Presidential Climate Action Plan Is Written: Who Can Fill the Shoes?

The Denver School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado has just issued a comprehensive Presidential Climate Action Plan (PCAP). It's being readied for the 44th President of the United States "to take decisive action on global warming, with an emphasis on the first 100 days in office." The team that produced the plan, led by Bill Becker, is using it to initiate a national conversation on climate change, and will issue a final plan in September 2008, two months ahead of the election. It's a must-read-right-away.

When you do, you'll see that the first question likely to arise is "Who can fill these shoes?" Then after considering the main recommendations PCAP makes, guarantee that you'll wonder about what Congress is doing now. Despite all the intense work behind the Lieberman-Warner Bill, it's not near enough.

But that's not bad news, because PCAP is focused on the game-changer: the President. By using all the tools at the disposal of the executive branch of government, the next President can work with Congress, now warming up for the main event, to go all the way.

"I'm not sure how much I want to be quoted on this, but Congress is broken," Bill Becker told me. "There's too much compromise, and the atmosphere is beyond compromise. We need a leader who will get us off dead center."

The need to build a new energy economy is the largest market opportunity ever handed to a Chief Executive. Now all we need to do is make sure the next one has feet big enough to fill this plan with action.

For starters, the plan provides strong inoculation against the naysayers, denialists and delayers. They wave a fear-mongering flag in order to scare citizens about big gu'mmit, higher taxes and higher prices. PCAP shows how that just ain't so.

For example, in section 3 (Energy Policy) on page 11, one of the recommended Presidential actions is this: Eliminate the US Department of Energy. There's a lot of how and why that follows. So much for big gu'mmit, and the agency that coddles fossil fuel interests with taxpayer dollars.

When I asked Becker about this proposal, he chcuckled and admitted it was a provocative recommendation, but he's dead serious. He spent 15 years inside DOE. Take away the fossil fuel subsidies that the DOE administers - as PCAP recommends -- and most of DOE "just goes away." That opens the way for promoting energy efficiency and renewables to the first tier of energy policy, and tying it to small business development -- one of the PCAP report's "engines that can."

Becker said in the next 60 days, PCAP will be releasing a legal analysis of what the President has the authority to do without Congressional approval. "For example, we think the President can institute a cap-and-trade program without Congress and can order the EPA to regulate CO2 immediately," he said. That should make for an exciting first 100 days.

He also promised that a full cost calculator, now in beta testing, will be forthcoming from PCAP. It will allow analysts to do full-cost lifecycle accounting of carbon emissions of any technology or process, and allow comparison of say coal with solar PV on an apples-to-apple basis. Currently, emissions from coal, for example, are only measured at the point of combustion. But a full lifecycle analysis would take into account the emissions and costs associated with mining, transport, burial of waste, and power plant construction.

"The calculator will allow us to hold solar PV to the same standard," Becker says, so that we can truly come to understand what is clean and cost effective.

Becker admits it's going to take strong leadership from a President to sell this package. "We're not expecting the next President to walk into the pasture and start shooting sacred cows," Becker said. "But it's overgrazed and we need to start eliminating perverse incentives and start using a new yardstick."

Stay tuned. In the coming days, SolveClimate will be looking at more of the details of the report and its recommendations.

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