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“The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.”

This article ultimately warns Americans of the dangers of saving their hard-earned money. I was taken aback when I fully realized the predicament our nation is in. How can we continue living in a society that rewards consumers for taking unnecessary risks? And yet, how can we revive our economy without consumer-driven growth?

In a time where the economy and sustainability are the two largest problems the world faces, there is an inherent contradiction that we have yet to confront. Japan has shown that conservation, while more sustainable, can pull us even further into recession. But at the same time, we cannot be environmentally-, socially-, or (in the long term) economically sustainable if we don’t heed the necessary calls to conserve.

The issue is something that hasn’t been widely addressed. For our GDP to sustain the relatively consistent growth we have seen since the industrial revolution, we need to continually increase consumption (and thereby increase pollution and environmental degradation). This growth, however, is limited to the boundaries of our natural environment. When we reach our boundary, the constructs on which which we built our economy on will collapse.

Ultimately, a system dependent on growth cannot grow forever.

I do not believe we have yet reached that boundary, the end of consistent growth. Growth will be temporarily restored in the near future as we retrofit the current system to be increasingly efficient. I do believe, however, that we must address this issue before we hit the limit of our growth. We must rethink how the system works. This is vital for both our economic sustainability and our environmental sustainability. Some experts suggest that we “power down” our society. We need to slowly return our society to a general way of life that requires much less energy, muss less material consumption, and includes much more time with family and being more self-reliant.

Some models to look out for are the Chevy Volt (G.M.), which is due to arrive in showrooms in 2010 – the propulsion system (electric and gasoline-driven electric turbine) will also be featured in a wide range of truck and car models at the same time. The long awaited Prius and Insight models will also be unveiled by Toyota and Honda respectively. For the full list of new technology being introduced visit the previously mentioned article. The amount of new vehicles unveiled at the show is impressive. At this point, it seems that we could definitely see all-electric vehicles on the road by at least 2011. We’ve reached a very excited point in the automobile age.

According to James Kanter of the New York Times,

There will be 1.6 billion tourists traveling the globe by the end of the next decade. That is nearly twice as many than at present. . .

We are worried about the 2 Billion people in China and India owning cars. What will the impact be now that they are starting to fly?

On the other hand, Kanter also points out that tourism is a vital source of income for many developing countries such as the Dominican Republic. It has created many jobs for this island, which has few valuable exports and millions of poor citizens.

There is obviously no straight answer to this issue. However, one thing is certain: It takes incredibly large amounts of energy to move people around the globe. We are just starting to feel the climate hangover of a century of binging on virtually free and limitless energy. Rising energy prices may not be such a bad thing.

It is clear that a reduction in tourism will be a major hit on the global economy. Then again, maybe our economy is already too big for the earth – and the climate – to handle.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a similar trend occurred. This time, Americans were moving away from the inner suburbs and out into the exurbs, sometimes an hour to two hours from the existing urban core. Walmarts sprung up, McMansions grew from orange groves, cornfields, and apple orchards. Americans had lost community centered around small towns and quaint downtowns. During that time, the average urban population declined slightly and the exurbs expanded outward nearly 25% or more. Today, we are seeing a reversal trend; more young people are looking to live in the urban core, and American’s are yearning for a sense of community. David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist from the New York Times, recently described the faults in this kind of population dispersal in his article “This Old House.”

Brooks argues that if President Obama and his economic team attempt to pump large amounts of money into federal highway infrastructure as a way stimulate the ailing economy, he would have simply stuck a cork in a gaping hole. The article describes how a booming economy and financial stability can be more easily brought about and sustained by investing in mass transit, high-speed rail, and in development of vibrant town centers. If we continue to invest in sprawling suburbia, our long-term energy needs will never be met, and our overall economic and environmental sustainability will continue to deteriorate, especially as oil becomes more and more scarce.

