Full Employment

By David Edwards

Please think about this for a moment. If instead of putting a mine at the Idaho Maryland site, in Grass Valley, a project with dubious possibilities being financed with Canadian money and would funnel our resources away from us, employ few people and close again when they got what they wanted probably leaving us with another toxic legacy.

What if we put in a co-generation plant? The plant would burn bio-mass generated from our forests which need to be managed now before they burn to the ground. It would produce electricity, hot water and carbon rich exhaust. One of the problems with small bio-mass fueled generators is they don't meet air quality standards because of the carbon in their exhaust. So, next to our generator we put an acre of green house and use the fruits and vegetables we grow year around to utilize the carbon from the generator exhaust.

So now we have employed 20 people in the generator portion, 100 people in the greenhouse and another 100 people in the forest.

We put these co-gen plants in every town of more than 500 people, sized appropriately. Not all of these plants need or should be fuel burning. Some should be photo voltaic, some hot water and some will be technologies we have yet to know.

And we start designing and building transportation systems that use electricity for both the public and light freight.

So now we have secure employment, food and energy. And for many people it will be within walking or bicycling distance. Next we take the electrical power grid and form a 1st District Energy Company so we can sell our electricity to ourselves at reasonable rates and outside our grid at market prices. If the greater grid goes down, which it will just as our outside economy is going to crash we will still have power.

This will give us food, heat, energy, employment, and security. We can be a model for the world.