Will Obama be a one term president?

I'd disagree with the latter half. This isn't JUST an environmentalist issue. This is economic and geopolitical, as well. And I think the issue is hurt by making it an 'environmentalist' issue simply because it means people don't see the larger context to it.

 

What you described is basically the reasoning behind the Kerry-Lieberman bill in the Senate (formerly Kerry-Lieberman-Graham). It's also, with almost directly lifted phraseology, the rationale Obama gave for supporting offshore oil drilling as a concession in advance of said bill's premiere.

A couple of point from that flailing debate are instructive here. First off, it's a very delicate balance, because as liberals at the time pointed out, and as the current crisis has evidenced, the sort of expanded drilling Republicans want as a compromise (and which is supposed to fill the gap until the new technologies come online) isn't really that safe. Second, as Jabbadabbado indicated (perhaps in another thread? Anyway, look for the one where he posted the graph about energy sources), nothing's going to come online fast enough to allow for essentially maintaining our current levels of consumption. Modifying our behavior on energy will, in all likelihood, require taxation of some sort to disincentivize it/account for the indirect costs of the energy production. Given how rabidly anti-tax the current conservative movement is, no carbon tax or cap-and-trade plan is likely to gain any traction with them, even as a necessary part of a comprehensive package (in some ways comparable the overwrought angst over the individual mandate in healthcare, really). Third, the current political environment is incredibly toxic. It's incredibly difficult for anyone to try and make a compromise even when it's something they'd agree with. Witness, for instance, John McCain's hardline opposition to climate legislation or immigration reform, after previously having been the loudest voice on the right championing both. Likewise, under increasing criticism from home state Republicans, Lindsey Graham has given a scatter-brained series of justifications for leaving the current climate bill that he had worked on for months. For instance, he declared himself angry and disgusted that the Democrats were considering taking up immigration reform, even though just a week or two earlier he had publically criticized Obama for. . .failure to show leadership on immigration reform.

So yeah. I'd agree that your general approach sounds valid. And I therefore both expect and hope you support the legislation moving through the Senate, given its close alignments with your stated goals. But the reality is that there are a plethora of reasons that keep this from being the sort of easy home run people in this thread are suggesting.

 

I'd also say Johnson and Nixon were environmentalist Presidents, to give you some perspective. Of course it has economic and geopolitical importance, I think I stressed that already, how important this is to the big picture. I just meant "Energy-ist" President, but I don't think that's a word, so I went with environmentalist. Obama thought he'd be remembered as the "Healthcare-President", but if he wants to be a strong candidate for re-election and doesn't want to be overshadowed by this Oil Spill (both now and in his legacy), he'll need to strive to become the "Energy-President" as well.

Watching his Oval Office address last night, he just did not seem as inspired by this as he was with Healthcare. I hope I'm wrong.




KnightWriter, please answer this:

If you don't think Democrats can do this, then why do you want Democrats to win? When Democrats are running to gain/retain power for the sake of power, there's no use voting for them. When I want a Do-Nothing government, I'll vote Republican. Or do you think there are some things Democrats should do, and can do, besides Energy? Because I don't see anything more important than Energy right now. Other issues, while important and in need of fixing (immigration, education, tax reform, gay rights, campaign financing, nuclear arms reduction, cyber-security & net-neutrality, etc.) just aren't as essential compared to Energy. Job creation and balancing budget could even be tied to Energy, as well as national security. There are a few issues (not those just mentioned) that I like which are also issues the Republicans would have a better shot than the Democrats at actually trying, issues which they could succeed in. I'm more liberal and progressive, but I'm an Independent, and if the Democrats are incapable of getting important stuff done, like Energy, then I might just consider the Republican candidates. I already plan on voting for an Independent, former-Republican for Governor. Why do you vote Democrat? Why keep Democrats in power? I know you are voting against Republicans, but what are you voting for??

 

Jabba-wocky, do you happen to have a link to that? Googling, I'm apparently getting side tracked with a Kerry-Lieberman bill about climate policy, which is precisely what I said it SHOULDN'T be, and at least with the article I found, is talking predominantly about cap-and-trade, and is very much being described as an environmental move, not an energy move.

 

Ghost:

It's called Big Business. And public ignorance. Those two things are the biggest reason why we still use gas the way we do. The end.

 

You're looking at the right bill, though you'll need to find a better article summary that addresses what the bill is actually about. It's a comprehensive energy/climate bill. However, because the cap-and-trade proposal is controversial, that's what gets the lion's share of attention in all the articles written about it for mass consumption. In the same way, important but by no means dominant issues like the individual mandate and the public option sucked up all the oxygen in the room during the healthcare debate. Likewise, the Consumer Protection Agency and Blanche Lincoln's derivatives proposal in a much larger and more complex financial reform bill.

