Green Project

Yesterday, Representatives Waxman and Markey, Chairmen of the House Energy and Commerce Committe and Energy and Environment Subcommittee, respectively, introduced draft energy legislation.  The ambitious bill lays out a sweeping agenda for energy reform that shows the intensity of commitment in this Congress to energy reform and dramatically increases the chance for passage of important energy legislation this year.  Today, the White House endorsed the legislation, further increasing the chances of action.

Key proposals include a cap and trade system to reduce emissions 83% by 2050, modernization of the grid, a renewable portfolio standard and support for new energy technologies including the politically important one of clean coal.  Coming on the heels of the major investments in clean energy included in the $787 billion ARRA legislation passed earlier this year, America is on the verge of the largest transition in energy priorities in our history--away from carbon based energy--toward new cleaner forms of energy.

Speaker Pelosi has already signaled her intent to move the legislation forward in the House where it will likely pass.  As usual, the key battleground will be the Senate where cap and trade legislation appears to be about four to five votes short of the 60 needed for cloture.  If cap and trade falls short, the Senate could move forward on the energy portions of a bill.  However, this would weaken the US negotiating position in Copenhagen next year.  Bringing a few more Senators on board is thus the key to comprehensive action.

The four titles of the bill map the major countours of the energy discussion, support for clean energy and clean technology including electric cars and a modernized grid, energy efficiency, a cap and trade system to limit heat-trapping pollutants and a transition title to minimize the disruptive impact of change this large on industry and consumers.

In addition to the Waxman-Markey bill, a variety of bills on the smart grid, grid modernization, renewable fuels, energy writ large and the reduction of carbon emissions through cap and trade or a carbon tax are also in play.  Some, such as Senator Harry Reid's transmission bill and Senator Bingaman's energy legislation have the imprimateur of highly influential legislators. 

While the Waxman Markey draft legislation is not designed to be the final say and leaves some details unspecified, we at NDN look forward to working with these leaders, the Administration and others to advance the legislation's critical energy goals.

The time has never been more ripe for moving America and the world decisively away from the carbon-laden fuels of the 19th and 20th Centuries toward a new, low carbon, renewable energy future.  That, in turn, should help drive the next great wave of economic growth one would expect from a major leap forward in the single most import imput--after people--in the economy, energy.

In his February 24 speech to Congress, President Barack Obama asked Members “to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.” So yesterday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman took the first step by introducing his cap-and-trade plan. Yet sometimes, the political sands shift underneath a policy approach that was once viable, even embraced broadly, and its chances of becoming law ebb away. Until the media and the public make the connection between the policy and the new environment, the approach becomes a dead policy walking. It happened to Social Security privatization and the flat tax -- good riddance to both -- and now it appears to be overtaking cap-and-trade.

Cap-and-trade combines a regulatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions with a market-based scheme to trade as financial instruments the “permits” to produce those emissions. For all of cap-and-trade’s initial promise as an answer to climate change, the current financial crisis has made its vulnerabilities painfully clear. The strategy would have the government create trillions of dollars in new, asset-based financial instruments. These emissions-right-backed securities, like their cousins, mortgage-backed securities, also would throw off a host of new derivatives to be profitably traded by the “professionals.” Unsurprisingly, cap-and-trade’s fiercest promoters include Wall Street institutions that see emissions-permit trading as a lucrative new market that could earn them billions in new fees, commissions and, while it lasts, speculative gains. But after Wall Street’s meltdown, the proposition for another round of the financial merry-go-round that produced the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes seems either very naïve or very cynical.

