A Green Agenda for Obama's First 100 Days

Yale Environment 360. Posted January 8, 2009.

Post-election polling conducted for the Environmental Defense Fund shows a majority of voters believe now is the time to address climate change by investing in clean energy and creating new jobs. Congress and the president-elect should work quickly to pass a cap-and-trade bill that builds our way out of the economic challenges we face, and makes America more efficient, more competitive, and more safe and secure. It is precisely the leadership the American people are looking to the next president and the new Congress to provide.

David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College.

The incoming Obama administration must grapple with the largest and most portentous policy debate we’ve ever had about the biggest issue ever on the human agenda -- planetary destabilization brought about by our overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, climate destabilization will compete for attention and resources with the effort to solve the economic crisis.

The conventional wisdom with which we’re starting the debate on climate policy is seriously flawed in several ways. Politicians, pundits, and even most NGO advocates believe that climate change is a solvable problem, is mostly an economic issue and is far less important than economic growth, and is only one issue on a list of mostly unrelated problems.

The conventional wisdom is wrong on all counts. Since most mistakes occur early in the policy process, embedded in unexamined assumptions, it is crucial at the outset that the president-elect understand the nature of climate destabilization. No known technology can “solve” the climate problem in a time span meaningful for us. But we do have control over the eventual size of climate impacts now underway. Assuming that we are successful, say, by the year 2050, we will not have forestalled many of the changes, but we will have contained the scope, scale, and duration of the destabilization.

The chasm between the science on one side, and the slow, piecemeal politics of Washington on the other, calls for leadership far beyond ordinary expectations. Climate destabilization calls for rethinking governance and the practice of democracy on a scale and time-span commensurate with the changes we’re setting in motion. Policies that govern climate and energy are crucial to policies that affect the economy and national security. Obama must demonstrate leadership that helps the public understand fundamental connections, including those between what we drive and the weather we experience. He must help us calibrate hope with the hard realities ahead and initiate deeper transformations that would otherwise be dismissed as utopian, but that are now the only practical options left to us.

We are rapidly approaching climate thresholds that we must not cross. The president-elect must be prepared to act quickly and boldly, develop unified policies for energy, security, the economy, and social equity, and use the White House as a “bully pulpit” to build a constituency for the long haul.

Van Jones, founding president of the group, Green for All, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps to put people to work tackling the economic and environmental challenges of his day. The new administration must help create an economy that is based on building, not borrowing; on creativity, not credit and consumption. We need to establish a Clean Energy Corps to help us meet our modern challenges. This corps should be charged with retrofitting and re-powering America. It would have three components: The first would be fully funded green community service programs -- for example, getting volunteers to plant trees and gardens. The second would be green job training programs; trainees would learn how to install solar panels, weatherize buildings, and do green construction. And lastly, green jobs; the federal government should invest heavily in renewable energy and energy retrofits for buildings. Much of this work would pay for itself in energy savings. Such an effort would jumpstart the economy.

William K. Reilly, administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1989-1993, and founding partner of Aqua International Partners, a private equity fund that invests in water and renewable energy.

In the first year, the Obama administration should quickly put the nation's clean air laws and other appropriate authority to work to cut global warming pollution and help deliver dramatic reductions in oil use. The Clean Air Act is flexible and well suited to address global warming pollution from the transportation and electric generating sectors, which account for more than half of greenhouse gas emissions. Aggressive action by the president can both spur Congress to early action on a more comprehensive climate program and complement congressional action.

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