That's probably the major failing of the media in dealing with this sort of omnibus legislation that has been Obama's hallmark to date. By focusing on the "hot button" issues involved, they tend to miss the forest for that one single tree, and leave the public with a very poor understanding of what's actually being proposed.

Here's the official summary of the: American Power Act

As you'll see, it really does try to address all the different elements of our energy policy, not just "ZOMG SAVE THE WHALES/OWLS!"

 

I know the problems of Big Business and public ignorance. I can have ideals and optimism, but I'm not naive, I can also be pragmatic and sometimes even pessimistic (which I basically am about this specific Oil Spill). I think Obama, or someone, could lead us to overcome them in passing a good Energy bill.

But that doesn't answer my question: why do you want the Democrats to have power in government? Especially if you think they're incapable of passing a good Energy bill without a gasoline price crisis? What are the issues that Democrats are for, that are important to you? (I gave some possible choices above). Please know that I'm not trying to nag you, just trying to understand you.

 

Ironically, KW, it will be big business and not government, idealists or activists who drive the transition to alternative energies and cleaner fuels.

ES

 

Probably true. But we aren't at the point where BB finds it profitable to do so.

 

I'm seeing a WHOLE lot of talk about carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, cap-and-trade etc. Which is precisely the stuff that shouldn't be in there. The whole cap-and-trade thing is, I think, a mistake. I don't think the solution is "regulate everything", I think the solution is "help fund a forward push". I don't object to gov't money (or tax breaks) going to infrastructure, like getting more nuclear power plants built (since the initial cost is much of the problem), promoting the adaptation of solar/wind power, and research to make all of these technologies more effective. And I'd also say steepening the gas mileages for cars a bit, as well, though the numbers on that aren't something I'd know myself.
This should be about promoting growth in research and adaptation, as things like solar will benefit simply from more people using the technology as it means those companies grow, and larger volumes can bring down costs, and give a chance to refine techniques. I also think that plan causes problems because it is doing precisely what it shouldn't, which is trying to constrict fossil fuels NOW before we have other options in place. If you successfully stall the economy, I'm skeptical that we'll be able to make the hard jump in new infrastructure that has to happen.

Also, the article I was looking at, then, (I was reading one from The Hill) highlights EXACTLY why this isn't supposed to be in there. IMO, deciding to make climate change issues as big of a deal as that bill does, given the political environment surrounding climate change, is basically something I read as all about political points to certain backers and not about getting results that actually help us. If you promote nuclear and renewable sources, you WILL reduce greenhouse gases, but won't bring up a politically volatile issues. This shouldn't, imo, mention climate change because thanks to the vile behavior of Gore, that's now a heated political issue that has been thoroughly undermined by many politicians that push it. That will serve as the touch of death. If you ignore climate change and focus on energy independence and that we'll run out of fossil fuels, and that it's economically logical to get the U.S. to be the forefront of this technology for exportation purposes, you get issues that people will uniformly agree with more, imo.

 

Mostly because there isn't the infrastructure for it yet, and also because the technologies aren't ready just yet.

ES

 

Only one way to find out.

 

I think that a cap-and-trade program is the wrong way to go for solving the energy crisis and climate change. Not only is it too closely associated with climate change and therefore difficult given the political climate, but I am skeptical of how efficiently it could be run. I'm not familiar with all of the logistics, but a lot of what I have read implies that it would be messy and inefficient in such a large, complicated market. However, I still believe that a carbon tax would be the best solution to not only confronting climate change but to benefit our economy. Climate politics aside, a carbon tax would still do wonders for our economy and society - with a higher price for carbon, it would promote efficiency, conservation and make alternative fuels more competitive. The revenues could be used to cut more unjust taxes (income) or used to subsidize clean energy sources. It would allow for assurance in the marketplace (cap-and-trade can cause volatile prices at times) and require much less regulation. The only problem with it is that it has the dreaded "T" word in it that would make most of the dreaded "Tea Party" go up in flames over it (even if it was revenue-neutral).

 

I think Obama won't be a one termer mainly because the alternatives are terrible. Mitt Romney? Seriously? The guy looks and acts like someone who'd date rape someone's sister. And yeah, he has a good business acumen, but I always thought that government and businesses should be run differently. Maybe that's just my silly notion. I think that's one of the major problems today: people think our government needs to be run like a business. That's why you've got the CEO Stepford Smiler trio on the Republican ticket in California. Do you really want a government run like HP or ebay? Anyway, who else? Scott Brown, nice guy, but too moderate for the tabaggers to vote for. Sarah Palin? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Mike Huckabee, again? Rudy '9/11!' Giuliani? Bobby Jindal?

