By video link, President-Elect Barack Obama spoke to a gathering of governors and foreign officials in Los Angeles Tuesday, reiterating his stance on climate policy.
The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. ...
My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process.
That will start with a federal cap and trade system. We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050.
Further, we will invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future. We will invest in solar power, wind power, and next generation biofuels. We will tap nuclear power, while making sure it’s safe. And we will develop clean coal technologies.
This investment will not only help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, making the United States more secure. And it will not only help us bring about a clean energy future, saving our planet. It will also help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by generating five million new green jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.
But the truth is, the United States cannot meet this challenge alone.
John Broder at The New York Times writes:
Some industry leaders and members of Congress have suggested that Mr. Obama’s climate proposal would impose too great a cost on an already-stressed economy — having the same effects as a tax on coal, oil and natural gas — and should await the end of the current downturn. A bill similar to Mr. Obama’s plan failed to clear the Senate earlier this year, largely because of concerns about its impact on the economy.
The same old, same old from the fossilized powers-that-be.
Some environmental advocates also have critiqued what they've heard from President-Elect Obama previously and what he's repeating in this video: about what they believe are inadequate goals for reducing carbon emissions by 2020, about the prospects for truly "clean" coal, about nuclear power.
My own perspective is that conservation should at least get a shout-out every time climate policy and energy policy are mentioned in one of these speeches, however short. Happily, it's on the agenda, as you can see at the Obama-Biden transition Web site. So there is no reason it should not be mentioned in the speeches.
Most important, the incoming administration should recognize that $15 billion a year over 10 years - $150 billion - isn't nearly enough for the government's portion of funding for clean energy. That's only a single year's U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dealing with global warming, weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and all the rest of it, is going to take a war-time level of government and private investment. That's both the frame and the reality: Don't call it spending, call it investment in a Green New Deal.
Despite criticisms, Obama has delivered a welcome and timely message in advance of the international negotiations on climate coming up in Poland in two weeks. The crux: Global warming deniers are finally getting the boot instead of the red carpet treatment at the White House. Expect science once again to be respectable in the federal government.
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