June 10, 2010, 4:00 pm

A Stimulus Package With No Jobs?

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Is it possible to botch stimulus spending on renewable energy projects? Florida and the federal Department of Energy have found a way, according to the Energy Department’s inspector general.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act authorized $3.1 billion in grants for the state energy programs, and the Energy Department allocated $126 million for Florida, a vast increase over the average of the previous few years, which was $1.4 million.

There were some rules. The state had to decide where to spend the money by Sept. 30 of this year and actually spend it by April 30 of next year. And the spending was supposed to preserve and create jobs, save energy, and increase renewable energy.

In a report released on Thursday, the inspector general said that Florida had given $8.3 million in rebates “related to solar energy projects that had been completed prior to the passage of the Recovery Act.”

Florida had had its own rebate program, which ran out of money in early 2008, and it had a backlog of people waiting to collect. But the work had already been completed, so no jobs were created by Florida’s use of the money in this fashion. Still the Energy Department approved the expenditure.

At least that money was spent quickly. The state had set itself a deadline of pinpointing where all of the money would be spent by the beginning of this year, the audit said, but missed its deadline, partly because it chose projects that turned out not to be eligible.

The Energy Department office that oversees the program agreed with the findings but pointed out that no state energy program had ever encountered the “scale of funding” provided under the Recovery Act.

The state itself noted it was having some bureaucratic problems. For example, allocation of the money was subject to the review of the Florida Energy and Climate Commission, which is a volunteer body that meets only monthly.

And Florida complained that while the Energy Department had found one project ineligible last December, it had approved the same project two months earlier.

It involved the production of ethanol from algae, but the Energy Department eventually disapproved the grant because the company seeking the money had not begun commercial production.

Flooding a small state program with federal cash exposed another weakness. According to the inspector general, a single staff member was receiving rebate forms, recording them, approving the payments and then mailing the checks.

These duties should have been separated among several people “to minimize the possibility of theft,” the inspector general said. (No actual theft was identified.)

But the Florida program “has historically had a small staff,’’ the state replied. Now that it is doling out larger sums of money, those jobs are split among eight people, it said.

Most recently (2009) the world was captivated by colors and 3 dimensional images in James Cameron’s AVATAR. Out on BlueRay on Earthday 2010 the movie builds an emotional love story around the human race invading and destroying a foreign planet Pandora and it’s people in search for the energy generating super coal Unobtainium. In our world Billions of tons of coal are mined from the Earth’s mountains in a very similar fashion to provide electricity to all of us each day.

In “The American President” Michael Douglas plays Andrew Sheppard a widowed President of the United States of America who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist. The movie is mostly about the romantic comedy of the President and his girlfriend however the climate message that underlies is that President Sheppard has promised his girlfriend he will introduce a climate bill to reduce carbon emissions in the United States by 20% by 2012 if she can generate the support of the house. What makes this even more interesting is this movie was released in 1995, years before Al Gore “made up” global warming.

When two soul mates are separated by two years in time and all that can bring them together is letters in a mail box that they can magically write to each other a global warming reference appears in the end when Sandra Bullock realizes how she can finally meet her true love Keanu Reeves in “The Lake House”.  Released in 2006.

Keanu Reeves is no stranger to movies that remind us that this planet is not ours and we should take care of it, especially when he plays the messenger of bad news in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” (2004) Believe it or not this move was actually a remake of the 1951 classic sci-fi film about an alien visitor and his giant robot counterpart who visit Earth. Keanu is also pretty good in the critically acclaimed hit, “Pointe Break”.

Al Gore’s warning is played out in more than charts in the action packed move “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004) when climatologist Dr. Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is drilling ice cores in Antarctica when a piece of the Antarctic Ice Shelf the size of Rhode Island breaks off which triggers a global climate change storm resulting in most of North America covered in ice.

Putting politics aside if you have never seen and Inconvenient Truth it is time to sit down and watch it with your family. I will be picking up a fresh copy of Avatar, on BluRay!

Image from NY Times / Peter Arkle

Bono. The global hero discusses his Top Ten ideas to propel us into a much better future and prosperous 2010. His #3 follows the recent climate conference in Copenhagen where the globe met to discuss world economic growth coupled with the prospect of sustainability. Click Here to read the full Bono Top Ten.

Excerpt From the NY Times:

In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now.

One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.) As a mild green, I like the idea, though it’s controversial in militant, khaki-green quarters. And yes, real economists would prefer to tax carbon at the source, but so far the political will is not there. If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated.

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Global leadership must take action to implement programs to promote or force energy efficiency, renewable energy, cleaner manufacturing standards and better recycling programs. Abundant Energy supports the organization 350.org and their cause. Watch their video to get a better understanding about their cause which is actually our cause.

Globally our climate depends on a bare minimum carbon rate of 350 parts per million. Each year, the economic growth of the United States, China, India and other developed and developing nations are adding to this number thus fueling the effects of global warming. Getting the attention of policy makers and the public is getting harder and harder.

Here is a (Safe for Work) video that might make some people pay a little closer attention to climate legislation thus adding more benefits to go solar now.