FutureGen Project Future Bleak
One day after President Bush’s State of the Union speech stated, “Together we should take the next steps: Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions” the Illinois-bound FutureGen project looks to be in serious doubt. FutureGen was a huge win for the State of Illinois that was to be heavily funded (~$1.8 billion) by the U.S. Department of Energy. The basis of the project is just like Bush stated on Monday night, it’s a coal-fired power plant that will push the carbon emissions deep into the earth. The plant could not only burn the “good” coal, but also the sludge and dirty coal that a typical power plant does not burn. The carbon then returns to the soil and all is good (very debatable premise).
We first talked about FutureGen in mid-December and were excited about the prospects for Illinois and the country, for that matter. The day after Illinois was picked as the site, there were immediate doubts to its future. Now, a little more than a month later and the day after the State of the Union, it looks even more bleak. The question is whether this is being killed because Bush’s home state of Texas was the runner-up or truly because of funding issues.
“The [Energy Department] has turned its back on us,” charged U.S. Rep. Timothy Johnson, a Republican whose district includes Mattoon. “We played by their rules. … Secretary Bodman’s response this morning was a slap in the face.”
Johnson said Bodman told the group that he planned to disband FutureGen and go “in another direction.” At one point, Johnson and Bodman snapped at each other. At another, U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat, told Bodman that “the first action taken by the president after the State of the Union was a series of broken promises.”
Source: Chicago Tribune
“I don’t get how we’re the wealthiest nation in the world and we aren’t making bigger changes.”
That depends how you measure wealth. Most of us would be more impressed by the guy with the $500,000 house than with the guy with the $200,000 house, though we might change our mind when we realised that the first guy had a $600,000 debt on his house, and the second guy just $50,000.
US GDP is about $15 trillion. US public debt is over $9 trillion, private consumer debt of all kinds about $12 trillion. So total debt is 130% of GDP. Now, the US has had that level of debt before, but at the time the US government ran a budget surplus, so it had spare cash to pay off the public debt, and the country had a trade surplus, so foreign money was coming in to pay it all off.
But now the US government has a $1 trillion deficit, and the country has a $1 trillion trade deficit. So not only do your debts exceed your total GDP, but you’re spending $2 trillion more than you have coming in.
About $1 trillion in all goes to your military, by the way. Officially it’s $480 billion, with $145 billion set aside for “the Global War on Terror”, but another few hundred billion is hidden in other departments; for example $24 billion goes to the Department of Energy for them to build and maintain your 10,000 nuclear warheads.
It costs more to lose a war than it used to.
I don’t see how the US can reasonably afford more spending on things. You have to cut back in other areas. Now, certainly there are many areas you could cut back without in any way hurting the country, and in fact it’d probably help you a lot.
But the point is, you’re not as well-off as you imagine. Your economy going arse-up is one of the things I see in my crystal ball this year.