Is there free money for your project?

My wife and I got a $1,500 credit on our 2010 taxes because we replaced our old leaking shingle roof with a new leaking metal one (long story, but never hire a roofer named Terry Hawkins). In theory, the more reflective metal roof will keep our house cooler and therefore save energy from air conditioning (which we don't use, but we still get the tax credit).

You can give your project the best chance at success by knowing about relevant national, state, and local incentives. In this module you will consider the history of energy policies in the United States and identify energy policy relevant to your project.

"We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us." - Jimmy Carter (in 1977)

"Rising global oil prices, usually caused by wars, strikes, or other upheavals overseas, have preceded ten of the last eleven American economic recessions ... All of these economic costs of oil dependency have been evident since the 1970s, yet American democracy has produced no politics to reduce them. The lobbying power of oil corporations is hardly the only factor. Oil prices gyrated during the 1980s and 1990s; at the bottom of these cycles, gasoline was often a trivial segment of many household budgets. During the late 1990s, gasoline expenses averaged as little as 2 percent of American pretax household income. That made it relatively painless for American voters to ignore oil dependency’s indirect costs and to reject the higher gasoline or carbon taxes that would be required to incent change. By the summer of 2011, gasoline expenses approached 10 percent of household income at a time of widespread economic pain. The opposite kind of policy paralysis now took hold: To change the gasoline pricing system would impose heavy new costs on working- and middle-class families..." Steve Coll in Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

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Reading and Video

Read U.S. President Obama's Climate Action Plan

Find and review something similar for your country, region, city, campus, etc...

Tweet your epiphany (include "#150tons")

For more information

Clean Break: The Story of Germany's Energy Transformation and What Americans Can Learn from It (Kindle Single) [Kindle Edition] Osha Gray Davidson