The Presidential Candidates & the Enviroment - 3 Great Articles

The Real Problem With Foreign Oil? Climate Change
WorldChanging Team
October 16, 2008 10:12 AM

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008877.html

Memo to Senators Obama and McCain:

Last night in your debates, you missed an opportunity. You faced the question,


Would each of you give us a number, a specific number of how much you believe we can reduce our foreign oil imports during your first term?

You led your responses, very similarly, with the following statements (excerpts taken from this transcript):

McCain:


I think we can, for all intents and purposes, eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and Venezuelan oil. Canadian oil is fine.

Obama:


I think that in ten years, we can reduce our dependence so that we no longer have to import oil from the Middle East or Venezuela. I think that's about a realistic timeframe.


Senators, we think that you missed the point to address the real problem, which is not which nation the oil comes from, but rather the very fact that it is oil. Your statements do not acknowledge that fossil fuels are a finite natural resource that we will eventually run out of, and which, when burned, poison the planet.

By addressing the larger issue -- climate change -- and pushing for a United States that no longer needs fossil fuels to do its daily business, you will inherently solve the problem of sending U.S. dollars to hostile oil-producing nations. But the reverse scenario does not work. America could remove all the foreign oil from its energy supply and still be economically disadvantaged and ecologically imperiled. And weaning America off select supplies of foreign oil does little to help the rest of the world transition to a post-carbon economy.

True, both of you mentioned alternative energy later on in your answers:

Obama:


But understand, we only have three to four percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, which means that we can't drill our way out of the problem.

That's why I've focused on putting resources into solar, wind, biodiesel, geothermal. These have been priorities of mine since I got to the Senate, and it is absolutely critical that we develop a high fuel efficient car that's built not in Japan and not in South Korea, but built here in the United States of America.
McCain:


So the point is with nuclear power, with wind, tide, solar, natural gas, with development of flex fuel, hybrid, clean coal technology, clean coal technology is key in the heartland of America that's hurting rather badly.

And, to be fair, moderator Bob Schieffer could have done a better job with this question. He took the topic – originally identified as "energy and climate control" – straight to the issue of "foreign oil."

By consistently addressing the problem of oil as if it is first and foremost an issue of national security, we believe that the entire discussion is misleading the public. Dependence on oil is an issue of planetary security, because continuing to yoke the systems that define our lives to a resource that has no future is the very antithesis of sustainability.

While we realize that foreign oil and its implications for security and the economy are at the forefront of American minds, we still believe that there is a crucial subject here that is being avoided by the two men competing to lead the world's most fuel-dependent, most polluting (per capita) nation on earth.

We worry that this persistent air of surreality won't clear up nearly soon enough.



Job One, Day One: Bright Green Economic Recovery
Alex Steffen
October 14, 2008 9:43 AM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008866.html

"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late."
--Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

With the U.S. presidential race in its final few weeks, and momentum towards a possible Obama/ Democratic landslide building, it's worth beginning to ask, "What next? What happens here in America after the election?"

The world needs a strong and future-focused United States, but what we have is a U.S. nearing complete collapse. Our financial institutions have nearly failed, our dollar is weak, our government is in deficit spending, our people are neck-deep in debt. Our infrastructure is literally falling apart. Our military is in a shambles. Our health care system is the joke of the developed world, our education system fails half of our children, and we imprison more people than China. Meanwhile, we are the world's worst polluter, having built a car-dependent suburban way of life that pumps money out of our economy and planet-threatening emissions into the sky.

Many Americans, especially young Americans, see this nation's future disintegrating in front of their eyes, and realize that we no longer have options or time to debate. We have only one choice: launch ourselves immediately into a bright green economic transformation, or sink into a potentially irrecoverable decline.

We know that transformation is within our grasp. We know that we can move quickly to transition to smart growth and urban revitalization, green building, efficient electric cars, power generation from renewables, sustainable farming, ecological restoration of our wild lands and rivers, green taxes (with a carbon cap) and a strong commitment to education, public science and diplomacy. Solutions exist to the problems we face.

We know that making this transition quickly and strongly will produce millions of green jobs, and propel America back into the lead of the global economy while benefiting people everywhere. We know too that making this transition will leave Americans healthier, more prosperous and safer, while restoring fiscal stability to our government. A bright green transformation would not be a drag on the economy, but the means of its rescue. Finally, we know that only an all-out effort to make our prosperity sustainable offers us any hope of staving off a planetary ecological disaster.

With all we know, and all that's at stake, you'd think a strong, outspoken and immediate commitment to building a green economy would be something we could take for granted. It's not.

There's an old joke told to those going into a legislative process for the first time which goes something like this: "Write down a list of your expected accomplishments. Cut the list in half and put each half in a different envelope. Throw the envelopes out and take what you can get."

That kind of thinking now will destroy this nation, and the planet, in the very short term.

But that kind of thinking may be what we get. The next U.S. president and congressional leaders will find themselves under immediate fire from neo-conservatives, reactionary businesses and industries that are irredeemably unsustainable (like the Oil and Coal Lobbies) and will find themselves very quickly pressured to scale back their plans, to speak in the most triangulated language possible, to confine change to the smallest, most halting steps. Those in the U.S. who oppose change are strong, wealthy, unprincipled and ruthless. They're already gearing up to demand that given the tough times, change must be weak, small and slow.

But we don't have another decade to embrace change. We may not have another election, even. Indeed, we need a president and congressional leaders who stand up on their very first days on the job, and commit this nation to big, bold, rapid and visionary change. We need to set the terms of the fight at a level with the order of magnitude of change we need. The stakes are a nation transformed within the next couple years. Without that, even a landslide will prove to have been meaningless.

