There’s a bit of money, too, totaling about $100,000 from the federal stimulus package, aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Great Lakes Commission has been granted $99,740 to develop a set of “Best Practices to Accelerate Wind Power in the Great Lakes and Beyond.”

The end result will be a guide to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to protecting the environment, being sensitive to community concerns and … building wind turbines in the water.

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We’ve already discussed what the $10 billion in economic stimulus might mean for high-speed rail. But the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law by President Obama, also includes an increase in the tax benefit for many users of mass transit who can now save up to $1,000 a year or more on their transit commute. This represents a potential $440 a year increase in what they can save currently.

The Tax-Free Commuter Benefits, which let employees pay for mass transit tickets with pretax dollar, will increase the amount of pretax income that workers enrolled in employer-sponsored commuter benefits programs can use to pay for mass transit — from $120 per month to $230 per month.

“This law nearly doubles the savings employees can enjoy by using mass transit and sets us on a path to a future that’s both economically and environmentally sustainable,” said Larry Filler, President and CEO of TransitCenter and one of the key drivers behind this provision.

Employers that participate in the program will benefit as well. Companies offering the benefit can save up to an additional $100 per employee per year in payroll taxes.

According to the American Public Transportation Association, switching from driving to riding mass transit reduces CO2 emissions by 4,800 pounds per person per year.

After a recent trip to California, I was reminded what it is like to have a mass transit infrastructure that can take you just about anywhere you want to go. Unfortunately, the U.S. rail infrastructure has withered significantly since its zenith in the early twentieth century, and unlike many of its European and Asian counterparts, it has almost zero high-speed rail service, excluding the Acela Express between Boston and  Washington, D.C.

But things might be changing on the rail front, partly because of the machinations of an Obama administration steeped in the loco-centric history of the biggest rail hub in the country - Chicago.

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Thanks to the Bush administration, the current US deficit is over $1 trillion (not including the economic stimulus package). Obama plans to cut this deficit in half by 2013. Is this even possible?

President Obama has stated in discussing the economy:

No single piece of this broad economic recovery can, by itself, meet the demands that have been placed on us. We can’t help people find work or pay their bills unless we unlock credit for families and businesses. We can’t solve our housing crisis unless we help people find work so that they can make payments on their homes. We can’t produce shared prosperity without firm rules of the road. And we can’t generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control. In short, we cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing them all. And that is exactly what the strategy we are pursuing is designed to do.

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Imagine cars with no tailpipes and no direct carbon emissions into our atmosphere — powered by an electrical energy system getting cleaner by the year through Renewable Portfolio Standards in effect in California and across the nation.

More than a decade ago, I was one of the original owners of the EV1, an electric vehicle produced by General Motors (GM). When GM discontinued the series and reclaimed all of the EV1s, it was a major setback for the American car industry. Instead of leading the charge to create a new generation of vehicles - America fell behind.

Last year we woke up. Four dollar a gallon gas was the catalyst. The price has gone down since the spike, but I think most Americans understand we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and one of the keys is more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Today, San Francisco took an important first step toward creating the electric vehicle infrastructure of the future. This morning I unveiled the installation of electric vehicle charging stations in front of San Francisco City Hall. These stations - called Smartlets - are on loan to the city from Coulomb Technologies.

>>Read the rest of Mayor Newsom’s post at gas2.0

Image: Tim Hurst

Highlighting the renewable energy components of the economic stimulus package, President Barack Obama said in Denver on Tuesday that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not the end of the economic downturn, but rather the beginning of the end.

Obama signed the bill into law at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science where he later toured the museum’s solar-panel installation. Major energy portions of the stimulus include:

• A three-year extension to the tax credit for wind, which would have expired at the end of this year, and an extension until the end of 2013 for geothermal and biomass renewable-energy projects. The credit has been increased to 30 percent of the investment.
• $4.5 billion in direct spending to modernize the electricity grid with smart-grid technologies.
• $6.3 billion in state energy-efficient and clean-energy grants and $4.5 billion to make federal buildings more energy efficient.
• $6 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy systems, biofuel projects, and electric-power transmission facilities.
• $2 billion in loans to manufacture advanced batteries and components for applications such as plug-in electric cars.
• $5 billion to weatherize homes of up to 1 million low-income people.
• $3.4 billion appropriated to the Department of Energy for fossil energy research and development, such as storing carbon dioxide underground at coal power plants.
• A tax credit of between $2,500 and $5,000 for purchase of plug-in electric vehicles, available for the first 200,000 placed into service.