That’s not the only tricky problem facing cap-and-trade. The other part of the policy’s design, the hard cap on emissions, ensures that the prices of the permits will be very volatile. Here’s why. The cap in cap-and-trade is set as a percentage reduction in annual emissions, figured from some baseline. The problem is that no one can forecast with precision how much energy American businesses and households will need from one year to the next, because no one knows how cold the winter will be, or how hot the summer, or how fast the economy will grow a year from now. When energy companies see that demand is going to outpace the forecast, so they will need more permits to keep on selling energy, the price of those permits will rise sharply. It’s not just theory: We use a small-scale cap-and-trade program to reduce the emissions that produce acid rain, and the price of those permits moves up and down an average of more than 40 percent per year. In the same vein, Europeans adopted their own cap-and-trade system for energy emissions a few years ago, and the price of their permits has moved up or down by an average of 17 percent per month.

For years, economists have worried that this basic feature of cap-and-trade would produce new volatility in energy prices. They’ve also cautioned that the result would likely be less investment in climate-friendly fuels, since no one would know what the price of their carbon content would be. Now there’s another, equally serious problem: The unavoidable volatility of the prices of emission permits also would attract furious financial speculation, since speculators live off of volatile prices. And we now know the risks that we all run when rampant speculation occurs in financial instruments tied to our economic foundations, such as housing -- or energy.

Like the excesses that helped create our current crisis, the financial markets for emissions permits also could well produce serious insider trading and manipulation. That’s because the final purchasers of the permits, large energy companies and utilities, would see shifts in demand for the underlying energy coming before anyone else. This information would create golden opportunities for insider profits and market manipulation, and erecting a “Chinese wall” inside the companies to segregate the production division from the trading division would work no better than it has on Wall Street. That may explain why until its own collapse, Enron was a prominent advocate of cap-and-trade.

The only reason to play another round of Russian roulette with the economy would be if cap-and-trade were the only way to address climate change. Happily, it isn’t: Many economists and some politicians support the major alternative, carbon-based taxes with rebates. This approach would create no new financial instruments to trade and abuse, and produce no additional price volatility, because the price of carbon would be set. It also would be relatively simple to administer and enforce. And it can be designed to recycle its revenues in payroll tax reductions or rebates. In this way, the carbon tax would change the relative price of different forms of energy, based on how much damage they do to the climate, while protecting people from the additional, direct costs of the tax itself. The revenues could also be recycled as a flat payment to each American household, providing relatively more help to low and middle-income families. The policy’s only real weakness is that it has no cap. But the tax rate could be adjusted periodically if actual emissions exceed its goal. And modeling shows that a carbon tax of about $50 per-ton of CO2 would produce slightly larger reductions in emissions than last year’s leading cap-and-trade proposal, the Warner-Lieberman bill.

For years, many politicians and environmental leaders have believed that any kind of tax to deal with climate change would be dead on arrival. That may be changing, especially if the tax is paired up with rebates to take away much of its political sting. More importantly, the costs and lessons of the financial crisis may effectively swamp the prospects for cap-and-trade. If cap-and-trade has become a dead policy walking, those who care deeply about climate change will find that a carbon tax system has become the last, reasonable policy standing.

The gutting of the US auto industry is a negative development for the economy, the consequences of which have not, I believe, been fully thought through.  And the contrast between the treatment of banks and the auto industry gets to the crux of what underlies at a very deep level our current economic malaise and long term prospects for recovery.

Further on this subject, the cover article in the current Harper's by Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago lawyer, explores how both the financial and manufacturing crisis stem from a single cause, the elimination of contract rights and usury caps protecting people in recent years that have seen credit card rates jump from a few percent to 30% or more. Usury or excessively high interest rates, Geoghan points out, is something that societies have regulated since Biblical days for good reason.  Sky high interest rates simultaneously impoverish those at the bottom while monopolizing capital at the top in the pursuit of huge but inevitably unsustainable profits.  Echoing Kevin Phillips argument that  declining societies turn to finance as the only way to support--if temporarily--excessive consumption, Geoghan describes how the prospect of absurdly high returns siphoned capital from productive sectors leaving us doubly impoverished.  He writes:

Some people still think our financial collapse was the result of a technical glitch--a failure, say, to regulate derivatives... In fact, some New Deal-type regulation was actually intoduced in recent years...think of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  The problem was not that we "deregulated the new Deal" but that we deregulated a much older, even ancient set of laws.

