New York Trash options

Couple of nice articles in the NYT today on New York City's waste disposal system and on producing power from sewage. The authors of the first, former high-level workers in the city's sanitation department, suggest investments in waste-to-energy plants, which can reduce costs as well as energy consumption. They also suggest a tax on (non-recyclable) waste, which I used to pay back in Japan. The garbage-men would only haul off trash set outside in special bags, and the bags cost something like $2 each for a standard large trash-bag size. The second article is on using human waste to produce energy, a process that rarely happens now but could potentially provide hundreds of thousands of homes with power. Is it just our short-term budgeting cycle (and electoral cycle) that keeps us from investing in projects that pay off a few years down the road?