Environment and Green Living News
By David Roberts
Clean energy investor John Doerr advises Barack Obama to hire Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, as the nation’s first chief technology officer (a position Obama has said he’ll create). Doerr also says “the most important thing [Obama]’s got to do is kick-start a huge amount of research and innovation in energy.”
Here’s Bill Joy on renewables:
Who do you think should be the country’s CTO?
By David Roberts
The funny thing about this picture is that it looks completely fake, like I’m posing next to a cardboard cutout. The light bouncing off the mirror does funky things. (PS, when posing for a picture with future presidents, always place yourself in front of a gigantic mirror.) The photo was taken after this interview from March 2006. In the intro I wrote:
The weight of much hope and expectation rests on the narrow shoulders of Barack Obama, the first-term Democratic senator from Illinois.
His eventual presidential run is seen as inevitable (some pundits even hype a 2008 bid).
Some pundits indeed.
By David Roberts
Ugh:
Rep. Michele Bachmann won reelection early Wednesday, fending off a challenge from Democrat Elwyn Tinklenberg in a Sixth Congressional District race that came to symbolize the perilous position of Republican incumbents across the nation.
…
Bachmann credited her victory to her vote against the $700 billion financial rescue package and her campaign to open up restricted areas for oil drilling to bring down the price of gasoline.
Continue reading " We’ll still have Bachmann to kick around "
By David Roberts
Bloomberg has a piece up about possible Obama EPA picks. The reporter seems to think that Kathleen McGinty is the front-runner. But Barbara Boxer is thinking what I’m thinking:
"Mary Nichols would be a great choice,” Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, said in an interview today. "If I was asked by the Obama administration, I’d say she’d be at the top of my list.”
Word.
Continue reading " If I had a Nichols for every time I wanted to fill the top slot at EPA … "
By David Roberts
In March 2007, Democratic primary contender John Edwards released an ambitious climate and energy plan, calling for greenhouse gas reductions of 80 percent by 2050, a cap-and-trade program with auctioned permits, and a ban on conventional dirty coal plants.
At that point in the race, conventional wisdom was that Edwards was trying to stake out the left and Hillary was going for the center — leaving Obama either nowhere to go, if you saw it like your average corpulent Democratic consultant, or free to maneuver, if you saw it like Obama. After Edwards released his plan, the obvious political move for a guy with his eye on the general election would have been for Obama to put out a somewhat more conservative version, to polish his centrist bona fides.
He didn’t, though. His plan, released in October, was more detailed and politically astute than Edwards’, but every bit as visionary. It proposes a declining carbon cap with fully auctioned permits, massive investments in energy research, job training, infrastructure, and efficiency, a renewable portfolio standard, a low-carbon fuel standard, higher fuel economy standards, and so on and on, in great detail. It is marred by its lavish support for biofuels and "clean coal," but that is a minor flaw in light of the historic changes it would spark if fully implemented.
Will it be fully implemented? In trying to figure out what Obama will do, it’s helpful to contemplate how he navigated the campaign itself.
The overall campaign strategy was to play the long game, to proceed steadily toward big targets and not get flustered or distracted by the day-to-day news cycle. No-drama Obama.
After the primary was over (and gas prices spiked, and a financial crisis struck), Obama did what polling indicated: he played down the parts of his plan that threaten to raise energy prices and played up investments in clean technology and green jobs. It’s a message that resonates across ideological and institutional lines. He was careful never to take sides in ecumenical energy debates: Nuclear is fine, if safe. Coal is fine, if the carbon is sequestered. Liquid coal is fine if it comes out of a low-carbon lifecycle. Offshore drilling is fine in exchange for serious support for renewables. What matters is not this or that energy source but the outcome, a cleaner economy.
This strategy allowed Obama to sound supportive of extractive and energy-intensive industries clustered in swing states while campaigning on an agenda that would utterly transform them. It allowed him the rhetorical space to refashion clean energy as a bread-and-butter jobs issue. It protected him from attacks on his right flank.
He never backed off his original proposals, though. The very day before the election he got attacked for telling the truth to a San Francisco newspaper. In the end, he was elected with a clear mandate for clean energy.
