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By Root 761 0

high-temperature combat zones just for air-conditioning costs the Pentagon billions of dollars a year in fuel, transportation, security, and medevac expenses. For Afghanistan, fuel is shipped into Karachi, Pakistan, then driven eight hundred miles on terrible roads for more than two weeks through dangerous territory. A lot of U.S. soldiers have been killed in those and other fuel convoys. If our troops had had bases equipped with solar panels to run the air conditioners and keep the lights on, it could have saved money and lives and driven continued price reductions and technology improvements beneficial to the entire economy. Solar cells, a few backup generators with a small amount of fuel to run them, and relatively inexpensive batteries that store solar power for cloudy days could have made a big difference in Afghanistan and Iraq and still can in many less hazardous places where our troops are deployed, including at forts in the United States. In the future, even if we rely more on our special operations forces like those who got Osama bin Laden, we’ll still be called upon to help train security forces in other countries, we’ll still have bases across the world, and we’ll still need the military to develop and test new green technologies that will ultimately lead to similar money-saving, job-creating advances in the civilian economy.

THERE ARE AT LEAST THREE OTHER THINGS we could do in the energy area that would help the economy.

21. Speed up the issuance of new energy efficiency rules for the most common household appliances. President Obama asked the Energy Department to do this in February 2009. In the past, every time we have raised appliance standards, it’s increased employment and cut utility bills. This round is estimated to save consumers $15 billion a year or more on their utility bills for the next three decades.

22. Spend the rest of the rapid-rail money, but spend it where it will do the most good. The Energy Department planned to finance thirteen high-speed-rail corridors with $8 billion. After the voters elected antigovernment governors in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, those states returned the funds. Now other states want the money. Conventional politics would argue for spreading the money around, but I think it would be best to prove the worth of high-speed rail with adequate investments in heavily populated areas where there is a lot of highway and airport congestion. Our fastest train, Amtrak’s Acela, which runs from Washington to New York to Boston and back, travels about 100 mph slower than the fast trains that connect Japan’s most populous cities. If we build competitive, safe networks in crowded areas, passengers tired of traffic delays, plane delays, and commutes to and from airports in heavy traffic would flock to them. That would build support for expanding high-speed rail to other parts of the country and give us a chance to work through any problems with the new systems.

23. Support state and local innovations and encourage their adoption across the country. My foundation is helping Los Angeles to install 140,000 superefficient LED streetlights that will save the city $10 million a year in costs once the bulbs are paid for. Los Angeles is also reducing pollution at its ports with a “clean trucks” program that has increased sales of more modern, efficient trucks, but the city has been taken to court by the American Trucking Associations, which is asserting the right of companies to deliver cargo to the port in older, more polluting trucks. As noted earlier in this section, California passed legislation to allow building retrofits to be paid off through a line item on the owner’s property tax bill for up to twenty years, but Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are blocking federal legislation on the theory that the payment device is an encumbrance that would impact the value of mortgages it holds. If we put more people to work making houses more energy efficient, their value would increase, and so would the value of Fannie Mae’s mortgage portfolio. Also, there really is no downside risk. Because the