Okay, these are all the likely people running, but you get the point. They all are just not good candidates or serious contenders. So, unless some Robo-Jesus Republican comes along I don't foresee Obama being voted out. As badly as he's doing right now it could've been a lot worse.

 

If it were economic/geopolitical, then the more obvious solution might be oil shale - not a green energy program. Almost five years back, Austin Bay was discussing reports that Shell had come up with a process to get shale oil that was profitable at $35 a barrel, and that the shale deposits in Colorado were anywhere from 1 to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil. They also noted that there was a fair bit of natural gas there as well. It makes ANWR look like a puddle on the sidewalk.

Then there is the fact that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal. Between coal-to-liquid and/or more coal plants, again, a lot of dependence on Saudi oil would be negated. I'm also in favor of nuclear power as well and think we should build more of them.

But environmentalists block or oppose all three of those methods. So, are they really seeking energy independence, or are they instead trying to push a different agenda?

 

I think the idea is not to pollute ourselves into oblivion, Smuggler.

 

I agree that we need to use those resources, but I think making the environment a better place is more worthwhile. The only people I know of who are preaching this 'trash the environment' nonsense are the religious freaks in the Republican't and Democratic party.

 

Coal is the one thing that can be ramped up more quickly than nuclear. People talk about U.S. coal reserves as if they were essentially limitless, but I wonder how long they would last if we had to essentially replace most of our oil consumption with coal-fired electricity for electrified rail or electric motor vehicles, or coal-based liquid fuel. a 200 year supply might quickly become a 50 year supply, although I think no one knows for sure. And the environmental/climate consequences of burning all that coal without any efforts at carbon sequestration/storage are likely to be severe.

Shale has very low energy content relative to coal and is never going to become a cost- and energy-efficient alternative to burning coal so long as coal remains an abundant alternative.

When we start grinding up oil shale and trying to burn it on a massive global scale to produce electricity, that's when you'll know that the end of industrialized civilization is at hand.

 

I think you make a lot of erroneous assumptions there. Critically, you act as if carbon taxing is solely an "environmental" issue. In fact, it's directly related to energy policy, and is being deployed in that fashion here, since the overwhelming majority of all human CO2 emissions stem from the burning of fossil fuels. Thus, trying to discuss energy without a discussion of carbon becomes an absurd exercise on the level of discussing major budget reforms without touching military spending, social security, or Medicare. It's pointless to say "This is comprehensive except for, you know, the part that's actually important" or better yet "This takes care of 100% of 15% of the problem."

Secondly, look again at this graph:
[image=http://www.theoildrum.com/files/world_primary_energy.png]

This isn't just something that needs a little more funding to drive innovation. The approach you are suggesting is unrealistic. There aren't enough clean energy alternatives to "replace our dependence on oil" at the current levels of consumption. There likely never will be. Even if you expanded capacity by hundreds of times, that graph pretty clearly indicates that you'd struggle to reach parity with oil. If you wait for that, you'll be waiting forever. Consumption needs to be addressed directly. Also, you seem to be misunderstanding how a tax works. By raising the price, it relatively disincentives use of fossil fuels, thereby relatively incentivizing clean technologies. There's no "stalling of the whole economy" or "everybody automatically abandons oil forever." This is the same sort of conservative alarmism that claims having an Estate Tax will bring us to communist dysfunction on the level of Mao's Great Leap Forward. In fact, people respond incrementally to incremental changes, and there's no reason a carbon tax would make the sky fall.

If I could comment more broadly, too, this is a pattern I've noticed with you form the healthcare debate. Simply doing things that are non-controversial isn't really that helpful. Sometimes, it's a good start. Other times, though, plans are only coherent or functional when they have many different parts working in synchrony. That means doing some unpopular things along with unpopular ones. Not just passing a prescription drug benefit plan, but coming up with a way to pay for it. Not just eliminating excision and pre-existing conditions by insurance companies, but including an individual mandate so that it's still economically viable. Not just throwing some more research money at developing technologies that few use or are likely to ever use so long as oil is cheaper, more available, and seemingly consequence free, but shaping the economics to reflect the externalities of fossil fuel usage, so that there's actually a realistic comparison between clean energy and fossil fuel usage. The point of having governments is not just to do easy stuff that everyone agrees on. It's a forum where citizens can come together to make the hard compromises--even over sharp debate and disagreement--that ultimately seem necessary to keep us moving in a positive direction.

 

Here is my issue. We have a major economic problem now. I don't think now is the time to raise the cost of living AND the costs businesses face at the same time. I don't see that as a positive. I don't think, for example, that we should be taxing concrete, even though I think that should be improved. There is also that if you raise the cost of doing business somewhere, you also open it up to businesses simply leaving. That would be the California model of government.