The first of these were contract rights.  "As one company after another "reorganized" in Chapter 11 to shed contract rights, working people learned that it was not rational to count on those rights and guarantees, or even to think in these future-oriented ways.  No wonder people in our country began to live for the moment and take out loans and start running up debts.

And then we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter's term, and which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it to us in law school.  That's when we found out what happens when an advanced industial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates.

Here's what happens: the financial sector bloats up.  With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking.  When banks get 25 to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits like auto manufacturing.  ...  What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor and the banks?  In the United Sates, we shrank manufacturing.  We got rid of labor.  Now it's just the banks. 

Geoghegan's unusually provocative article is worth a read.  More broadly it raises an important question.  Will the United States undertake real reform to strengthen contract rights, limit usury, downsize our financial sector and upsize our productive base.  This is an outstanding opportunity for meaningful reform to address the middle class impoverishment that, as NDN has long noted, lies at the root of our current crisis and whose reversal is also critical to our democracy.

Yesterday, the Obama Administration's task force on the auto industry concluded that America's auto industry must downsize.  Drastically.  Cutting 50,000 jobs at GM--the company's proposal--is inadequate, the Administration concluded in its review of the GM plan.  Nor can GM continue to sponsor so many brands which the task force dubbed distracting to management.  Instead, the Administration believes GM should pare back to perhaps Chevy and Cadillac.  As for Chrysler, the Administration ordered it to sell, ie. hand itself over to Fiat or file for bankruptcy.

At issue is the $6 billion or so the industry needs to keep going. 

Does anyone else notice the irony that this pronouncement came on the heels of a plan to provide 1 to 2 trillion dollars to banks to take bad loans off their books with no concessions, no plan for a turnaround, no paring of brands, no industry review or task force, in fact, nothing at all required?

I support bailing out the banks.  And I support doing it without micromanaging the business beyond changing management at the top--and securing warrants to reduce the cost to taxpayers--as I don't think government is well suited to managing businesses.

But I don't think anyone in the government including the task force after reading the industry's plans and conducting one or two trips to Detroit know more about cars than the car industry itself.  Nor does anyone in the government know more about cars than about the banking industry which the government regulates and has been bailing out--and therefore learning about--for over a year at the cost of trillions. 

One other thing about the government's dual standard for financial services and autos bothers me, namely wrapping condemnation of the auto business in environmental rhetoric. While the car industry took a hit from high gas prices last summer--an external shock it could not control--and has shown a consistent tin ear to fuel economy, its problems today have little connection to the environmental profile of cars.  From a strict profit and loss perspective, investing in hybrids and electric cars--though critical to a future that may no longer exist in the United States--is not good for present cash flow.

The primary problem facing all the automakers today, not just GM and Chrysler but Toyota, Honda and the rest is that sales have fallen off a cliff becasue of lack of financing.  Few people can pay all cash for a car.  And currently only those with sterling credit can get a car loan.  The auto industry, from Honda whose sales are down over a third to Chrysler, is a casualty of the financial crisis created by our banks.  But it and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in the auto supply chain will now have to pay a far higher price.

The Big Three have one problem the Japanese carmakers don't, their legacy healthcare and retirement costs from when times were good and unions were strong.  These have been exacerbated, however, by the stock market collapse--again a financial problem not of their making. 

If America is serious about reaping the economic benefits of a clean technology revolution that encompasses transportation--as I believe we must be and the President has indicated he believes we must be as well, we can't do it with a gutted auto sector.  By gutting the auto sector, we are only making ourselves more dependent on financial services as the chief engine of our economy--a strategy that has proven ill advised.

To rebuild our economy we need more engineering and less financial engineering.  And to do that we will need a healthy auto sector.  In a previous post I outlined some of the reasons that finance is advantaged in the policy process relative to manufacturing.  Until we address the anti-blue collar, anti manufacturing barriers in our policy process, we will not succeed in placing our economy back on a sustainable path to long term growth.

