Michelle Wilde Anderson & Steve Weissman

(Originally published in the San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 6, 2009)

“The time for delay is over,” President-elect Barack Obama said recently following a meeting about energy and climate policy with former Vice President Al Gore and Vice President-elect Joe Biden. “We have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country in all 50 states to repower America, to redesign how we use energy and think about how we are increasing efficiency to make our economy stronger.”

To that end, the incoming administration has announced plans to fund capital projects like mass transit, electrical grids, sewer systems and public utilities. It will invest in jobs to design alternative fuels, build windmills and solar panels, and install fuel-efficient heating and cooling systems.

We need such efforts urgently. Yet if past is prologue, there is a great deal of work to be done to ensure that the federal government carefully weighs the distribution of its investments. Who will benefit, who will not? Who may be harmed inadvertently? Read the rest of this entry »