Now everyone wants to know what he’ll do. It’s seems reasonable to expect that he’ll stick with what seems to be his instinctive strategy: focus on the long game.
What’s that mean? For the Obama presidency, there are three biggies:
Based on precedent it’s likely he’d be willing to negotiate or horse trade just about anything else in favor of tackling these three issues.
Now, how does that same strategy translate to climate/energy? The biggies in this area are:
The first two shape the foundation of the market and the third accelerates new industries within it.
Along the way, there are certain to be environmentalist-irritating concessions. There will be research and pilot-project funding for "clean coal," oil shale, and liquid coal. Ethanol subsidies are unlikely to be substantially curtailed. There will likely be more oil drilling. Horses will be traded.
The key is the long game. Obama worked carefully, diligently, and adeptly to get elected on a clean energy agenda. Despite the many reasons he gave greens to recoil along the way, he got there. There is every reason to believe he will now work carefully, diligently, and adeptly to get clean energy flowing to the country. That is in his best interest and the country’s.
Greens are deeply accustomed to believing that politicians are humoring them and will abandon their concerns at the first sign of lobbying. It’s not an unfounded fear, but it occasionally gives them the tone of jealous, paranoid lovers, flipping out over every perceived slight. Sometimes, though, what looks like a Sign He Doesn’t Really Mean It from one angle looks like long-term strategic thinking from another. Throughout the campaign Obama has repeatedly shown that his critics miss the difference. Perhaps, at least for a short while, Obama has earned the presumption of good faith.
By David Roberts
Avaaz brings you happy people who hope Obama will get cracking on an international climate agreement:
By David Roberts
“Although the technical issues vary, inspections repeatedly identify a lack of contractor oversight and poor quality control in concrete placement.”
– the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a report about problems at the Savannah River nuclear plant
By David Roberts
Reuters adds a few names to the list of candidates being considered to head EPA: Governors Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, and World Resources Institute head honcho Jonathan Lash. That’s in addition to the usual names of Kathleen McGinty and Mary Nichols.
I’m beginning to think reporters are just pulling these names out of their rear ends, and that none of them has sources inside the Obama transition at all. Surely, that can’t be the case, right?
Reuters also says Obama’s considering creating a “climate czar” position, but offers no evidence for that either. Could they have gotten the idea here?
By David Roberts
I’ve been on the phone with top Obama aides all day, and the first 100 days of energy policy are coming into focus. Here’s what I’m told is on the way:
That is, in the words of one adviser, “a good start.”
By David Roberts
President-elect Barack Obama is strongly considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet post, Democratic officials told Politico.
I must say, I don’t see this:
The selection of Kennedy would be a shrewd early move for the new presidential team. Obama advisers said the nomination would please both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
It might please Clinton and Kennedy, but by my count it will piss off just about everyone else. Enviros are still pissed about his opposition to Cape Wind. Sensible people are pissed about his naive acceptance of the phantom vaccine-autism connection. Many journalists are pissed that his overheated work on Republican vote theft in 2004 served to discredit more modest but verifiable theories. He’s also, to put it bluntly, widely considered considered kind of an arrogant jerk — which makes me like him more, but I don’t know how it will play in a delicate and highly constrained bureaucratic position.
Also, the guy’s run Waterkeeper, which is a great group, but not exactly training for running a huge government agency.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of RFK Jr.’s environmental work, but he strikes me as more of a strident activist voice than a careful, detail-oriented managerial type. His appointment would sure send an unmistakable message, though! I suppose I’m ambivalent and should give it more thought.
What do y’all think?
Postscript: Huffington Post got him on the phone, where he said he would happily serve if asked. He also said:
“I think that Barack Obama understands that energy must be the centerpiece for his administration. That there really are two big issues, one is health care and the other is energy,” he said. “And energy is intertwined with all other issues. If we can get off of foreign oil, for instance, we can save 700 billion a year. We can pay back the Wall Street debt we just ran up in just one year.”
“That whole dark cloud of the Bush administration,” he added, “has all the sudden been lifted.”
