Buddy, can you spare a dime for a solar panel?

Krugman's vinyl is stuck. But I can't say I blame him.

He's written what seems like endless opinion pieces about the need to step up deficit spending, to increase Keynesian stimulus. But who's listening? This is not an easy sell. Most Americans have jobs, most pay taxes, and the deficit looks pretty large to most folks. They're not anxious to add to it.

It's 74 years since the General Theory was first published.

You'd think we'd be past this by now, that we'd actually have serious data and a more secure knowledge of our own economy, wouldn't you? That we would really know what to do? But it's monstrously powerful, this endless Keynesian debate, the supply-siders versus the demand-siders forever, like the Army-Navy game, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, or cats and dogs.

Krugman is of course technically a New Keynesian, and for those of us interested in arcana, we could study some of the arguably new twists the New Keynesians and the neoclassicalists have come up with. Not that it matters. As long as the main choices with which we are presented are increased spending versus tax breaks for the investing classes, we're still arguing either side of the Old Keynes.

I am starting to think that this is all a very big red herring, that there's a third way kind of way around all this.

I'm also beginning to think that our Solar Power Road Trip crew may have hit upon one such program.

Lets just examine the so-called alternatives for a minute. The key argument from Krugman is for more stimulus, to relieve what he sees as a liquidity trap kind of stagnation, similar to the US in 1938, or Japan during the 1990s. In this view, the government should borrow money now, taking advantage of cheap interest rates and the likelihood of inflation, to spend our way into more jobs. But while this program has excellent academic credentials, it hasn't, and won't, gather any speed with Americans in their present frame of mind.

The Democrats in Congress right now, and by default Obama (because he hasn't argued for doing anything else) are betting that they've done enough stimulus, that if they did more they'd lose in November because of the outbreak of fiscal rectitude that underlies parts of the current conservative backlash. They've made their bet and find themselves forced to stick with it, although I would guess that some of them would like to follow Krugman's recommendation.

The Republicans in Congress, and those of the Tea Party that are primarily motivated by fiscal concerns, are betting on the Bush tax breaks. They hope to be able to continue them or even increase them, into the sunset.

Most Americans just kind of sit there, even a lot of the unemployed ones, and don't know what to think because the media they use are uniformly uninformative, because most people don't study these things in college, and because, well, isn't that why we hire these leaders?

Aside from all this, I do wonder how many unemployed Americans it would take to make a serious jobs movement? Obviously ten percent, or nine-point whatever percent, is not enough. This is nothing but testimony to the power of capitalism as popular theory. Even the unemployed are really just waiting to get back on the tracks of the rat race, not questioning, not theorizing, not organizing. This complete lack of political awareness is amazing to me.

But back to the main thread, and McKibben's, and 350.orgs, call for a massive presidentially-sponsored investment in solar roofing.

At first glance this seems like another call for demand-side action, pretty much as it was with the ARRA stimulus for energy audits and weatherization.

But a primary sponsor is the firm Sungevity, one of the solar PV lease firms that began to spring up after the price of modules began to drop a couple years ago. They have even offered to solar-roof the White House for free. Obviously good advertising for them, whether or not the Obamas take them up on it, and I do hope they read my points below about not needed to place the modules actually on a 210-year old historic building. But a generous offer all the same.

Let's understand though, ordinarily, this offer to the Obamas aside, Sungevity makes money on leasing panels. The only reason we don't care to buy panels ourselves is because a) we don't know that they can save us money, and b) we're averse to adding debt even when it's cheaper than the alternatives. We'd rather keep paying an electricity bill that is greater than what the cost of leased panels would be.

So is this really a liquidity trap, as Krugman would have us believe?

Or is it just a lack of energy knowledge and analysis skills?

It would be pretty silly if we had a recession and couldn't get out of it, even if there was a huge amount of cost effective energy work to be done and a huge amount of private capital looking for secure investments at 8 or 9 or 10 or 12 percent, and the only reason we couldn't put two and two together is that we didn't have enough folks trained to crunch the numbers.

Sungevity is really practicing old-fashioned arbitrage, not engineering or electrical work. All they're really selling is the smarts to crunch some numbers and some effective guarantees for investors. There's a massive amount of similar cost effective energy work to be done, not just in solar PV but in even more cost effective investments such as insulation, but a huge lack of knowledge about how to do anything about it.

And, what really drives me particularly nuts about all this, while we wait for leadership, there's a climbing Keeling Curve.

So Obama has another option, one that dodges neatly between the horns of the Keynesian dilemma, and that might even help with November's election currently so worrisome for the embattled Dems.

All he has to do is make a speech and give it, explain to the American people carefully, probably a few times, in his endearingly wonkish way, that solar power is now sufficiently cost-efficient that many of us could have solar roofs, either on lease or using our own equity. If he was being a good energy wonk, actually, he'd make sure to prioritize insulation and weatherization work first and foremost, using similar equities-backed financing, such as the PACE system. And he should start with the White House. With an energy audit, actually.

He has to say some words in this speech sufficient to galvanize colleges and universities around the country to teach the economics and analysis to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of energy auditors and energy investment consultants to-be, to break down the knowledge barriers and get the liquidity flowing.

He could even throw in a few barbs about how this will get us off foreign oil, make it seem like a rejoinder to OPEC, a way to de-finance the Saudi, Iranian, and and other oil money that flows to radical Islam, and so on, to head off the Tea Party's criticism before it starts.

And if investors, homeowners and building owners began to listen, that Keeling Curve, or at least the American contribution to it, would begin to come down.

Where America leads, others will follow.

I can't see a downside. Can you?

The daily energy peak (twice daily if you live in a state where they use AC), actually, and the lack of effective storage. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. It will take some years. By simply reversing the flow of energy in the existing wires, from homes and other solar roofs during the day to workplaces during the solar day, we could probably make 20, 30, perhaps even 35 % of our electricity with solar delivered through a slightly reworked version of our current grid, more if we add electrical charging stations at work and use computer modeling to finesse drawing down charge from EV's at night to watch TV and so on (you want to draw down just enough and a bit more, to allow you to get work in the morning, to the charging point at work).

But like I said, the efficiency work should come first. Which, actually, is what I plan to do right now, adding some insulation to our straw Bale House. And I'm late. And the dry wall-lift I'm using to finish this newly insulated ceiling has to be back to Home Depot by 3pm.

Enough theory. Action!