The federal “stimulus” set aside $5 billion to weatherize 600,000 U.S. homes and make them more energy-efficient. So far, fewer than 10,000 houses have been weatherized, though more than 10 percent of the money is already gone. It’s anyone’s guess whether the effort has created the tens of thousands of jobs it was supposed to create — even as President Barack Obama seeks to shower an additional $10 billion on the inefficient program.
But it’s not just the United States that is getting those bad results from unwise stimulus spending. Australia has managed its own government-funded weatherization program even worse than Washington has managed ours. The Land Down Under pumped $2.4 billion into home insulation initiatives. The goal there, too, was to reduce energy consumption and “greenhouse gases” that environmentalists blame for “global warming.”
But Australia’s eager environmentalism turned deadly. The government program installed a type of foil insulation in thousands of homes. But fires broke out in some of the houses. The insulation had been laid atop electrical wiring and boxes, sparking 93 house fires — so far. Tragically, four people have died, and the government has been scrambling to get the insulation removed, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Even that has its dangers, the government said, because workers can be electrocuted in the attempt to take out the insulation.
Perhaps the United States and Australia alike should go back to “square one” and acknowledge that top-down economic “solutions” imposed by government may be inefficient at best, and dangerous at worst.