone
Forbes, Feb. 27, 2009
Congress Sends Huge Spending Bill to Obama
The Associated Press, March 11, 2009
Senate Passes $410 Billion Spending Bill
by Michael Muskal
The Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2009
The Agenda: Energy and the Environment
WhiteHouse.Gov
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6 CommentsThis would be great if Obama was King of the world, but, I do not think he can claim that prize (though I am sure he is thinking about It). Until the jerk can convince the rest of the world to do the same our little effort will not amount to a grain of sand in the world of polution. He is charging our kids and grandkids and probbibly our great grandkids, and it will not make any difference here or abroad. So far Obama has set us up for the worst economic nightmare in the history of the world. I always said I did not want to get old in this country, well I guess I won't. I will get old in a China provence called USA.
March 17, 2009 1:05 PMWhy, oh why does he insist on immature and inefficient technologies like solar and wind? Why does he insist on biofuels that require large amounts of fossil fuels to produce, and require government subsidization (over $.50 per gallon for ethanol currently)? The most efficient means of generating cheap energy is nuclear, and it is ecologically friendly. Yet his bill actually hinders nuclear development by taking funding away from waste handling under the guise of “nuclear security.” And why does he buy into the carbon dioxide madness when the science does not support it? There is clearly an agenda other than better energy.
March 17, 2009 1:18 PMI have no problem with a desire to lessen or eliminate our dependance on foreign oil, that is an admirable goal & one you MIGHT get the public to buy into.
My problem is with the notion that 'green energy' will solve the supposed global warming problem. Please find someone who can explain where the electricity will come from to power all these electric cars? Didn't we just have brown-outs in the west a couple of years ago? We are going to need more than a 'smart grid'; we'll need a grid with much larger capacity. Also, check whith the folks in KY who were hit with a big ice storm this winter & some were without power for weeks. If they had electric cars they would have been stuck at home!
As for solar, consider this example. My home is heated for 6 months of the year by propane. Lets guess that 30 million BTU's are used annually. Now lets assume that I replace my propane system with an electric one with solar cells and batteries that are 100% efficient. I have now cooled the environment by a net of 30 million BTU's/year becasue I'm not burning anything & the sunlight I'm using to heat my home used to fall onto exterior surfaces and heat them. Now multiply this times billions of homes & businesses & tell me why this would not result in another ice age!
This planet is a complicated system that has previously undergone significant temperature changes whithout human intervention. I think it's foolish to believe that the minor changes in climate seen recently are solely the result of human behavior. 20 years ago in college a professor told us we would start to hear about global warming due to fossil emissions. He said to ask why we didn't see a significant spike in temperature as a result of the industrial revolution. No one has answered that one to my satisfaction.
March 17, 2009 5:50 PMOur elected officials finally got their wake-up call, by talking small business and balking at the conglomerates exuberant greed.
In fact, the small business is and it will be the back bone of this country and in the World, as well as the “Deliverers of Tomorrow”. [Bill Gates, then a micron startup and in-the-box, did deliver out of his garage today’s technological revolution. Today, there are others like Bill's micron start-ups; still in-the-box but are inventing out of their garages the Science Revolution of tomorrow, however unrecognized].
Indubitably and inevitably, this country and the World will need those micron start-ups out-of-the-box and hopefully soon, before it is too late, respect them as the deliverers of tomorrow, rather than trashing them out; which has been the occurrence for the past decade. [Construed as the small business and creators of jobs]. The choice is up to all.
"The thinking goes that ... enough Americans are willing to modify their lifestyles..."
A key quote from the article.
I'm retired, but in my misspent youth was a physicist, and my son is an engineer working in an energy-intensive basic industry. We're probably better placed than most to understand the impact of what is happening now in the name of environmentalism.
The public have been fed a mix of half-baked science, moon-bat economics, leftist propaganda, and lies. The behind-the-scenes work is going on right now, preparing to tax and regulate the cost of energy and many basic materials up to untenable levels. The EPA is collecting the data from industry, preparing to "regulate". My son is checking over the calculations in another report due to be sent in.
The recently hyped "Smart Grid" is basically central control of your power consumption, at home and work, in real time (forced rationing). A partial system is already being quietly promoted as a voluntary cost-saving feature, misrepresented of course, to homeowners here where I live. You can get it installed today.
Remember Jimmy Carter's sweaters and the "turn down your thermostat to 68" stuff from the 1970s? This time it is intended to be "turn down everything, right down to the food supply", and it won't be voluntary. (How could it be, and succeed?)
Oh yes, we are going to "modify [our] lifestyles" all right. But, the "Americans are willing" part is the problem. In a democracy we're all going to don hair shirts and go live in caves? Voluntarily?
This won't fly with "Americans", unless we lose democratic control of our government (tyranny), or, more likely, our industrial capacity to produce energy and materials is damaged beyond recovery before we realize what is happening. Future profits and taxes are already committed to pay for the shutdown and cleanup (destruction) of our "old" industrial base (you know - the one that exists and works.)
Intelligent and thoughtful people of my aquaintance are preparing for a new dark age. I'm more hopeful. But only hopeful, not optimistic.
Will the voters wake up in time? Will we overreact and lurch from radical environmentalism to no environmentalism? Will we be the first society in history to give up the benefits of science, technology, and industry voluntarily? Or will we do it the old-fashioned way, via a civilizational collapse?
Stay tuned. There will be amusing and picaresque events on a global scale, and many opportunities for schadenfreude - as long as you ignore the misery (including your own) and are sufficiently cynical.
Oh, and don't expect industry to object. They LIKE regulation. It creates and sustains monopolies. They also think that as their costs go up, so will their profits - profiting more while producing less. They've forgotten who pays and how they pay, and that the ability to pay is limited by total economic production, which is supposed to go down - a lot. They each think that they will survive to be smaller fish, but in a much smaller pond.
Industrial management is nearly as deluded as the populace in general. Most don't get it yet - that this isn't their father's environmental regulation. (Or that their father's Oldsmobile is not the last technological comfort scheduled to disappear.)
March 19, 2009 3:16 PMBiolfuels are ready , and LATE for even such Midwestern state areas as Illinois-always intentionally behind taxing overlord layers of local governmental greed. No biofuels there where YESTERDAY needed, taking the burden off the nation.
Solar, where applicable as in West coast and Southwestern US doing okay, but bogged down in state budgets. Just like wind in those high-wind documented and mapped areas by ASES sources.
What's the matter with all you, that you can't persuade CA companies like Sun Run who already has local manufactures of solar panels in Arizona to SPREAD(You take it on), for a least rental(as they do out of CA Sun Run) or residential solar arrays outside CA.Are you still back in the "Nine Nations" of America. Get with it, call you local state chapter of the American Solar Energy Society today.
So, DIY, it's done easy with online research, design easy and DIY. But resist any carbon footprint tax of the Fed, for it is only another extra-profiteering on the part of the Fed using phony pretense of debt reduction. LOL.
October 2, 2009 10:18 PM
