Is the Nation Ready for Obama's Energy Plan?

By Mark Clayton, Christian Science Monitor. Posted November 13, 2008.

If President-elect Barack Obama enacts the energy plan he laid out during his campaign, American taxpayers will each get a $500 rebate check -- funded by a windfall profits taxes on big oil companies.

But that's just for starters. Besides taxing oil giants more, Senator Obama's detailed 30-point energy agenda calls for big changes to address carbon emissions, fuel efficiency for vehicles, and domestic and renewable power and efficiency.

While many candidates' platform promises are cast aside when political opposition looms, the Obama energy plan seems integral to his promise to get the economy restarted, some experts say.

"Obama's energy plan is much more than a campaign laundry list," says Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank chaired by John Podesta, who heads the Obama administration's transition effort. "It really is a centerpiece of Obama's economic development strategy for the nation, for energy security, and rebuilding our cities and infrastructure," Mr. Hendricks says.

Among more than two dozen bullet points, Obama 's energy plan includes:

• Putting 1 million plug-in-electric hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) on the road by 2015 -- cars that can get the equivalent of 150 miles per gallon.
• Creating 5 million new green jobs by investing $150 billion over 10 years to stimulate clean-energy infrastructure and manufacturing such as wind-turbine plants and solar panels carpeting the nation's rooftops.
• Cutting US oil consumption, within 10 years, by the amount currently imported from the Middle East and Venezuela combined.
• Requiring 10 percent of the nation's electricity to come from renewable energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass by 2012. By 2025, raise that to 25 percent.
• Establishing an economy-wide cap-and-trade program that cuts US greenhouse gas emissions by charging for every ton of carbon dioxide that goes into the sky from coal- and natural gas-fired US power plants.

Can Obama do all that and more -- or will political and economic obstacles ultimately turn the plan into a much more modest effort? How much was campaign window dressing, and how much energy transformation will the US undergo?

"Obama has enormous political support for his clean-energy agenda," says Anna Aurillio, director of policy development for Environment America, an environmental group. "If you look at the regions that will be impacted by the changes -- middle America and New England in particular -- these are places that will benefit from clean energy and back him politically in making this change."

Some elements of Obama 's energy plan are costly, but also vital to the rest of the plan. For instance, sales of pollution permits from the cap-and-trade program to limit CO2 emissions across the economy are key to helping fund the plan's $15 billion per year (for 10 years) expenditure on renewable energy research and development.

But some say rising electric rates -- the result of costs involved with greenhouse-gas emissions -- could stir political opposition and derail implementation, especially given the economic crisis.

"In times of economic stress, the last thing you want to do is increase peoples' energy costs with something like cap-and-trade," says Anne Korin, cofounder of the Set America Free Coalition (SAFC) of energy-security hawks and environmentalists. SAFC calls for policies that would disconnect the US from imported oil.

"There 's a lot of talk about that, but a congressman who wants to be reelected would be very wary of that," Ms. Korin says.

While no one has recalculated the cost-benefit for Obama's official energy plan, some earlier calculations for similar -- albeit rosy -- plans suggest that the net effect would still be a plus for green jobs and the economy.

The Apollo Alliance, a labor-environmental coalition, has put forward a proposal that contains proposals similar to those in the Obama plan. The alliance calls for a federal investment in clean-energy technology and green building that's twice as large ($300 billion) as Obama's. Their analysis calculates more than $1.4 trillion in savings and economic growth.

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Mark Clayton is a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor.

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