There are a lot of people who are enthusiastic about high-speed rail in the U.S., especially since Obama announced $8 billion in awards for high-speed rail projects.

On the other hand, there are a lot of skeptical people who think high-speed rail isn’t worth the investment; it won’t work in the U.S.; the proposals aren’t fast enough and they aren’t going to achieve what they are supposed to.

I’m sure the naysayers will not be won over with one report, but a relatively new one out by the U.S. Conference of Mayors finds that high-speed rail will be a big benefit for cities and will bring in billions of dollars.

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There are a lot of ways you can throw the blame after the horrible death of a comprehensive climate change and clean energy bill, and the seeming death of a national Renewable Energy Standard (RES).

You can blame:

• the Republican party and a broken Senate
• the media
• immoral billionaires
• Obama
• environmentalists
• a handful of Democratic senators (see below)
• the public
• greed and cowardice
• and probably more

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A new report out by the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), analyzing the economic and job creation impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), finds that the ARRA saved or created millions of jobs. Additionally, one of the areas where Recovery Act funds are stimulating the most private investment is the clean energy sector.

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Grist is reporting that the Obama administration has tried and failed to stop Fannie and Freddie from putting up a roadblock to low-cost clean energy financing through PACE programs. Here is my suggestion to make Fannie and Freddie stakeholders, to make PACE a win-win-win-win.

The administration had invested $100 million in PACE program funding, in which municipal local governments can finance long term investments in solar roofs in their communities, by fronting that money; backed by private investment bonds, to just those individual homeowners who choose to put solar on their roofs, and then paying it back with a 25 year property tax assessment on that homeowner’s property, to pay back the private bonds, to pay back the Feds.

It is a pretty safe bet, and a good investment in clean energy which costs every stakeholder nothing in the long run, as it replaces routine energy bills that would have been paid to a utility otherwise.

Each time the house is sold over that 25 year PACE loan, the monthly solar bill is assumed by the new owners, and because the solar roof reduces or eliminates the electric bill, the new owners pay the same or less than they would have for electricity,  if they had stayed with their utility.

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Obama announced in his weekly address this week that the Department of Energy has awarded two solar companies, Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing, nearly $2 billion as “conditional commitments from the Recovery Act.”

Abengoa Solar is to build one of the largest solar power plants in the world in Arizona with its portion of the money, creating approximately 1,600 construction jobs “with over 70 percent of the construction components and products manufactured here in the USA.” The plant will produce enough energy to power about 70,000 homes when completed.

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A new report out by the International Energy Agency (IEA) makes it clear that if we just stopped subsidizing the fossil fuel industry (or, at least, subsidized it a lot less) we could significantly cut climate change pollution.

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Thanks to a small transformation in federal transportation policy since Obama took office, cities around the nation are looking at the real possibility of creating new streetcar lines within the next year or two.

In a series of momentous moves, the Obama Administration has made it easier for cities to start or expand streetcar lines. The crux of the changes come from the understanding that streetcars are not just about saving people time, they are also highly useful in building an attractive urban landscape, stimulating and channeling investment and growth into the urban core and into other specifically targeted areas of the city, and attracting non-transit riders to efficient mass transit.

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High-Speed Rail (HSR) attracts a lot of positive attention because of its speed, of course. But is this speed only about saving time and having fun? No.

It is about expanding economic competitiveness and improving social cohesion as well.

Research from Europe shows that we can praise HSR for doing just these things,.. there, at least. But how does this research transfer to the US situation.

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On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced $600 million in awards for 191 transit projects across the nation. The transit projects are aimed at transforming the nation’s infrastructure and creating thousands of jobs.

With this announcement, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) met its ambitious deadline of awarding 100% of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding for transit by March 5, 2010.

In total, since the ARRA was announced by Obama in February, 2009, the FTA has awarded 881 grants totaling $7.5 billion.

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I think it’s commonly known now that Obama is quite supportive of nuclear power. He mentioned it prominently in his State of the Union speech as a form of clean energy (“to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country….”). Now, he has announced over $8 billion in loan guarantees to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia (“scheduled to be the first U.S. nuclear power plant to break ground in nearly three decades”) and has proposed $54 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power plants.

Of course, it didn’t take long for environmentalists, economists and others to jump on all of this and call it a bad idea, (see: “Obama’s nuclear error: $54 billion in loan guarantees make little policy or political sense“, “5 Reasons Why Nuclear Energy is Even Worse than Clean Coal“, “Next in Line for a Bailout: The Nuclear Industry?“, “There’s a New Drive for Nuclear Power, But It’s Still a Financial Dead End“, “The loan arranger: Obama triples budget for nuke loan guarantee program… but hasn’t seen a single promising application in two years“).

Energy Secretary Steven Chu decided to respond to some of these concerns on Facebook, explaining the administration’s rationale for supporting nuclear.

Of course, the debate is not over. And now, to try to stop the new nuclear reactors in Georgia and others from being built, Friends of the Earth is running very eerie TV ads on the topic (one above and another one below).

“Even if nuclear reactors weren’t top terrorist targets,” the one above asks, “even if radioactive waste didn’t remain deadly for ten thousand years, even if you wouldn’t mind radioactive waste passing through your town, how would you feel about exposing your family to a potential radiation accident? Tell President Obama: ‘No bailout for new nuclear reactors. They’re just not safe.’”

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