President-elect Barack Obama’s speech in Chicago’s Grant Park last Tuesday night was a celebration of his campaign victory. He didn’t dwell on policy, nor should he have.
I was encouraged, however, that he included climate change and renewable energy among the few priorities he did highlight. With significant Democratic gains in Congress, Obama will have an opportunity to sign more significant energy-related legislation than we’ve seen since Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
I wonder though whether it will be enough to prevent an energy-driven depression following the present economic turmoil.
Eight years ago, George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on a promise to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. When he was elected, he dismissed the promise almost immediately.
Obama will find it harder to renege on his commitment on climate change and energy policy. He doesn’t have the ties to the oil industry that Bush and his administration brought with them to the White House, and the political landscape has changed.
Part of the change comes from new urgency. Rajendra Pachauri, the scientist and economist who heads the Nobel-prize-winning International Panel on Climate Change, told the New York Times last year, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”
Now, too, more Americans are clamoring for action on climate change. Step It Up pressured presidential candidates to adopt pledges to achieve sweeping reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Step-It-Up’s successor organization, 350.org, is keeping up the pressure. Will Bates, one of the original Step-It-Up organizers, recently showed me how to use 350.org’s Web page for e-mailing Barack Obama, urging him to attend the December negotiations in Poland to replace the Kyoto protocol with a stronger agreement.
The constituency for a radically different energy policy is broad. The National Wildlife Federation is traditionally the most conservative of environmental organizations. Don Hooper, the organization’s New England regional coordinator, said NWF recently asked their members with hunting or fishing licenses about energy policy. An astounding 80 percent responded that they wanted the United States to draw 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources within 10 years.
Obama has responded to grassroots pressures for a better energy policy. Just a year ago, he didn’t know whether to push for 50 percent or 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and he didn’t seem to attach much importance to the difference. Contrast that with Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., who took up former Sen. James Jeffords’ mantle on energy issues. On his first day in the Senate, Sanders introduced a bill designed to achieve an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050. Obama had adopted the Jeffords/Sanders goal by early in the primary season.
Obama distinguished himself during the recent run-up in gasoline prices, refusing to pander to voters with a gas tax holiday proposal, as Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton did. However, after initially resisting, he succumbed to calls from Vermont Rep. Peter Welch and others to start draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was created to respond to interruptions in supply, not merely high prices. The New York Times pointed to Obama’s sudden reversals on this issue and offshore drilling as evidence that it’s impossible to hold a “grown-up conversation” about energy in this country.
Obama’s campaign produced an eight-page energy policy including cap-and-trade auctions of carbon emission permits which could raise large sums to fund other parts of his energy policy, like weatherizing a million low-income homes a year, workforce training for renewable energy and efficiency jobs, and tax credits for plug-in hybrids and other advanced vehicles.
Some parts of the Obama energy plan are confusing. He embraced new nuclear power plants in his stump speech. Yet his plan says that issues like safe storage of nuclear waste must be addressed before any new plants are considered. No high-level nuclear waste generated in the last 65 years has yet been placed in safe, long-term storage. And Obama opposes the one plan the federal government has for long-term storage, dumping the waste in the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada (a swing state where Obama campaigned heavily).
If safe storage of nuclear waste must merely be addressed before new nuclear plants are built, I suppose the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could hold a single hearing on the subject and then start approving new reactors. If Obama means that a facility capable of safely storing the country’s high-level waste for 10,000 years or more must actually be built, then we’re unlikely to ever see another nuclear power plant.
On ethanol, Obama seems to be shifting. Iowa corn farmers are an important constituency, and Obama endorsed sharp increases in ethanol production during the primary season.
Recently, a discussion participant at TheOilDrum.com reports that an Obama adviser told him that “Obama gets it that ethanol is sort of a joke… So ethanol probably won’t go any further. If you noticed in his most recent speeches he stopped saying ‘ethanol’ and started saying ‘next generation biofuels.'”
Sure enough, the 8-page Obama energy plan does say “next generation biofuels” and omits corn ethanol.
On transportation, the Obama energy plan is no great shakes. It advocates further subsidies for poorly managed U.S. automakers and a large investment in plug-in hybrid cars. While there’s a place for plug-in hybrids, they’re a continuation of the car-centric culture that exacerbates U.S. dependence on foreign oil. I’d put rebuilding the passenger rail system as a much higher priority; it’s not mentioned.
Maybe we’ll see a resurgence of passenger rail with “Joe the Amtrak Rider” Biden as vice president. Biden is famous for daily commuting from Delaware to D.C. by train. Al Papp, vice president for the National Association of Railroad Passengers, says he is hopeful of Biden’s support for their plan to greatly expand passenger rail.
Obama’s energy plan addresses climate change and the twin economic issues of creating green jobs and staunching the outflow of money to pay for oil imports. It does not address peak oil or even implicitly address resource limits that could shape our goals.
Take, for example, the support of NWF’s licensed hunters and fishermen for 100 percent renewable energy within 10 years. If that is a doable goal, one way to imagine achieving it is to ramp up production of biodiesel and ethanol and plug-in hybrids so the NWF members can drive 20 or 200 miles to their favorite hunting and fishing spots. I would suggest another alternative: They could sell their cars and hunt and fish within walking or bicycling distance, or use public transit.
Even without peak oil to contend with, the vision of walkable hunts is more technically achievable than a complete conversion of all vehicles to renewable energy in 10 years. Add in potentially steep declines in the availability of oil and other fossil fuels, and our ability to re-create a renewable energy alternative universe crimps dramatically.
It takes energy to manufacture new cars and new biofuel facilities. With a massive commitment, now, by an inspiring leader, I believe the United States could rapidly change its manufacturing. Franklin Roosevelt quashed manufacture of private cars during World War II to free up factories to construct planes, tanks and ships. The climate is near a tipping point, and oil depletion stares us in the face. The Obama administration has all the grounds it needs to declare an energy emergency and devote the country’s vast talents and resources to responding.
Popular awareness of peak oil and of the importance of relocalization for survival arose with George W. Bush in the White House, pointed out Bart Anderson, editor of EnergyBulletin.net, a news aggregator for peak oil and sustainability issues. Anderson was a guest on my radio show the day after the election, and he suggested that leaders in the new movement wrote off national action, because they saw no likelihood of meaningful response from the administration. With a new administration, and a Congress more concerned about energy issues, he says that thoughts are turning to national action.
If Congress and Obama decide to invest heavily in rail, weatherization, renewables, local food production and other aspects of resilient communities, we’ll be able to make a transition far more quickly. There’s a danger, however, that new infusions of money will not go to investments that are most useful at a future time, when we have half or a 10th of the oil we use now. Dinosaur industries may be poorly managed, but they can afford lobbyists. (Immediately after the election, the auto industry demanded another $25 billion from the feds.)
Local planning, local energy, local food continue to be crucial. Just now, I have some amount of hope that competence and attention from the federal government can boost those efforts enough to make a huge difference in how prepared we are a decade from now.
Carl Etnier, director of Peak Oil Awareness, blogs at vtcommons.org/blog and hosts radio shows on WGDR, 91.1 FM Plainfield and WDEV 96.1 FM/550 AM, Waterbury. He can be reached at EnergyMattersVermont(at)yahoo.com.
