a light green stimulus

On Tuesday, President Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus plan. What does this new stimulus package appear to mean for the environment?

The stimulus is mostly a continuation of Cornucopian-Promethean thinking, although some of the funds are allocated wisely in term of environmental protection.
Firstly, the $286,869,000,000 for tax cuts is bad for the environment because it further promotes cancerous overconsumption of resources. One of the goals is to stimulate consumer spending, and this is after a decade long binge of consumers overspending. Tax cuts without a serious restructuring of incentives is not a long term solution to the environmental and economic crises.

But in the short term, I like some of the investments the government is going to make in the environment. My favorite is the $8 billion allocated for high speed rail systems, because I would really really like to be able to take the train while I'm back home in Iowa. The $11 billion for smart-grid is also pretty good, except to actually get a smart grid nationwide will cost something like $200 billion. There's also some money for research in renewables, but like I said before, the incentives just need to be restructed - something that puts a price on GHGs. Also many pieces of the stimulus include money for all kinds of efficiency - my sincerest hope is that efficiency money is spent wisely and effectively because I think it would be easy for agencies to lie and waste the efficiency money (counter intuitive, eh?). I like the several billion set aside for old-school style environmental clean-up, but I would prefer that money to clean up environmental problems is along the lines of "polluter pays." Many things are somewhat related to the environment in the stimulus, like money for NASA research.

The worst thing is the $3.4 billion for fossil fuel research, which sounds to me like clean-coal, tar sands, and off-shore drilling.