President-elect Barack Obama has removed any reference of his promise to implement a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry from the Obama-Biden Transition Team website, www.change.gov.
During the course of the 2008 presidential election, the Obama campaign called for a windfall profits tax on the oil industry as a means of subsidizing a $1,000 "emergency" rebate for consumers struggling with surging gas prices. However www.change.gov, which houses the Obama-Biden transition agenda, was recently cleansed of any mention of such a tax.
Four years, aka one presidential term, is all the time Obama has to save the Earth according to NASA scientist James Hansen.
Hansen testifed to Congress over twenty years ago alerting the world that climate change was under way. Five presidential terms later, Obama is left with a crisis of epic proportion. Hansen warns:
We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.
Even before George W. Bush can settle into his new house in Dallas, his legacy on the environment is being dismantled by his replacement in the White House.
In less than two months, President Obama has put on hold Bush's plans for power-plant pollution, offshore oil drilling, nuclear waste storage and endangered species.
THE PRESIDENT'S AGENDA: What's been done, what lies ahead
The Obama team has rolled out policies Bush officials delayed, such as requiring higher energy efficiency from appliances.
Such moves have significant impacts and not just on the environment. They could affect electric bills, gas prices and the time it takes to build highways, dams and bridges.
Barack Obama is seriously considering the creation of an Energy Security Council within the White House, according to sources close to the transition.
President-elect Obama and his staff are examining a white paper written by former President Bill Clinton's chief of staff, John Podesta, who is heading up the Obama transition, the sources said.
"President Barack Obama, weighing in on the Senate's efforts to pass a climate change bill, gathered Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday to try to jumpstart an overhaul of U.S. energy policy.
Barack Obama | Green Business | COP15
Obama called the meeting at the White House with influential senators and members of his cabinet to reinvigorate one of his top domestic and foreign policy priorities, which advisers admit has suffered from the president's focus on healthcare reform.
The House of Representatives passed a bill that would require the United States to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels, roughly the same goal Washington has backed at international talks to combat global warming."
President Obama today announced over $467 million from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to expand and accelerate the development, deployment, and use of geothermal and solar energy throughout the United States. The funding announced today represents a substantial down payment that will help the solar and geothermal industries overcome technical barriers, demonstrate new technologies, and provide support for clean energy jobs for years to come. Today's announcement supports the Obama Administration's strategy to increase American economic competiveness, while supporting jobs and moving toward a clean energy economy.
"We have a choice. We can remain the world's leading importer of oil, or we can become the world's leading exporter of clean energy," said President Obama. "We can hand over the jobs of the future to our competitors, or we can confront what they have already recognized as the great opportunity of our time: the nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy. That's the nation I want America to be."
President Barack Obama took aim at climate-warming greenhouse gases on Tuesday and ordered the struggling auto industry to make more fuel-efficient cars under tough new national standards to cut emissions and increase gas mileage.
Obama said the standards, announced at a White House ceremony attended by auto industry and union leaders, would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and give five years of cost certainty to an industry battling to survive.
"The status quo is no longer acceptable," Obama said in an announcement that will pressure carmakers to transform and modernize the industry to produce more efficient vehicles.
Barack Obama has created a top-notch team to guide his transition into the White House (see "Obama fills key posts on environment, energy teams"). Next, he should create a team to guide America's transition to a new energy economy.
I'm not talking about the prestigious group of economic advisors Obama already has assembled to help him identify solutions to the economic meltdown. I'm talking about a team that includes experts in sustainable energy technologies, climate mitigation and adaptation, capital investment, state and local government, business, industry and labor.
The governors of the nation's largest energy-producing states are encouraging President-elect Barack Obama to quickly adopt a national energy policy that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The bipartisan Western Governors' Association delivered Obama a four-page letter outlining what steps it believes his administration should take to address the issue in his first 100 days in office.
President-elect Barack Obama and leaders in Congress are fashioning a plan to pour billions of dollars into a jobs program to jolt the economy and lay the groundwork for a more energy-efficient economy.
The details and cost of the so-called green-jobs program are still unclear, but a senior Obama aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a work in progress, said it would probably include the weatherizing of hundreds of thousands of homes, the installation of "smart meters" to monitor and reduce home energy use, and billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments for mass transit and infrastructure projects.
The Age has an article on the challenges awaiting Obama and the opportunity to make history via the green new deal - All eyes are on Obama, as history is his to write.
Franklin Roosevelt told Americans in his first inaugural address in 1933 that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself", before embarking on the New Deal, an ambitious and expansive recasting of government that lifted the country out of the Great Depression.
