For one, Grist tells us the bill contains $17 billion in tax credits for renewable energy. It
includes an eight-year extension of the investment tax credit for solar energy, a one-year extension of the production tax credit for wind, and a two-year extension of the PTC for solar, biomass, and hydropower. The residential energy-efficient property credit would also be extended through 2016, and the definition of the systems that qualify for that credit would be expanded to include small wind investment and geothermal heat pumps. There are also incentives for bicycle commuting and plug-in electric vehicles.Not surprisingly, there are other, unhappy energy-related provisions, such as support for carbon sequestration, oil shale, tar sands, and coal-to-liquid fuels.
All in all, I certainly won't call the renewable-energy tax credit provisions a silver lining - they're more like a couple of flecks of pewter - but hell, if the bailout was going to pass, and it was, we might as well take what we can get.
On that same logic, there was another handful of pewter flecks in the bill, this one in some ways more significant than the renewable energy credits. The New York Times has the story:
It would have been nicer if it hadn't required tacking this on to the (falsely-labeled) "must pass" bailout, but dammit, at least it's there.More than one-third of all Americans will soon receive better insurance coverage for mental health treatments because of a new law that, for the first time, requires equal coverage of mental and physical illnesses.
The requirement, included in the economic bailout bill that President Bush signed on Friday, is the result of 12 years of passionate advocacy by friends and relatives of people with mental illness and addiction disorders. They described the new law as a milestone in the quest for civil rights, an effort to end insurance discrimination and to reduce the stigma of mental illness.
Companies have until January 1, 2010 to adjust their plans.
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