Today, as Republicans release a manifesto labeled as an alternative budget and President Obama meets with CEOs of major banks, we're pleased to present you with some helpful thinking on these issues.

First, though, I'd like to draw your attention to an April 1 NDN event: The G-20 Summit and Beyond: Challenges Facing The Global Economy. This event, to be held at NDN and hosted by NDN President Simon Rosenberg, will feature NDN Globalization Initiative Chair Dr. Robert Shapiro and Dr. Moisés Naím, the Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine. Click here to RSVP.

• The New Treasury Program: Sound Economics, Resting on Some Wishful Thinking by Dr. Robert Shapiro, 3/25/2009 - Shapiro points out that, since we've never seen this kind of crisis before, there's little way to know what will work to fix the financial system, but that doing nothing is unacceptable.

• Hope and Optimisim II by Michael Moynihan, 3/16/2009 - Moynihan looks at some recent developments in the financial world and sees cause for cautious optimism. 

• Weekly Kos Poll, GOP Still at 16 Percent, Messaging the Economy by Simon Rosenberg, 3/14/2009 - The strongest argument for President Obama's economic plan is that, despite strong productivity and GDP growth over the last eight years, the typical American family saw its standard of living decline.

• How Long the Recession Could Last - and Why It Matters So Much by Dr. Robert Shapiro, 3/12/2009 - Shapiro arguest that the Great Recession is anything but traditional, so there's little reason to expect a traditional recovery.

• Sustainable Funding for Sustainable Infrastructure by Michael Moynihan, 3/9/2009 - The old system for infrstructure funding is inadequate for creating a robust, clean infrastructure driven future.

• GOP Economic Policy as an Exercise in Grief Management: Denial, Anger & Rush Limbaugh by Dr. Robert Shapiro, 3/5/2009 - Shapiro puts on his psychologist hat and argues that the only explanation for the current Republican thinking on the economy is that they are angry and in denial about losing.

• The Utter Bankruptcy of Today's Republican Party by Simon Rosenberg, 1/28/09 - Rosenberg argues that Republican opposition to the economic recovery package represents the ideological bankruptcy of the party.

• A Stimulus for the Long Run by Simon Rosenberg and Dr. Robert Shapiro, 11/14/2008 – This important essay lays out the now widely agreed-upon argument that the upcoming economic stimulus package must include investments in the basic elements of growth for the next decade, including elements that create a low-carbon, energy-efficient economy.

• Accelerating the Development of a 21st Century Economy: Investing in Clean Infrastructure by Michael Moynihan, 10/18/2008 – NDN Green Project Director Michael Moynihan outlines a strategy for investing in clean infrastructure that will help create long-term prosperity.

• Back to Basics: The Treasury Plan Won't Work by Dr. Robert Shapiro, 9/24/2008 - As the financial crisis unfolded and the Bush Administration offered its response, Shapiro argued that, while major action was needed, the Treasury's plan would be ineffective.

• Keep People in Their Homes by Simon Rosenberg and Dr. Robert Shapiro, 9/23/2008 – At the beginning of the financial collapse, NDN offered this narrative-shaping essay and campaign on the economic need to stabilize the housing market.

• Making the Struggle of Every Day People the Central Focus of the National Debate by Simon Rosenberg, 8/17/2008 - As the 2008 presidential campaign entered a crucial phase, Rosenberg argued that political leaders must focus on raising the wages and incomes of Americans.

From the White House Press Office yesterday:

Today, President Barack Obama announced that Jon Wellinghoff, currently serving as Acting Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), will be designated as Chairman. 

This announcement, both welcome and expected, likely signals a new era in FERC's energy regulation. Wellinghoff is a visionary on grid issues, as demonstrated last November when he spoke at an NDN Green Project event in November entitled, "A Vision for a Modernized Electric Grid: Clean Infrastructure for a 21st Century Economy." 

