Update
"Anonymous" suggested I link a similar story regarding military spending waste.
Will do: President Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel peace prize, authorized 112 cruise missile launches against 20 coastal Libyan targets earlier this spring (March, 2011). Each cruise missile costs, conservatively, $600,000 (total --> $67 million. One night of fireworks. This does not include personnel costs or the pro-rated operating costs of the launch systems. Fighting over/in Libya continues. I believe this is number four of six wars we are currently waging in the Mideast. Depends on what one counts as a war, and in what order, I guess. I have lost track.
Original Post
$20 million federal grant for weatherization of city homes.
Three homes weatherized.
Fourteen (14) jobs.
"The jobs haven't surfaced yet," said Michael Woo, director of Got Green, a Seattle community organizing group focused on the environment and social justice.Well, duh.
The only downside: most of the jobs were administrative.
Link here.
Stop here.
I can't make this stuff up. Remember, this was a grant. $1.5 million/job.
And folks get upset with depletion allowances and/or the US Navy spending $600 on toilets.
By the way, Seattle is about as temperate a climate one can find in the continental U.S. It would have been nice to weatherize homes in North Dakota. But not many votes in North Dakota, I guess.
Someone sent in a comment that North Dakota homes are already weatherized. Not entirely true.
ReplyDeleteMany houses were built fifty to seventy years ago are huge and very energy inefficient, and in great need of weatherization. Knowing only what I know from growing up in Williston and having visited Seattle occasionally, there is no question in my mind that there is more low-hanging fruit in North Dakota than in Seattle.
It is rare to see homeless on the streets in North Dakota during the winter, but not uncommon to see homeless on streets year-round in Seattle.
Based on average temperatures in Seattle, one might get away with heating only two months/year:
http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/USWA0395
The average low in Seattle "never" gets below freezing.
The mean low for North Dakota is well below freezing for six months of the year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_North_Dakota
And had it not been for global warming, the cold temperatures in North Dakota would have been colder and longer lasting.
ReplyDelete