Concomitant with the signing of the stimulus bill, Mr. Obama also announced the launch of Recovery.gov which will be the online portal for these efforts. According to the President, the new website will be “publishing information about how the funding will be spent in a timely, targeted, and transparent manner.” Watch Mr. Obama’s Recovery.gov announcement:

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Putting profit above all else, these clowns have dirtied our nation’s air and water and have stood in the way of energy and fuel-related progress for decades.

With $62.2 billion in the latest version of the Economic Stimulus Package going to environmental initiatives, said fat cats will surely live a comfortable existence as they ease into their “golden years”, but the new energy czars will be leading the way deriving energy and fuel from such sources as; wind, solar, waves, algae, cellulosic ethanol, and much more…

…Leading our great nation to a clean, energy independent future!

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The conservative blogosphere, led by up and coming right wing-nut Michelle Malkin have been frantically pushing to label the stimulus bill the “Generational Theft Bill,” and impressionable republicans on the hill are echoing this ill-conceived branding quip. Generational Theft? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

Apparently in the eyes of these pundits and politicians all debt is not created equal…

When Bush nearly doubled the national debt from 5.7 trillion to almost 11 trillion dollars to fund the Iraq war and give tax cuts to the wealthy, that wasn’t “Generational Theft.” Even though we’ll be paying for his policies for years to come, he was investing in our future, and making the world a better, safer place.

>>See also: Who Wins with Passage of Stimulus? Google, of Course

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Water fountains in some L.A. schools tested up to 500 times the government level for lead, and high lead levels have been found in our capitol’s water system, but covered up with ‘science fraud‘.

In a nation that’s getting ready to distribute an economic stimulus package of astronomic size, where is the money to stop poisoning our kids?

The author of the exposé of the D.C. lead incident, professor Marc Edwards, an environmental engineer, had this to say: “There’s no question that lead in schools is a big national issue —especially in some of the older urban cities that have this old plumbing infrastructure.”

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Hmmm–pork (barrel spending) by definition, is spending for projects that will benefit a certain group of constituents.

This article in Grist highlights all who will benefit from the “green pork” in the package.

Regarding increased fuel efficiency Obama shares:

This is what they call pork. You know the truth. It will not only save the government significant money over time, it will not only create manufacturing jobs for folks who are making these cars, it will set a standard for private industry to match. And so when you hear these attacks deriding something of such obvious importance as this, you have to ask yourself — are these folks serious? Is it any wonder that we haven’t had a real energy policy in this country?

Regarding clean energy:

After decades of dragging our feet, this plan will finally spark the creation of a clean energy industry that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next few years, manufacturing wind turbines and solar cells, for example — millions more after that. These jobs and these investments will double our capacity to generate renewable energy over the next few years.

And regarding energy efficiency:

This will save consumers money, this will spur innovation, and this will conserve tremendous amounts of energy. We’ll save through these simple steps over the next 30 years the amount of energy produced over a two-year period by all the coal-fired power plants in America.

Americans with lungs, and a heating bill sure does cover a large group of constituents. Sorry folks, but spending that will do wonders to clean up the earth and positively affect all earthlings is not “pork”.

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The Barrasso amendment would exempt any project funded by the Economic Stimulus Plan from a normal National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) review.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency:

“The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to integrate environmental values into their decision making processes by considering the environmental impacts of their proposed actions and reasonable alternatives to those actions.”

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Spending in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on environmental projects being debated in Congress right now already includes $100 billion in ‘green stimulus.’ But because of the stated preference for so-called ‘shovel-ready‘ infrastructure projects, long-term infrastructure projects like mass transit and a smart grid may suffer.

The bill already includes spending for incentives for clean energy; the retrofitting of public buildings and public housing; low and moderate-income home weatherization; clean water and environmental restoration projects. But mass transit and smart grids require the kind of planning and long-term investment not encapsulated by that tidy new buzzword, ’shovel-ready.’

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A new campaign launched by Friends of the Earth calls for investing in clean options for transportation, not in building new roads.

The government’s new stimulus package is in grave danger of being hijacked by the road-building industry to redirect billions of dollars toward new roads that we simply don’t need. New Roads = New Pollution aims to mobilize grassroots activists to fight for a clean investment in our future.

“More roads mean more pollution and more dependence on oil—hurting our economy, security and climate. Investments in clean transportation alternatives, as well as road and bridge maintenance and repair, create more jobs than new road construction and help families save money on gas. Focusing an economic stimulus package on such clean investments should be a no-brainer.” - Colin Peppard, Friends of the Earth

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