Another article recently published in the Times called “New York City Grew, but Traffic Didn’t” describes how during New York’s recent booming years (2003-2007), the population of the city grew but overall traffic tended to decrease or remained flat-lined. The extra population and increased movement of people was absorbed entirely by the mass transit system, where air pollution and the amount of traffic actually decrease; the example shows how a sustainable living model can coexist with a booming economy and can actually keep the economy booming for a longer period of time as less money is wasted in traffic and on energy.

Interestingly enough, there is a blog dedicated to enlightening Mr. Obama on the evils of urban sprawl. The Blog is rightly called the End Sprawl Blog, and it is hosted by the official Barack Obama website. The author of the blog believes that Barack Obama has the chance to reverse urban sprawl by encouraging federal investment in Smart Growth and New Urbanist practices, as well as more investments in sustainable transportation like passenger railroads.

On another note, Tad Fettig, the Director of PBS’s acclaimed series Design ‘e2,’ recently sat down with an interviewer from wired.com to discuss the downfall of the American dream and suburb.

He said, “I think it is dead, and very worrisome. So many families have bought into it without factoring in rising fuel cost. The city is the future. Possibly, many smaller cities and large towns will help with smartly built mass transit, but I don’t think there are enough jobs to allow for a home/work life. I’m not sure. The computer age suggested a growing ability to work from home, but did not factor in the outsourcing and rising education of the rest of the developing world.”

Of course, Mr. Obama has been tauting investments in renewable energy as the key to our future economic upswing – but, what good are renewables if America’s virgin/green land is overrun with asphalt and strip malls and our overall energy bill continues to skyrocket because of this wasteful sprawl development?

Me neither; maybe it’s because I grew up without t.v., or maybe it’s because these ads NEVER EXISTED BEFORE!

I find it absolutely fascinating that the airwaves and t.v. minutes are being saturated with advertisements for “Coal, America’s Fuel” and “Heating Oil, Now That’s Comfort.” If you go to the American Coal Council’s website there’s a picture of. . . a. . . golf course. “Coal, The People Who Do Business on The Course.” The heating oil campaign is hitting hard here in New England because many people are realizing they can’t afford to heat their homes with oil so they are looking for alternatives.

The radio and tv must love the revenues, as these industries have never had to advertise in the past. Why? Because there were no alternatives and there was no public awareness of the damage these industries are doing to our planet and our future. They have been saying our ‘way of life’ depends on these resources. But I would challenge, which came first, the chicken or the egg? We now have the alternatives and thus the option of adapting our lifestyle to a new world, a world where we walk and ride bikes more and actually know the names of our neighbors, where we work in buildings and communities that were designed for us, not cars, and where our very ‘way of life’ does not threaten the very life of the next few generations.

Maybe the advertising is a sign of weakness. . . Or at least a changing marketplace, which is heartening.

The most important question is, should we continue to prepare for the worst? Are SUV’s a dying breed? Will electricity prices and corn prices continue to skyrocket? I am no expert in predicting the future, but I do think it is important to realize the broad reaching effects of a tighter energy supply. Electricty prices, for instance, never had time to correct for increased fuel prices. This winter we may see additional bumps in electricity prices paid along with higher prices for heating oil and natural gas.

It’s interesting how so many intricate connections there are in this world market. Take Wall Street for instance: they didn’t diversify, everyone got sucked into subprime mortgages, overstated their available cash, and got a little too tied into the real estate market. Look what happened when just one sector, the real estate market, crashed; too many eggs in one basket can lead to disaster. What a shame, as Lehman and Bear were two of my personal favorites, both because they have been very respectable banks and also happened to employ more than one of my recently graduated friends.

With a lot of investment opportunities up in the air or now bankrupt, where can we turn with our money? How can we best make our money grow? Pretend you’ve got the world’s energy sector at your fingertips. Imagine getting to ‘invest’ in our energy future, and your options are not just the fossil fuel generation options but the alternatives as well; solar, wind, biomass, wave energy, and more. Think of our energy sector as one giant investment portfolio. How would you invest?