Take a look:

NDN had major appearances in a great group of publications this week. First off, Simon was featured in Roll Call in a story about Al From stepping down from the DLC. Here's an excerpt from the piece:

Another group trading on its centrist ties is the NDN, a group previously known as the New Democrat Network that was started and is still run by former DLC field director Simon Rosenberg.

His organization, now a think tank focusing on demography, technology and the media, was once a political action committee engaged in trying to elect moderate Democratic candidates.

NDN has since retooled, Rosenberg said, although not entirely.

"There is no question our origins come out of the New Democrat movement and NDN has been long affiliated with the New Democrats," Rosenberg said.

"But we’ve also charted our own course. We've really tried to make sure that we've tried to understand the changes in America and build ideas and strategies and arguments around what is a very dynamic and fast-changing time."

For NDN, a "fast-changing time" in 2003 meant engaging with the net roots, the activist wing of the Democratic Party that raises money and interacts primarily on the Internet — and became a thorn in the side of more established players such as From.

Rosenberg said a fissure within his party cropped up in recent years over how moderates should align themselves on the issues with Republicans, whose centrist ranks in recent elections have been gutted. Rosenberg said that once Republicans "became unreasonable, the whole construct of the third way started to weaken.

"There were elements of the New Democrat movement that became leaders in the opposition to [President George W.] Bush and there were others who were slow to recognize how much damage they were doing to the country," he continued. "That became a huge dividing line in the family."

Finding common ground with people "whose ideas are wrong and bad for the country," Rosenberg said, "is not a virtuous act."

Rosenberg wrote the forward to Jerome Armstrong and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas’ best-selling 2006 book "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics."

As evidence of the rift that still exists between From and others perceived as the party's establishment — a divide originating with moderate Democrats' support for the Iraq War — Moulitsas dismissed the idea of compromise.

"The notion that splitting the difference makes an issue moderate is patently absurd," he said.

Simon was also quoted in an excellent Alternet article about the prospects for immigration reform in the midst of an economic crisis:

But those with whom I spoke are optimistic that a slightly different coalition will hold together. Simon Rosenberg, director of the New Democrat Network, a centrist group that's been in the thick of the immigration debate, told me, "if people want to resolve these issues, they can." He believes a modest guest-worker program is key to winning broad support, including the support of a number of Republicans.

"Getting 5 percent of the workforce out of the shadows, giving them the opportunity to unionize, getting them minimum wage protections -- this is such an important goal for progressives that they need to be willing to accept some compromise," he said.

The original 2007 bill included a guest-worker program that would have allowed as many as 400,000 migrant workers, but an amendment halved that number, capping the number at 200,000 per year for two years. The guest-worker program was a key part of the bargain hammered out between McCain and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., in 2006.

Rosenberg fears that a bill without a guest-worker program may not earn the support of key members of the GOP, including McCain, who rightly feels a sense of ownership over the legislation. "It's going to be hard without McCain, because no Republicans want to be seen running to his left on immigration," Rosenberg said.

Kos also posted on DailyKos today about this same topic, quoting Simon and linking to NDN's report Hispanics Rising II:

There's no doubt that the system is in serious need of reform, as NDN's Simon Rosenberg summed up a month ago:

"Our broken immigration system is a national disgrace, yet another terrible vexing governing challenge left over from the disastrous Bush era. Legitimate workers have a hard time getting legal visas. Employers knowingly hire and exploit undocumented workers. Our immigrant justice system is a moral outrage. And of course, the scapegoating of the undocumented migrant has become the staple for right-wing politicians and media, giving them something to rail against as the rest of their agenda has collapsed all around them. It is long past time to fix this broken system and replace it with a 21st century immigration system consistent with traditional American values and the needs of our modern ideas-based economy."

