In my dreams, the President’s Oval Office speech included these two sentences:
Folks, what we’re seeing in the Gulf is the price of cheap energy. We can’t afford it anymore.
And now, back to dull, boring primary reality.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Founded by Mark Kleiman (1951-2019)
Too bad no President is allowed to say that the country can no longer afford cheap energy.
In my dreams, the President’s Oval Office speech included these two sentences:
Folks, what we’re seeing in the Gulf is the price of cheap energy. We can’t afford it anymore.
And now, back to dull, boring primary reality.
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Obama didn't even mention cap-and-trade or a carbon tax as one of the "ideas" that need to be considered, along with standards and research! Nor did the rest of the world rate a mention, and your president only reached for the stale mercantilist rhetoric of American exceptionalism. It's not as if the minds of the majority of the American people have been clogged by the lobby-fueled toxic plume of Beltway denialism. A disastrous, colossal fail.
I'll revise my opinion if these dissembling tactics bring off a climate law that does the necessary wthout mentioning the problem it is actually designed to solve.
My fantasy Obama introduced a single payer health care bill by saying, “We need a public health care system because disease is a public enemy. We don’t use privateers to defend our shores and we shouldn’t have private insurers defend our citizens’ health.”
Sadly, Obama is too much of a politician to even imagine calling energy 'cheap.' But it's not sad that he's enough of a politician to know that setting any political benchmarks at all would be ineffective and even backfire. Nothing he could say on prime-time TV would change any Senators' minds about voting for a carbon tax (which is only peripherally related to an oil spill anyway–at best it would slow, never stop, oil exploration).
I'd have loved to hear him say that oil, not BP, was the problem, but I accept that in a country where the oil spill has barely dented public support for offshore drilling, that this would do more harm than good.
I'll give G.W. Obama a pass on this because, from a climate perspective, oil is irrelevant. Any serious analysis shows that we (humans) will find and use all the oil and natural gas that's findable and usable. Maybe Americans won't, but somebody will. Even at $10/gallon for gas, oil is extremely cheap, given what you can do with it in terms of work, and that's leaving aside the miraculous chemical transformations we've learned ("Why you can build a whole society on it! Yes, I know, we have!!")
Talking about climate and oil just mucks up the chances for getting anything serious done on climate, which means getting off coal. As Ray Pierrehumbert of realclimate.org (and U. Chicago) discussed in his outstanding paper "Catastrophe in Slow Motion," we can expect that all the oil and natural gas will be used, and we've still got a chance to survive. Conversely, if we don't get off coal — and fast — then nothing we do about oil and natural gas matters. There's enough fossil carbon locked up in coal to send us to 1000 ppm CO2 even without natural feedbacks kicking in.
So, for once, I'm happy that Obama is ultra-cautious. The case against Big Oil is that we're wasting an incredible resource while destroying ecosystems; that isn't a climate argument. There's no replacement for oil or natural gas on even the most distant horizon, so if Obama had linked action on oil to doing something about climate, then it would have been an admission that we're not going to do anything about climate.
Bottom line is this:
It is the job of Congressional Democrats (and any non-insane Republicans there) to make the far-out proposals, like mentioning new taxes in this economy, so the President can look moderate and statesmanlike when he gets us to something that's a big step forward, but more sellable than the crazy Congressional ideas.
That is what leadership looks like, when we all know that as a society we are probably not capable, as yet, of bold bipartisan solutions. We will end up with some middle-of-the-road, not so great policy (as in healthcare), but if the left does its job, maybe it will still be something worthwhile.