The Op-Ed pieces, however, highlighted even more reasons that the gas tax holiday was an insult to the collective American intelligence, citing a letter written by some 300 American economists – that this short-term salve would do absolutely nothing to ease gas prices in the long-run; that the tax was an essential means of generating funds that we need to maintain our highways; that really, the parties that would profit from such a holiday would be big oil companies. Now, I know that more money for oil might actually mean more money for you, if you have a 401k in there. But the main point is that McCain and Clinton seized onto this policy because it sounded good, because it would put Americans under the impression that these two candidates wanted to give them some relief at the pump in time for summer getaways. That just kills. We have serious problems with energy, and we need actions to speak louder than words. While McCain was out campaigning for suspension of the gas tax, he oh-so-accidentally didn’t show up to Congress to vote for the extension of production and tax credits for renewable energy like wind or solar.

In the meantime, though, I’m glad that Barack Obama refused to support this gas prices head-fake, calling it like he saw it. I didn’t much like Obama prior to this display of brazen sanity, because I thought it was beyond presumptuous to run for the presidency without having completed a single Senate term. But hey – all I can really ask for is that politicians act as rationally as possible, and it seems as though so far, Obama tends to weigh in on the less-dumb side of most debates.

Summer went on without the gas tax holiday being enacted. People have had to take matters into their own hands, saving their bank accounts from the drain of high energy costs. My family bought a new, more fuel-efficient car, and soon after that I splurged on a bicycle. These personal choices were satisfying, knowing that we were doing the smart thing, despite government’s inaction. And then yesterday, when I met with a Tufts Economics professor, Gilbert Metcalf, I was happy to see a printout of the letter condemning the gas tax holiday on his door, with all 300-odd names below it. To my surprise and delight, there were a number of familiar names among the signatures, names belonging to my very own Economics professors. I walked in and commended Professor Metcalf for displaying the “We call bullshit” letter so proudly.

“Well actually, I was the one who orchestrated it,” he said, smiling. “I had supported Obama for quite some time, and when the gas tax holiday story broke, a couple of my friends and I decided to get this going. We didn’t even have to solicit signatures, they just kind of fell into our inbox.”

It’s been a tough summer, trying to elicit truth from between the lines of the screaming, story-starved 24-hour news networks. But perhaps, beyond the crazy media and the legion of Americans that might just have been hoodwinked by McCain and Clinton’s desperate ploy for votes, there is a cadre of real, smart people like those angry economists, who are ready. Ready to dispel the lies, stand up for what’s genuine, and get started helping us bring about the clean energy that we deserve.

That link does a decent job of explaining the bill if you are not familiar. Obama on the other had will probably place a tax on greenhouse emissions, which will help fund social reform programs. Either way, this will force a major shift in how businesses produce and transport products. For example, we might see a massive increase in rail transportation. Again, Warren Buffett was ahead of the curve by buying up rail lines all over the United States. We are also going to see a massive increase in infrastructure investment. I believe that this money will come from foreign investors because of the weak dollar. All the money that we are pushing out of the country will come back into our economy through the reformation of our infrastructure.

We are seeing all of this first hand in states such as Texas, California, New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. 80% of homes in Maine are heated by oil. This is a major problem. People will be forced to choose between having heat or food. The state government unfolded a relief program three weeks ago so that those without the money to heat their homes can afford it. The American lifestyle cannot be sustained without sustainable changes.

The idea of ‘green’ has been picking up serious momentum in the economy and media over the past year or so. Companies and individuals are discovering the cold, hard economic benefits of “going green.” These monetary benefits have been compounded with the already existing green benefits, the feel good benefits such as ’saving the world,’ ‘making a difference,’ or however you want to think about it. With the idea of going green suddenly picking up a whole heck of a lot more substance with this new economic boost, we’re seeing a rush to build, build, build!