Few would disagree with that assessment, the real contention is over the solutions. Nativists advocate a hardline against immigrants, but their loud and aggressive efforts have proven to be an electoral bust. On the other hand, Democrats have benefitted from an increasingly engaged, and increasingly Democratic Latino electorate. They're growing (PDF), they voted Democratic, and they expect action on this key issue. You see, for Latinos, immigration reform isn't an ideological issue, it's a family one. And you don't mess with family.

Next, Mother Jones had a write-up of our event last week with Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign's New Media Director and founder of Blue State Digital. From the piece:

On Tuesday, Rospars took part in a question-and-answer session about the impact of technology on politics hosted by the left-leaning think tank NDN. Rospars dinged the Republicans' much-criticized request for a proposal (PDF) to redesign its website, laughing that his company, Blue State Digital, certainly won't be competing for the business. (Lefty BSD probably wouldn't respond to the RFP anyway, of course, but Rospars brought it up out of the blue—he was obviously referring to the widespread mockery it had already received.) He criticized the GOP's email list, boasting that the Obama campaign's 13-million-strong list was developed in an "organic" way. "We didn't purchase lists and just add people to our email list," he said. "The point of having a big email list isn't just to say you have a big email list. The RNC says they have a however big email list, but the point is to actually have relationships with people so they open the message, they listen to what you're saying, and they're willing to do something," he said.

Finally, Michael had a piece in Grist about creating a sustainable system for infrastructure funding - it's very important stuff, so be sure to check it out! 

Sam linked to it this morning, but this new essay by Martin Wolf, the first in a new series about the future of capitalism in the FT, is worth revisiting (and reading):

In the west, the pro-market ideology of the past three decades was a reaction to the perceived failure of the mixed-economy, Keynesian model of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The move to the market was associated with the election of Reagan as US president in 1980 and the ascent to the British prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher the year before. Little less important was the role of Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, in crushing inflation.

Yet bigger events shaped this epoch: the shift of China from the plan to the market under Deng Xiaoping, the collapse of Soviet communism between 1989 and 1991 and the end of India's inward-looking economic policies after 1991. The death of central planning, the end of the cold war and, above all, the entry of billions of new participants into the rapidly globalising world economy were the high points of this era.

Today, with a huge global financial crisis and a synchronised slump in economic activity, the world is changing again. The financial system is the brain of the market economy. If it needs so expensive a rescue, what is left of Reagan's dismissal of governments? If the financial system has failed, what remains of confidence in markets?

It is impossible at such a turning point to know where we are going. In the chaotic 1970s, few guessed that the next epoch would see the taming of inflation, the unleashing of capitalism and the death of communism. What will happen now depends on choices unmade and shocks unknown. Yet the combination of a financial collapse with a huge recession, if not something worse, will surely change the world. The legitimacy of the market will weaken. The credibility of the US will be damaged. The authority of China will rise. Globalisation itself may founder. This is a time of upheaval.

New York City -- This past Friday, Princeton University's PRIOR Center and the NYU's Rudin Center convened a conference on what's next in transportation. The speakers, who included Mort Downey, former Deputy Secretary of Transportation and leader of the Obama transition team for transportation, Tony Shorris, former head of the New York and New Jersey Port Authority,  current PA chairman Anthony Coscia, and others agreed that we are at a crossroads in transportation policy. 

On the one hand, there has never been more enthusiasm for new modes of transportation such as high-speed rail and new approaches such as vehicle mileage tolling and congestion pricing. Billions in the stimulus bill and the Obama budget for rail have set off a frenzy of excitement about building high-speed rail in the United States. At the same time, however, the old system of funding infrastructure, the Highway Trust Fund, fed by gas taxes, has never been under greater stress. With a new transportation authorization bill likely to move this year, we stand at a key juncture in U.S. transportation policy.

Transportation reform is vital to building a clean economy. Not surprisingly, therefore, much of the discussion at Princeton focused on the irony of trying to fund the reinvention of transportation out of a five-cents-per gallon gas tax -- at a time when reducing gas consumption has emerged as a national security, economic and environmental priority.

