"Green Building Can Lay a Fast Foundation for Economic Recovery"

I wonder if greening the country could drive a recovery the way that computing technology drove the last one. Society can change. In my lifetime I've seen smokers and non-smokers exchange places. It used to be that someone who would be offended by being around smokers would have been driven to take their coffee breaks outside, huddled in the chill air with the other nuts. I wonder if the same can be said for green living.

I would think the US would have to develop technologies which would be desireable on a very broad scale, somewhat complex and exportable. I don't know of anything on the horizon which might fit those criteria, though.

Manufacturing solar panels won't be necessarily done domestically, but their installation would be. The cost of the oil and gas they save would be local. The cars might not be local, or might be but be produced by people not earning a living wage, but again the fuel saved would be a local gain.

Nuclear power plants will be built just as soon as nuclear power is shown to be reasonably less expensive than that produced otherwise. When that happens public sentiment will not care one whit about anyone in Nevada and Yucca Mountain will be stuffed with waste. (Some Conservative will suggest that the solution to pollution is dilution and that after filling that cavern it be nuked. THAT solves all problems for them.)

It would be an interesting result of the greed which got the US into this mess. Those same people have said we can't afford green and we can't afford to tackle global warming. Maybe in a couple of ways we can't afford not to.

Arf