A climate plan in peril?
WHAT WILL the election of Barack Obama and increased Democratic majorities in Congress mean for the prospects for a change in course on global warming?
It's hard to say.
During his campaign, Obama proposed that the federal government spend $150 billion over the next 10 years "to catalyze private efforts to build a clean-energy future." He also pledged to increase automotive fuel economy standards by 4 percent per year and to institute a national cap on greenhouse gases.
On few issues is there greater contrast between the positions of the incoming and outgoing presidents. After eight years of Bush administration denial, obfuscation, stalling, and litigation, America has chosen a president who promised change. In his Grant Park victory speech last Tuesday, he referred to "a planet in peril" and of "new energy to harness."
Nevertheless, President-elect Obama will confront several obstacles to making his visions a reality.
The most obvious problem is fiscal. The federal budget was already deep in red ink before the recent $700 billion financial bailout bill. Any climate initiative involving new dollars will be in competition with other spending proposals at a time when all expenditures will be facing tough scrutiny.
The public's lukewarm, even conflicted, feelings about global warming are also problematic. Even after Al Gore's Nobel Prize and his Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth," polling reveals that Americans continue to rank the issue far down on their list of concerns. By contrast, as gasoline prices rose above $4 a gallon earlier this year, people demanded action from politicians and were quick to embrace offshore oil drilling, revealing a preference to feed our fossil fuel habit rather than reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A budget out of balance and a populace more worried about the economic present than our atmospheric future does not bode well for global warming emerging as a top-tier issue in the early days of the new administration. An agenda crowded with critical items - an economy in recession, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the continuing mortgage meltdown, healthcare - awaits our newly elected leaders. There are only so many priorities that an administration and Congress can focus on, and they will need to make choices on how to use their initial honeymoon period and their finite supply of political capital.
Perhaps the best hope for a climate change initiative making the cut will be to include it as part of the administration's economic recovery plan. This would not be mere packaging: Both investment in developing new energy technologies and deployment of off-the-shelf conservation and efficiency measures are likely to create many new jobs and generate significant returns.
Even if the president and Congress manage to fund and launch a new climate initiative, there will be pressures and temptations to get it wrong. Some interests, including coal, oil, and automobile companies, will exert their influence to try to soften the effects of any climate program. These industries are disproportionately located in what we have come to know so well as battleground states. The election of 2012 is just around the corner.
There will be other political pressures as well. The president-elect took some heat in the closing weeks of the campaign for his remark to Joe the Plumber about "spreading the wealth around." Broad distribution of government benefits is, of course, a fundamental feature of democracy's DNA - it is no accident that military bases and post offices dot the landscape.
However, a national research program to accelerate green energy development ought to make its investment decisions on the merits, which is to say, according to the best judgment of experts about the promise of proposed technologies to blossom and diminish our demand for carbon-emitting fuels. On the other hand, energy conservation and efficiency programs could be spread around - all states and regions have a need for tightening buildings, tuning heating and cooling systems, and replacing old, inefficient appliances and light fixtures.
There is no longer any debate about the fundamental scientific question: The earth's climate is already changing, and human activities are the cause. Whether America's political climate will be favorable enough to produce action remains to be seen.
Jim Gomes, a guest columnist, is director of the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise at Clark University. 