Currently, the Highway Trust Fund, built on nickel-a-gallon gas tax accounts for the lion's share of infrastructure funding in the United States -- not only for roads, but for mass transit as well. But the fund essentially depleted (having required a bailout last fall to stay solvent).  Additionally, with construction prices higher but gas usage falling, the gas tax now provides only about half the purchasing power needed to sustain our current system, let alone make improvements.

As a result, many people have been talking about switching to a Vehicle Mileage Tax or VMT as an alternative to the gas tax. A VMT would toll mileage, not gas, enabling the country to reduce gas consumption without starving its infrastructure. However, the "t word," as Mort Downey has described it, whether that refers to taxes or tolls, is highly controversial and recently White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs struck down a suggestion by new Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that switching to a VMT is on the table.

One alternative that would sustain historic levels of funding but would not provide funds for much new investment would be a dime-a-gallon tax. That would be the easiest -- if least imaginative -- fix.

A bolder idea is to create a national infrastructure bank as proposed by U.S. Sens. Chris Dodd and Chuck Hagel to tap private money for infrastructure investment, an idea endorsed by NDN. Indeed, the Obama budget would fund such a bank. However, in the current environment, private money is not as available as it was.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who spoke at NDN's clean infrastructure event in January, introduced Clean Tea legislation to tap 10 percent of revenues from a cap-and-trade system of the type contemplated by the Administration's budget for transportation. Given the key role of transportation in emissions and cleaner transportation in reducing emissions, this makes a great deal of sense. 

Everyone recognizes that the old system of a nickel-a-gallon tax combined with earmarks isn't working. There is a great appetite to reform the basis for funding infrastructure and this year, a real opportunity.

With new, frightening unemployment numbers out today, take a look at some of NDN's latest thinking on the economy. What government policies are needed to stabilize the financial sector? Why is the Republican minority so obstructionist? How should everyday Americans deal with their balance sheets?

• GOP Economic Policy as an Exercise in Grief Management: Denial, Anger & Rush Limbaugh by Dr. Robert Shapiro, 3/5/2009 - Shapiro puts on his psychologist hat and argues that the only explanation for the current Republican thinking on the economy is that they are angry and in denial about losing.

• Protect Savings, Prevent Bank Runs Now by Michael Moynihan, 3/3/2009 - Moynihan advocates for fully insuring deposits to prevent panic.

• Spend? Save? The debate continues by Simon Rosenberg, 2/11/2009 - Building on a previous post, Rosenberg follows the growing debate about whether American families should be focusing on saving.

• The Utter Bankruptcy of Today's Republican Party by Simon Rosenberg, 1/28/09 - Rosenberg argues that Republican opposition to the economic recovery package represents the ideological bankruptcy of the party.

• A Stimulus for the Long Run by Simon Rosenberg and Dr. Robert Shapiro, 11/14/2008 – This important essay lays out the now widely agreed-upon argument that the upcoming economic stimulus package must include investments in the basic elements of growth for the next decade, including elements that create a low-carbon, energy-efficient economy.

• Accelerating the Development of a 21st Century Economy: Investing in Clean Infrastructure by Michael Moynihan, 10/18/2008 – NDN Green Project Director Michael Moynihan outlines a strategy for investing in clean infrastructure that will help create long-term prosperity.

• Back to Basics: The Treasury Plan Won't Work by Dr. Robert Shapiro, 9/24/2008 - As the financial crisis unfolded and the Bush Administration offered its response, Shapiro argued that, while major action was needed, the Treasury's plan would be ineffective.

• Keep People in Their Homes by Simon Rosenberg and Dr. Robert Shapiro, 9/23/2008 – At the beginning of the financial collapse, NDN offered this narrative-shaping essay and campaign on the economic need to stabilize the housing market.

• Making the Struggle of Every Day People the Central Focus of the National Debate by Simon Rosenberg, 8/17/2008 - As the 2008 presidential campaign entered a crucial phase, Rosenberg argued that political leaders must focus on raising the wages and incomes of Americans.