Some time after he gets back from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, president Obama is slated to give a speech about his "new" jobs plan. Most likely, the plan will be a political exercise designed to help with Obama's re-election campaign rather than a realistic attempt to help the economy create new jobs. No matter how unlikely, one can still hope that Obama will actually do something that might help Americans find work. To that end, I will offer a few suggestions.
My first suggestion is that president Obama endorse a plan to create a domestic industry to produce vehicles that run on compressed natural gas. There already are American manufacturers who build cars, trucks and buses that run on CNG, but that industry is tiny. Natural gas, however, is the fuel of the future for a variety of reasons.
First, America has an abundant supply of natural gas. Indeed, we have more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil. As the natural gas gets produced, it will create hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs here in the USA. For example, the most recent projections are that just in the state of Pennsylvania where the Marcellus shale has been developed in the last five years, the natural gas industry has created about 140,000 jobs. This job creation has made Pennsylvania the big state with the lowest unemployment rate. Natural gas has also contributed to economic growth in Pennsylvania and has raised state revenue by over a billion dollars.
Second, unlike electric cars, natural gas vehicles already exist in economical commercial form. Many of the buses in New York run on CNG. This is true in many other transit systems. These vehicles run on fuel that costs less than one-third as much as gasoline or diesel. Thus, it would not be difficult to move ahead in a big way with the use of CNG powered vehicles.
Third, CNG is much cleaner than diesel or gasoline powered vehicles. Compared to electric cars which are actually fueled by buring coal at power plants, the environmental advantage is greater still. Switching to a CNG vehicles would reduce air pollution by over 40%.
Fourth, using natural gas would put billions of dollars into the US economy each year rather than sending it overseas to countries like Iran and Venezuela to pay for oil. The combination of lower overall costs and keeping the money in the country would be an annual boost to economic growth. It would also deprive many enemies of the USA of their economic base in the oil industry.
The big problem facing the natural gas vehicles is the lack of filling stations across the country. If one buys a gasoline powered car, there are stations almost anywhere to buy fuel. The lack of nat gas filling stations is a significant problem. Of course, the filling stations cannot be built quickly until there are sufficient vehicles to use the stations and make them profitable. It is a classic chicken/egg situation.
This is where the federal government comes in. Were the government to promote construction of filling stations and the use of nat gas vehicles, it could jump start the industry and gain all of the benefits discussed above. There already is pending in Congress a bill called the NATGAS Act which would do just that. It has a price tag of 5 billion dollars over two years. That amount is enough to move the basic infrastructure forward sufficiently to push natural gas powered vehicles ahead in a major way.
My first suggestion is that president Obama endorse the Nat Gas bill. He can stop pushing electric vehicles which are uneconomical, polluting and unwanted by the market. Just the savings from stopping the electric car programs could more than pay for the NAT GAS act.
No comments:
Post a Comment