To focus down the discussion a bit more, let’s stick to the energy sector. New markets are rapidly emerging all over the country as the price of electricity soars and renewable energy technologies begin to enter the mainstream. Another big reason for this opening of the market is due to the deregulation of the electrical utility sector, where energy companies convinced the government to deregulate the electricity generation and distribution. Utilities sold off their power plants and held on to the actual grid infrastructure like transmission lines and substations. Some psuedo-public companies sold off much of their distribution capabilities, or portions of the grid, to private companies and retained their generating capacity. Some public utilities, like municipal power and light companies, still generate and distribute to a certain degree. This allowed distributed generation into the market, such as utility-scale wind farms and solar arrays.

This open market, with rising electric prices and easy access to developers, has made renewable energy skyrocket in growth and also found itself the new darling of the media. Wind has definitely seen the largest increase in market share as it is currently the most cost-competitive with fossil fuel generation technologies like coal and natural gas. This green rush has been almost completely embraced by the media and society to the point of blind acceptance. Which is where we encounter our hiccup.

Here it comes. . . Who’s seen the movie “There Will Be Blood?” We’re dealing with the same forces in some parts of the nation, namely upstate New York and even in parts of the Midwest. The difference is that today, unlike the 1800s, we have a functioning legal system along with a streamlined communications network, the internet, and media. All this makes for a much more difficult task for wannabe energy tycoons/robber-barons. This green rush equates to hugely lucrative wind developments in a market receptive, but uneducated to the idea of green for wind developers, setting up an unfortunate, sticky situation.

Developers are like kids in a candy store with a pickle jar full of nickels. These developers, boosted by private investment, run around like crazy, grabbing everything in sight and throwing down a big pile of money on the cashiers counter; these developers may have gotten a bit too excited and moved just a little too fast. They have too much opportunity and too little restraint. Sitting outside on the park bench, surrounded by sticky wrappers, half-eaten ‘baby ruth’ bars, and in serious pain, the energy developers may be having second thoughts.

Mommy is not so happy either. The next thing you know there are thirty wind turbines spinning in your backyard and the next thing they know they’re being investigated by Andrew Cuomo, Attorney General of New York State, for anti-competitive practices and improper dealings with local town officials (read: bribing or corruption). While the investigation is ongoing and in our system you are innocent until proven guilty, one thing is for certain: Wind developers have put a bitter taste in the mouths of many New York State residents.

It is a shame the move toward wind in upstate New York has seen this hitch. New York is the perfect place for wind development. Electric prices are higher than in the Midwest, the wind is great, and there is a lot of open space. Farmland is perhaps the single best place for wind development as the land can still be utilized for farming with the turbines serving as an added ‘crop.’ Farmers are literally expanding their farming by harvesting one more crop, the wind. With the recent economic slump hurting even more due to skyrocketing electric prices, an additional crop means increased yearly income from wind turbines; this can be the perfect solution for struggling farmers in economically depressed areas. Can be. Can be. . . if done correctly and with those farmers involved and in mind.

Now everyone is beginning to learn, to realize we’re rushing perhaps a bit too recklessly into our renewable energy future. We can, and should, continue at a fast clip, as renewable energy is essential to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and help reduce the impacts of global warming. And time we have not. We should move quickly, but smartly.

We must proceed forward hand in hand. Wind developers have seen their competitors trip up in the green rush and communities are seeing their neighbors rethink decisions that are up and spinning in the wind. Fortunately, there is a way forward that will work for everyone.

There are companies, like our own, Emergent Energy Group, that practice community-focused wind development, employing transparent and open development processes. We work with communities to design and develop projects that meet local needs and provide real local benefits. Because, truly, there is enough to go around. And it’s exciting. Wind development really is very exciting. Wind power is a vast opportunity and when it’s approached in the right way, we all win.