Against Austerity: There's No Time Like the Present for Massive U.S. Investment in Energy Efficiency

But a temporary spike in government spending might be the most effective way to boost demand for goods, services, and labor in the face of lingering U.S. economic malaise – and at a relatively low cost.

Of course it is. And it should include transportation, education, energy, communication, water, and waste infrastructures. It should not include tax cuts or direct aid to states increases. The aid to the states will come in the form of increased tax revenues from the economic activity of the infrastructures projects as they multiply through the economy. Energy efficiency is a significant portion of the energy infrastructure investment. But this also needs to include distributed generation of electricity and fuels. The fuels portion overlaps with waste management since much of our waste can be processed in a number of ways to produce methane and other gas and liquid fuels with existing technologies (composting with methanogenic bacteria and pyrolysis using concentrated solar ovens). This would also overlap with local jobs by creating a market for native vegetation to feed these processes. This would created tens to hundreds of thousands of permanent local jobs all across the country in the harvesting, transporting, and processing of this biomass material and the fuels that result.