The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

President Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill Yesterday in Denver, Colorado. Here are the Green highlights of his address.
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"Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles. Nor does it constitute all of what we must do to turn our economy around. But it does mark the beginning of the end -- the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs, to provide relief for families worried they won't be able to pay next month's bills and to set our economy on a firmer foundation, paving the way to long-term growth and prosperity.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I will sign today, a plan that meets the principles I laid out in January, is the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history. ...a plan that is both bold and balanced enough to meet the demands of this moment. The American people were looking to them for leadership, and that is what they provided.

What makes this recovery plan so important is not just that it will create or save 3½ million jobs over the next two years, including nearly 60,000 in Colorado. It's that we are putting Americans to work doing the work that America needs done in critical areas that have been neglected for too long, work that will bring real and lasting change for generations to come.

Because we know we can't build our economic future on the transportation and information networks of the past, we are remaking the American landscape with the largest new investment in our nation's infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s....bringing critical broadband connections to businesses and homes in nearly every community in America, upgrading mass transit and building high-speed rail lines that will improve travel and commerce throughout the nation...computerizing America's medical records, to reduce the duplication and waste that costs billions of health care dollars and the medical errors that every year cost thousands of lives.

Because we know we can't power America's future on energy that's controlled by foreign dictators, we are taking a big step down the road to energy independence and laying the groundwork for a new green energy economy that can create countless well-paying jobs. It's an investment that will double the amount of renewable energy produced over the next three years and provide tax credits and loan guarantees to companies like Namaste Solar, a company that will be expanding, instead of laying people off, as a result of the plan I am signing.

In the process, we will transform the way we use energy. Today, the electricity we use is carried along a grid of lines and wires that dates back to Thomas Edison, a grid that can't support the demands of clean energy. This means we're using 19th- and 20th-century technologies to battle 21st-century problems like climate change and energy security.

It also means that places like North Dakota can produce a lot of wind energy but can't deliver it to communities that want it, leading to a gap between how much clean energy we are using and how much we could be using.

The investment we are making today will create a newer, smarter electric grid that will allow for the broader use of alternative energy. We will build on the work that's being done in places like Boulder, Colorado, a community that is on pace to be the world's first Smart Grid city. This investment will place Smart Meters in homes to make our energy bills lower, make outages less likely and make it easier to use clean energy.

It's an investment that will save taxpayers over $1 billion by slashing energy costs in our federal buildings by 25 percent and save working families hundreds of dollars a year on their energy bills by weatherizing over 1 million homes. And it's an investment that takes the important first step towards a nationwide transmission superhighway that will connect our cities to the windy plains of the Dakotas and the sunny deserts of the Southwest.

Even beyond energy, from the National Institutes of Health to the National Science Foundation, this recovery act represents the biggest increase in basic research funding in the long history of America's noble endeavor to better understand our world. Just as President Kennedy sparked an explosion of innovation when he set America's sights on the moon, I hope this investment will ignite our imagination once more, spurring new discoveries and breakthroughs that will make our economy stronger, our nation more secure and our planet safer for our children.

As important as the step we take today is, this legislation represents only the first part of the broad strategy we need to address our economic crisis. In the coming days and weeks, I will be launching other aspects of the plan. We will need to stabilize, repair and reform our banking system and get credit flowing again to families and businesses.

We will need to end a culture where we ignore problems until they become full-blown crises instead of recognizing that the only way to build a thriving economy is to set and enforce firm rules of the road.

None of this will be easy. The road to recovery will not be straight and true. It will demand courage and discipline and a new sense of responsibility that has been missing, from Wall Street to Washington. There will be hazards and reverses along the way. But I have every confidence that if we are willing to continue doing the difficult work that must be done -- by each of us and by all of us -- then we will leave this struggling economy behind us, and come out on the other side, more prosperous as a people.

For our American story is not -- and has never been -- about things coming easy. It's about rising to the moment when the moment is hard, converting crisis into opportunity and seeing to it that we emerge from whatever trials we face stronger than we were before. It's about rejecting the notion that our fate is somehow written for us, and instead laying claim to a destiny of our own making."