SolveClimate
Editor's Note: From our friends at SolveClimate, an excerpt from an article by Stacy Feldman on how the new administration will tackle energy and climate issues. See the original article here.
"Change has come to America," declared President-elect Barack Obama in his victory speech. It has arrived at a time of "two wars" -- "a planet in peril" and "the worst financial crisis in a century." And so, he warned:
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term.
Certainly, no president can solve the climate crisis in four or eight years. But to his credit, Obama has laid out an aggressive clean energy agenda for America to start the fight. And with increased majorities in Congress, much of it could become law.
The nation should know before Obama takes office what he has promised to deliver. A summary, from his "New Energy for America" plan:
Cap on Emissions
- Target: 80% cut in emissions below 1990 levels by 2050.
- Enact an economy-wide cap-and-trade scheme with 100% allowance auction (no pollution rights given away for free).
- Invest a portion of auction revenue ($15 billion per year) into clean energy, efficiency improvements, next-gen biofuels and cleaner cars.
Clean Energy
- Invest $150 billion over the next 10 years in clean energy technologies.
- Create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require 10% of US electricity to come from renewable sources by 2012, and 25% by 2025.
- Extend the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC) for renewables for five years.
Green Job Corps
- Help the private sector create 5 million new green jobs from government's $150 billion clean energy investment.
- Increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct it to green technologies training.
- Create "Green Vet Initiative" to provide green job training and placement for US veterans.
- Invest $1 billion per year to help manufacturing centers modernize.
No More Dirty Coal
- Make it uneconomic to site traditional coal facilities with severe limits on CO2 emissions and a carbon price signal.
- Develop 5 commercial scale coal‐fired plants with carbon capture and sequestration.
Auto Efficiency
- Target: Eliminate current oil imports from the Middle East and Venezuela within 10 years.
- Increase fuel economy standards 4% per each year and double them in 18 years.
- Put 1 million plug‐in hybrid cars on the road by 2015.
- Give $7,000 tax credit for advanced technology vehicles, as well as conversion tax credits.
- Establish a National Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) to require fuel suppliers in 2010 to begin to reduce the carbon of their fuel by 5% within 5 years and 10% within 10 years.
- Convert the entire White House fleet to plug‐ins in 1 year.
- Ensure half of all cars purchased by the federal government will be plug‐in hybrids or all‐electric by 2012.
- Provide $4 billion retooling tax credits and loan guarantees for domestic auto plants and parts manufacturers.
Building Codes
- Make all new buildings zero-emissions by 2030.
- Improve new building efficiency by 50% and existing building efficiency by 25% over the next decade to meet the 2030 goal.
- Achieve 40% increase in efficiency in all new federal buildings within 5 years.
- Weatherize 1 million homes annually.
- Ensure all new federal buildings are zero‐emissions by 2025.
- Increase efficiency of existing federal buildings by 25% within 5 years.
General Energy Efficiency
- Reduce electricity demand 15% from DOE’s projected levels by 2020.
- Reduce federal energy consumption by 15% by 2015.
- Flip incentives to energy utilities by ensuring that they earn benefits for improving
energy efficiency, rather than higher energy consumption. - Invest in a smart grid.
Global Climate Treaty
- Re‐engage with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. (First step: have a representative at the climate talks in Poland in December 2008.)
- Create a Global Energy Forum -- based on the G8+5, which includes all G-8 members plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.
- Transfer American technology to the developing world to fight climate change.
Read the rest of the article at SolveClimate
Further Reading:
With the election of Barack Obama, a new day is surely dawning for the family of humanity. We have good reasons to be hopeful. The agonizing throes of the severe and colossal storm we have endured in the past several years have produced an unexpected outcome. The air is being cleansed and the dark clouds that had been gathering on the horizon are being blown away.
Al Gore has reminded all of us that now is the time for intellectual honesty and moral courage as necessary attributes for responding ably to the human-driven global challenges which are looming ominously before humankind. As the horrendous, once in a century storm is being swept away by benevolent winds of change, perhaps we will see that honest and courageous activities of many people will begin to replace cascading, self-interested behavior of a few misguided, greedy people who have been willing to do whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially fashionable... come what may for our children.
Perhaps sufficiently reality-oriented changes in policymaking and action planning, changes that protect biodiversity from mass extinction, prevent more wanton environmental degradation and preserve Earth's body from relentless dissipation as well as the children from endangerment, are in the offing.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Written in November 2008