We are rapidly coming up on the rusted sign by the side of the road that says, simply, "too late." We need to demand action before we get there. If we don't win action now, there's no point in preserving power to fight for change later.

The task for all of us, over the next few months, is to figure out how to raise the largest ruckus imaginable in the public debate and in our communities and workplaces, demanding real change and articulating the kinds of solutions that are within our power to implement immediately.

Critically, we lack a real vision of what a bright green American would actually look like -- that's why we're hard at work on a book that explores what this nation could make itself into in 20 years, and how it might feel to live in that country.

But we needn't wait for the whole vision to advocate real change and the politics of optimism, and on that, expect more here soon.

The election was just a prelude. The fight that matters has not yet even started.

The Candidates and Climate: A Persistant Air of Surreality
Alex Steffen
October 7, 2008 6:07 PM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008827.html

Watching the U.S. presidential debates felt like an exercise in describing the problems of another planet altogether.

Consider this exchange:

QUESTION: Sen. McCain, I want to know, we saw that Congress moved pretty fast in the face of an economic crisis. I want to know what you would do within the first two years to make sure that Congress moves fast as far as environmental issues, like climate change and green jobs?
MCCAIN: Well, thank you. Look, we are in tough economic times; we all know that. And let's keep -- never forget the struggle that Americans are in today.

But when we can -- when we have an issue that we may hand our children and our grandchildren a damaged planet, I have disagreed strongly with the Bush administration on this issue. I traveled all over the world looking at the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, Joe Lieberman and I.

And I introduced the first legislation, and we forced votes on it. That's the good news, my friends. The bad news is we lost. But we kept the debate going, and we kept this issue to -- to posing to Americans the danger that climate change opposes.

Now, how -- what's -- what's the best way of fixing it? Nuclear power. Sen. Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or something like that.

Look, I -- I was on Navy ships that had nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is safe, and it's clean, and it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs.

And -- and I know that we can reprocess the spent nuclear fuel. The Japanese, the British, the French do it. And we can do it, too. Sen. Obama has opposed that.

We can move forward, and clean up our climate, and develop green technologies, and alternate -- alternative energies for -- for hybrid, for hydrogen, for battery-powered cars, so that we can clean up our environment and at the same time get our economy going by creating millions of jobs.

We can do that, we as Americans, because we're the best innovators, we're the best producers, and 95 percent of the people who are our market live outside of the United States of America.

BROKAW: Sen. Obama?

OBAMA: This is one of the biggest challenges of our times.

And it is absolutely critical that we understand this is not just a challenge, it's an opportunity, because if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily, here in the United States.

It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades.

And we can do it, but we're going to have to make an investment. The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we've got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.

And that's why we've got to make some investments and I've called for investments in solar, wind, geothermal. Contrary to what Sen. McCain keeps on saying, I favor nuclear power as one component of our overall energy mix.

But this is another example where I think it is important to look at the record. Sen. McCain and I actually agree on something. He said a while back that the big problem with energy is that for 30 years, politicians in Washington haven't done anything.

What Sen. McCain doesn't mention is he's been there 26 of them. And during that time, he voted 23 times against alternative fuels, 23 times.

So it's easy to talk about this stuff during a campaign, but it's important for us to understand that it requires a sustained effort from the next president.

One last point I want to make on energy. Sen. McCain talks a lot about drilling, and that's important, but we have three percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil.

So what that means is that we can't simply drill our way out of the problem. And we're not going to be able to deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming.

We're going to have to come up with alternatives, and that means that the United States government is working with the private sector to fund the kind of innovation that we can then export to countries like China that also need energy and are setting up one coal power plant a week.

We've got to make sure that we're giving them the energy that they need or helping them to create the energy that they need.



Note that neither candidate, both supposedly standard-bearers for straight talk and change, puts the planetary crisis in anything like the proper perspective. Both candidates gave pandering, half-answers: for supposed climate champions, neither gave the kind of answers that will either inspire the American people nor prepare the kind of mandate we'll need to take action of the proper scale.

Now, of course, being an armchair candidate is the easiest thing in the world, but still, I wish one of them had said something more like this:

"Thank you for that question.
We hear a lot about climate change and other environmental problems these days, and that makes sense, because we place a planetary crisis of historic proportions. Humanity's future is at stake.

We know that we must change our economy, if we're going to avoid catastrophe. We need to slash our greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts, and that means we're going to have to change the ways generate energy. We're going to have to change how we get around. We're going to have to change the way we build. We're going to have to change the way we grow food, and manage forests, and run our factories. We're going to have to change everything.

To the people of another country, that might be scary. But we're Americans, and we know that the changes we need to make offer us the best opportunity we have to also change the things about our country that aren't working as well as we'd like. If we commit to building an economy that grows by protecting the environment, we will create whole new industries and millions of jobs, develop technologies and products we can sell overseas, rebuild our cities and infrastructure, and bring prosperity back to our farms and forest-dependent communities.

When I am elected president, one of my first actions will be to hold a top-level "climate crisis summit" to develop a comprehensive plan to move America into the carbon-neutral, bright and green economy of the future, so that we avoid catastrophe and renew our nation."


Because here's the thing: whichever candidate wins, he is going to need to stand up in front of the American people and tell them that we face an emergency, if we are going to have any chance of acting quickly enough on climate and other planetary problems to stave off disaster. It'd be nice to see that leadership now, and not just hope it blooms after 1/20/9.