Understanding Government

Nicholas Kristof had a thought-provoking piece over the weekend in the New York Times pointing out how reckless politicians are hurting America from within:

The biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

Motivated by ideology rather than practicality, some members of Congress are blind to the way their position will actually make America weaker, and how their “budget-cutting” stance will actually end up forcing the government to spend more (to finance debt payment at higher interest rates, for one). (more…)

Government can and should be at the center of innovation along with private industry.  The market is more nimble, the market is more responsive, and the market is more reactive.  But government can be the convener, the coordinator, and  the patriotic core driving projects America needs.   Tom Friedman’s New York Times column about an exciting group of alternative energy innovation centers (called Energy Innovation Hubs) proposed by the Department of Energy shows how “faceless” government agencies can work at the forefront of infrastructure change in this country.   Mini-Manhattan Projects devoted to peaceful production of energy, bringing together private industry, university researchers, and the best engineers the country has available?  A program like this would show us all that we can still solve problems.  And it might even work.

You might have missed this one over the summer, but it’s worth a look:  The Nation‘s Christian Parenti looks at one way government can quickly and easily move the economy greenward.  He calls it the Big Green Buy, and the idea is simple:  Instead of looking for breakthrough environmental technologies (which are up against massive obstacles we often ignore), the federal government should use its purchasing power to support green technologies that already exist and start saving energy and money. (more…)

The Washington Post’s Michael Shear and Steven Mufson report on the Energy Department’s guarantee of $8.3 billion in loans for two nuclear reactors in Georgia:

By helping to finance the construction of the reactors — the first new U.S. nuclear power units in more than 30 years — Obama is hoping to jump-start his efforts to pass comprehensive climate-change legislation, which has stalled in Congress in the face of GOP opposition.

The president is also casting the nuclear initiative as a centerpiece of his plan to produce clean-energy jobs, although construction on the two reactors would not begin for more than a year.

Or not. As I reported in my story on a possible “clean coal” power plant in rural Illinois, the wisdom of these Energy Dept.-funded programs is unclear absent global warming legislation. (more…)

Mike Grunwald’s TIME portrait of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu starts far afield — in China, where Chu had the chutzpah to lecture Chinese scientists about their country’s energy problems. It goes back pretty far as well — to Chu’s childhood on Long Island where both Chu and one of his brothers were, for a time, high-school dropouts . . . though all three Chu sons have gone on to significant careers. Chu earned a Nobel Prize in physics while at Stanford, and then cemented his reputation as the head of the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Of course, since Chu got his start at the University of Rochester (which Grunwald, in a fit of temporary madness, describes as the place Chu “settled for”) it’s no surprise he has gone on to a spectacular career.

But what Grunwald’s irreverent and tightly-worded profile (Chu spent “spent phone-monopoly money” at AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey) shows most of all is that President Obama’s chose for energy secretary a creative and hard-driving soul, one whose intellectual abilities and interest in fixing things bode well for his work at DOE.

Chu is “retooling a sclerotic department to shell out about $39 billion worth of short-term stimulus projects;” he’s “pushing investment in wind, solar, and . . . a smarter grid to exploit them;” and he’s facing up to the challenges of Washington, D.C., where “a Nobel Prize winner’s opinion is just another opinion.” His idea is for U.S. energy policy to be “like Wayne Gretzky . . . positioning itself where the puck is going to end up.” A government agency that aims to be at the forefront of change? We could use a couple more cabinet secretaries with that kind of ambition. -NH