48 years later, Ronald Reagan stood on the same steps and declared: "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." With that, Reagonomics was born and FDR's New Deal consensus was usurped by a philosophy built around free markets, privatisation, deregulation and lower taxes.
The facts are pretty simple, the U.S. Department of Energy said: "Burning coal is the dirtiest way we produce electricity." And yet oddly the Obama administration, which has embraced climate legislation and green jobs, is a supporter of the oxymoronic "clean coal." The White House Web site proclaims that one of Obama's priorities is to, "develop and deploy clean coal technology."
And Obama isn't the only who is helping to spread the "clean coal" myth. The new stimulus bill, which just passed Congress, calls for $3.4 million for "fossil energy research," which refers to carbon dioxide sequestration projects (more on the problems with that below) -- the key component in the "clean coal" fantasy.
President Barack Obama announced plans on Tuesday for a national fuel-economy and greenhouse-gas standard that would significantly increase mileage requirements for cars and trucks by 2016.
Obama called it "an historic agreement to help America break its dependence on oil, reduce harmful pollution and begin the transition to a clean energy economy."
The new requirements mark the first time there has been a nationwide standard for emissions of greenhouse gases. They require an average mileage standard of 39 miles per gallon for cars and 30 mpg for trucks by 2016 - a jump from the current average for all vehicles of 25 miles per gallon.
competitiveness
WASHINGTON - Building on the action by the U.S. House of Representatives in passing historic legislation that will pave the way for the transition to a clean energy economy, President Barack Obama and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced aggressive actions to promote energy efficiency and save American consumers billions of dollars per year. Today's announcement underscores how the clean energy revolution not only makes environmental sense, but it also makes economic sense - creating jobs and saving money.
"One of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to make our economy stronger and cleaner is to make our economy more energy efficient," said President Obama. "That's why we made energy efficiency investments a focal point of the Recovery Act. And that's why today's announcements are so important. By bringing more energy efficient technologies to American homes and businesses, we won't just significantly reduce our energy demand; we'll put more money back in the pockets of hardworking Americans."
"President Barack Obama has vowed the Gulf of Mexico spill would speed the end of US dependence on fossil fuels, but experts doubt reality can match his rhetoric.
"The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now," Obama said in a primetime televised address from the Oval Office.
Amid the worst environmental disaster in US history, supporters of renewable energy had hoped images of sullied coasts and dramatic engineering failings would spark just such a revolution: the beginning of the end for fossil fuels."
To perhaps avoid the truth that was so inconvenient to President Bush, on Tuesday Barack Obama will meet with Al Gore to discuss energy policy and climate change. The talk, which will take place in Chicago, will also cover how energy and climate can fit into job creation and the economy.
President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Colorado Senator Ken Salazar as the next Secretary of the Department of the Interior, three anonymous Democratic sources have confirmed. The sources say that Salazar has been offered the job, one telling the Rocky Mountain News "It's a done deal."
Salazar, a Democrat, is four years into his first term as U.S. Senator from Colorado and has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration's energy and environmental policies, especially those relating to oil and gas development in the American West. When current Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced the draft rule designed to accelerate oil shale development across the West, Salazar reacted strongly, saying:
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday.
Obama plans to name Carol M. Browner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator for eight years under President Bill Clinton, to fill a new White House post overseeing energy, environmental and climate policies, the sources said. Browner, a member of Obama's transition team, is a principal at the Albright Group.
Part of the change Americans just voted for in overwhelming numbers was to move away from the failed energy philosophy of "drill, baby, drill" to a more farsighted strategy, emphasized by Barack Obama, based on clean, renewable energy and efficiency. Yet on the very day that we raised our voices for change, the Bush administration dragged us in the opposite direction.
The Bureau of Land Management cynically chose November 4 to announce a last-minute plan to lease huge swaths of majestic wilderness in eastern Utah for oil and gas extraction one month before President-elect Obama takes office.
President Barack Obama declared Friday a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.
"It is going to be very hard, and it's going to take some time," he said near the conclusion of a 193-nation global warming summit. "We have come a long way, but we have much further to go."
The president said there was a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" between big, industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations. Still he said this week's efforts "will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and grandchildren a cleaner planet."
President Barack Obama declared Friday a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.
"It is going to be very hard, and it's going to take some time," he said near the conclusion of a 193-nation global warming summit. "We have come a long way, but we have much further to go."
The president said there was a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" between big, industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations. Still he said this week's efforts "will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and grandchildren a cleaner planet."