The issue isn't even that we have great options and people aren't using them, it's that those better systems need to be developed. It doesn't help that the huge federal government that you'd like to fix this are, in part, responsible because of the current subsidies that fossil fuels receive. In the case of something like oil shale (since JediSmuggler brought it up) I think if a company thinks that would be financially a good move, I don't object to it if it's done with their investment. But I don't think the fossil fuels should currently be getting subsidized and I would say a big part of this would be to drop the subsidizing of fossil fuels, which will increase the cost somewhat, but by getting rid of what the government is currently doing to artificially lower the costs of it.
I've no doubt that the price drops we've seen thus far, which have been very large, will continue for sources like photovoltaics and wind. The issue really comes down to further investment in them, and in other technologies that haven't really seen large scale implementation yet and need further research. There is, for example, some very promising solar sources being looked at that just aren't there yet. They need development, but I don't think it makes sense to punish people for not using it yet. In the 60s, the government was able to get us to the moon in a decade. I would like to see something somewhat comparable in technology development from the government NOW to get us to a large portion of renewable energy. Yes, it's spending without revenue from the government, but THIS is the sort of stuff where I think the gov't SHOULD be doing that.


One can argue that something like cap-and-trade would be necessary, but I would suggest that without it being discussed, we might've gotten the ball rolling on the research side of things a couple years ago, but that the focus created by cap-and-trade has meant that other things, very necessary things, aren't happening either. And I question if the opportunity cost of that is really less than the cost of not having one package all at once.

 

Except a couple of things. Removing tax breaks (which seem to make up a lion's shares of the fossil fuel subsidies you refer to) has the same economic impact as a carbon tax. Why? Because what consumers respond to is the price of a good, not the ideological positioning of how the increase came about. Likewise, it's been a conservative meme for years that "repealing a tax cut is raising taxes." It's silly to try and create some arbitrary distinction between them. If you can support removing the "subsidies" you can support a carbon tax.

On your second point, I would again return to the fact that you don't ever address the problem of excessive consumption. The point is not to get people to shift over to immature clean energy technologies that will completely replace fossil fuels. It is, in part, to reduce the amount of energy used period. You've neither addressed that, nor offered your view for why something like that isn't necessary. It seems to be a pretty crucial part of the analysis.

 

I view one key distinction in that carbon taxes are increasing the convoluted state of manipulatable tax policy in this country, whereas removing subsidies is simplifying it by getting rid of special exemptions. The idea of "ok, so now we have subsidies for the coal industry, on top of tax penalties on them" is convoluted and, imo, needlessly complex. I do also disagree, generally speaking, with any attempt to have subsidies or tax deductions treated as a permanent thing, viewing them as temporary measures. (I will note there's a large difference between changing the tax rates versus changing taxes for specific groups of people)

Well, in part, given the vast difference between untapped renewables and energy we consume, I don't think that, in itself, is a needed thing. Energy reduction is good, and in particular, I'm very supportive of anything that increases efficiency in the system and saves energy we'd be losing otherwise. Which is, for example, why I think that right now, hybrids are vastly superior to electric cars. I did also mention, at least, improving gas mileage, which is again in the category of efficiency and reduces consumption.

But I would, for example, have no issue with putting benefits in place for things like installing more energy efficient windows and more energy efficient appliances. Additionally, I do think the grid needs to be improved greatly. In 1970, 25% of energy consumption was for producing electricity, and we lost something like 5% of the electricity transmitted, so that works out at roughly under 2% of the nation's energy consumption was just electricity lost in transmission. Now, 40% of our energy consumption is electricity production and the loss is 9.5% due to an aging and overworked system. Which is about 4% of our energy consumption being electricity lost in transmission. We could reduce nationwide our energy consumption by 2% just if we got back to 1970s-level losses, and possibly more if, with newer technologies, we could improve on the 1970s era losses (and I'm fairly sure we should be able to do so).(data source)

 

There is a difference between deciding not to subsidize, and then adding a bunch more taxes. I'm all for removing subsidies from most industries (with an exception for those critical to national security).

But this notion of additional taxes over "excessive consumption" - particularly when there is an apparent large reserve of oil that we could tap - and your expressed desire to reduce the energy we use seems to be more about redistributing wealth on a global scale than trying to do right by the environment OR ensuring energy independence.

I'm not opposed to clean energy, but is this climate bill really about clean energy, or is something else the real objective?

 

No, I dare say you are opposed to clean energy if you wish us to drill for more oil and pollute to our heart's content. If we don't break the oil cycle now we're likely never to get rid of it until it goes away. So, best to do it now as opposed to your own idea of 'drill baby drill'.