Next week Barack Obama will nominate key members of his energy and environmental team and among the likely choices are some to be happy about including Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu.
On Tuesday Obama met with Al Gore and, sandwiched between comments on the Blagojevich case, succinctly outlined most of the big plan I summarized a few days ago:
(transcript below)
I think it is clear from these comments that Obama is not aiming for incremental change. To achieve the kind of change Gore talks about, a switch to clean power in ten years, will require not only implementation of technologies we currently have but new breakthroughs. That's what makes Chu's appointment so encouraging: he leads the lab that has been working on the breakthroughs.
Still, there are skeptics who say the cost and the time necessary for a conversion to cleaner power make this undoable during a severe recession. More on that below.
Here is the transcript of Obama's comments during an appearance with Joe Biden and Al Gore:
All three of us are in aggreement that the time for delay is over. The time for denial is over. We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way. That is what I intend my administration to do.
What's exciting about that conversation [with Gore] is that it is not only a problem, it is also an opportunity. As I've already spoken about as we've started to provide a framework for our economic recovery plan, we have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country in all 50 states to repower America, to redesign how we use energy and think about how we are increasing efficiency to make our economy stronger, make us more safe, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and make us competitive for decades to come -- even as we save the planet.
And so we are not going to miss this opportunity. My office is going to be working with a whole host of stakeholders on this issue, including VicePresident Gore, businesses, Republicans, Democrats, consumers, everybody who has a stake in this issue and we all do, I want to bring together. The kind of a progressive bold approach that is that is going to make the future better for my children and all our children.
But can this be done? Here's a pessimistic take which argues that the type of R & D necessary to create the technology for this may be hard to come by when companies are struggling to survive.
Still, the arguments in favor seem to be winning so far. Here's some great material on the emerging "Green New Deal":
Incidentally, the term "green new deal" began, as best I can tell, in the UK last summer. If you search Google news you'll find over 150 stories with the term from the last month but almost nothing before that. There's certainly worldwide momentum here which is rather astonishing considering where we were on this issue just 2 years ago.
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