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Obama’s first 100 days make—and may remake—history
Joseph Romm, Grist
The media just keeps missing—or messing up—the story of the century.
Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change—Hell and High Water—then all presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures, and rightfully so.
How else could future generations judge us if the U.S. and the world stay anywhere near our current emissions path, warm most of the inland United States 10 to 15°F by century’s end, with sea levels 3 to 7 feet higher, rising perhaps an inch or two a year, with the Southwest from Kansas to California a permanent dust bowl, and much of the ocean a hot, acidic dead zone — impacts that could be irreversible for 1,000 years if we don’t reverse emissions soon and sharply. This will require an unbroken — and indeed escalating — response by our political leadership throughout this century. The same is true for the very important, but still secondary, issue of avoiding the worst impacts of peak oil.
In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in its first 100 days is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives. While I will present a longer list below — and welcome your additions — three game-changing accomplishments stand out:
- Green Stimulus: Progressives, Obama keep promise to jumpstart clean energy, economy — conservatives keep promise to jumpstop the future
- Sustainable Budget: The first sustainable budget in U.S. history.
- Regulatory breakthrough: EPA finds carbon pollution a serious danger to Americans’ health and welfare requiring regulation
Obama has clearly demonstrated he has a serious chance to be the first President since FDR to remake the country through his positive vision. Indeed, if Obama is a two-term president, if he achieves even half of what he has set out to, he will likely be remembered as “the green FDR.”
As an interesting side note, President Reagan, who is held in some esteem with historians these days, will almost certainly be relegated to a second-tier, if not third-tier, president by the painful dual realities of global warming and peak oil.
(27 April 2009)
Cost of public works may fool us all
Danny Westneat, Seattle Times
A professor at Oxford University in England has done a compelling series of studies trying to get at why big public-works projects such as bridges, tunnels and light-rail systems almost always turn out to be far more costly than estimated.
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… What’s so controversial about Flyvbjerg’s research is not his documenting cost overruns. It’s his effort to show why public projects are so chronically out of whack.
It’s not technical challenges or complexity or bad luck, he asserts. If that were so, you’d get more variation in how it all turns out. He concludes the backers of these projects suffer from two main maladies.
One is “delusional optimism” — they want it so badly, they can’t see its flaws. I know about this firsthand from when I supported the monorail.
The second is worse: They knowingly are lying to the public.
“Delusion and Deception in Large Infrastructure Projects,” was the title of Flyvbjerg’s most recent paper, published in January. He details through interviews with public officials how the pressure to get a project approved politically and under construction almost invariably leads to deception — a lowballing of costs and an exaggeration of benefits.
(26 April 2009)
Shaping the post-carbon economy
Jeremy Oppenheim and Eric Beinhocke, Guardian
With the right levels of willing and resources, we can achieve tough new targets on carbon emissions likely to be agreed by the United Nations
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… Research at McKinsey into the effectiveness and cost of more than 200 mechanisms for reducing carbon emissions – from greater car efficiency to nuclear power, improved insulation in buildings, and better forest management – suggests that only concerted global action can ensure levels that the scientific community says is necessary to avoid the disastrous consequences of climate change.
… The good news is that we can achieve what’s needed, we can afford to do it, and we can do it all without curtailing growth.
… Making all this happen requires moving toward a new model for ensuring that we are more productive globally with core resources that we have long taken for granted. To the extent that we invest across sectors and regions to improve our carbon productivity (GDP per unit of carbon emitted), we will weaken the pollution constrain on global growth.
Improving carbon productivity requires improving land productivity. Forests and plants remove carbon from the atmosphere, potentially accounting for more than 40% of carbon abatement opportunities between now and 2020.
… If increased agricultural productivity is necessary, so, too, is improved water management. Given that agriculture uses 70% of the world’s reliable water supply (and the potential impact of climate change on water reliability), a comprehensive approach to climate security will need to embrace better water policies, better integrated land management, and agricultural market reform. Our research suggests that annual growth in water productivity must increase from 0.3% to more than 3% in the coming decades.
In other words, resources and policies are inter-dependent. Moving to a model in which carbon emission levels and growth move in opposite directions – what we call a post-carbon economy – may start with agreements in Copenhagen to reduce carbon in the air.
Jeremy Oppenheim is global director of McKinsey & Company’s Climate Change Special Initiative; Eric Beinhocker is a senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute Jeremy Oppenheim is global director of McKinsey & Company’s Climate Change Special Initiative; Eric Beinhocker is a senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute
(25 April 2009)
