The New Energy Agenda

Al Tilley, Professor English College of Arts and Sciences at UNF and Northeast Florida Group Executive Committee Member

President-elect Obama will probably move support for renewable energy ahead of his cap and trade program. He is also expected to quickly support production of more fuel-efficient vehicles. Learn more from Bloomberg.com.

Bill McKibben describes the tasks which lie before the Obama administration in an article from Envirnoment360. (The link is courtesy of Vijay Satoskar). The burden for action to mitigate climate change up to now has been at the local and state level because the national government played no role except occasionally to try to impede action. Now it moves to the national level. If the Copenhagen conference next year is successful, the effort will be internationally led. State and local authorities will no longer be working out our climate policies.

A renewable energy portfolio standard (RPS) passed the House and was narrowly defeated in the Senate. With the shift in those bodies in the past election, an RPS is likely to be enacted. Obama's program asks us to achieve 10% renewable energy in the next few years and 25% by 2025. The cap and trade program will place a price on carbon; well engineered with few offsets, a cap and trade can in effect be what it ought to be for maximum effect: a tax on carbon. The coal industry will probably disappear, as it must. Other fossil fuel suppliers should dwindle. Obama has expressed an interest in supporting natural gas. It is a position from which I hope he will be dissuaded-burning natural gas cannot take us toward near zero emissions. In any case, an adequate price on carbon would mean that natural gas could not compete with renewable energy in cost.

One reason to postpone the cap and trade program is to build an early success with renewable fuels and fuel-efficient vehicles so that people will be prepared for the many shocks which will follow a high and rising price placed on carbon. Too, we shall need a new energy grid in place before we phase out fossil fuels. Al Gore urges the new grid as the first project, as noted on Reuters.com. Gore wants us to be at 100% renewable energy within ten years. That is at the edge of the doable, which puts it into scale with the problem. If renewables are ready to pick up part of the load, and if people have come to see that the renewables program is having a positive impact on jobs and the economy, they may be more willing to endure the pain which will come with a full transition to a sustainable economy.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle last January Obama remarked that under his cap and trade program companies could if they wished buy the carbon credits to build a coal plant, but it would probably bankrupt them. The Drudge Report discovered the quotation in the final days of the election and McCain used it in speeches, but no one I heard seemed to realize that McCain was right to emphasize the seriousness of what Obama had said. Perhaps the slander and exaggerations of the McCain campaign insulated his listeners from what deserved to be taken with greater attention. Currently, only 42% of Americans consider global warming to be a serious problem, among the lowest public concern of all countries. Read more about it from Yahoo! News.

I have seen little indication in our public discourse that people recognize the dislocations which the transition will bring. We shall need to rebuild everything from our transportation to our food supply. The goal of the transition is a world in which we are more fully at home and one which we can proudly pass along to the future. That vision needs to be built before we are prepared to endure a shift in the foundation of our material civilization away from fossil fuels.

Legislative/Politics