Bill Becker's Climate Chronicles

Tip O’Neil, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, once declared that “all politics is local”. The same might be said for climate change. While its consequences are global, its root cause is the greenhouse gas emissions each of us emits directly or indirectly from our vehicles, buildings and appliances.

If anthropogenic climate change is the result of the millions of energy decisions each of us makes in the course of our lives, then it stands to reason that the solution to climate change lies in making those decisions differently. Each us must sign a treaty with ourselves, a personal Kyoto Protocol. Without that individual commitment, no international agreement to mitigate global warming will be worth the recycled paper it’s written on.

This point came home recently when I met a woman named Clare Dakin in London. Clare is the UK’s representative for a program called Project Green Hands. Its objective is to reverse the desertification of Tamil Nadu, the seventh most populous state in India, by planting 114 million trees within the next 10 years.

So far, six million trees have been planted by 1 million people in three years, including 850,000 in a single day, a Guinness Book world record. The people who plant the trees are volunteers who each pledge to care for a single sapling for two years.

I’ve just returned from Europe with a new understanding of what the world expects from the United States on global climate change, now that Barack Obama will be president.

In a word: Everything.

I spent two days in Poznan, Poland, at the 14th Conference of the Parties – the gathering of nations now underway to work on a global climate deal scheduled to be signed one year from now in Copenhagen. From there, I went to London for a series of meetings with business and environmental leaders.  Because I’ve been involved in proposing a climate action plan for the next president and Congress – one of dozens undoubtedly descending upon the transition team – everyone wanted my take on what President Obama will do.

The weather in Poland was cold and gloomy, the weather in London was cool and foggy, but the mood in both places was sunny in anticipation of U.S. leadership. Obama’s approaching inauguration has filled international climate activists with hope.

But – and this will be good news for the president-elect – I came away with the sense that the world community isn’t expecting Obama to be Captain America, single-handedly preventing a tragic decline in the Earth’s hospitality to our species. The world expects the superhero to be America, the nation. Obama’s election isn’t seen as the anointment of a miracle-worker; it’s seen as a sign that America has returned to its senses, has reasserted its ideals in a way that surprised even us Americans, and has become in the words of one colleague in London, “cool again”.

In part one of this two-part post, I suggested four principles that President-elect Obama’s economic team should follow as they create an economic recovery package. To sum up, America needs long-term investments in a new energy economy, with every dollar used strategically to solve several problems at once, including energy security, economic stability and a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama clearly understands this prescription. He has announced that he will champion a two-year recovery package to create 2.5 million jobs, in part by "creating the clean energy infrastructure of the twenty-first century." To his credit, he told governors and international leaders meeting in California last week that our economic mess will not deter his commitment to this investment.

"I promise you this," he said in a taped address. "When I am president, any governor who's willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that's willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that's willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America."

The question is whether the Congress and the American people will support a recovery package designed not just for short-term stimulus, but for long-term health.

When Barack Obama introduced us to his economic team in Chicago this week, you could almost hear an intercom blasting in the background: "Dr. Obama, please report to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, stat."

The new advisers gathered around the President-elect looked like a crew of surgeons about to go to work on a patient who is flat on his back and suffering a heart attack -- an apt description of the economy. How the Obama team chooses to treat the patient will mean everything for the long-term prognosis. The economy needs more than a jolt from a defilibrator; it needs a heart transplant. The doctors should use the paddles if they must, but they should not spare the scalpel.

As Obama’s team begins work on a recovery package, I hope they’ll keep a few guiding principles in mind.

Now that the 2008 election finally is over, let’s go to Disney World.

I’ll explain, but first some background. The dominant theme of the long presidential campaign was change. The vote on Nov. 4 was a clear mandate for President Obama to make it happen. But what kind of change? And once we begin to define it, will we all disagree?

We need a national conversation on the topic of change, on America’s future. The conversation is sufficiently important that it should be convened by President Obama himself. In fact, along with all of the other tasks that will occupy the transition team between now and January 20, a few members of the team should be assigned to focus on our national trip to Disney World.

Barack Obama has created a top-notch team to guide his transition into the White House. 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 advisers 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.

To lead America into a post-carbon economy, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have to revolutionize the biggest and most heavily lobbied of the government’s programs. That means taking on the armies of the status quo, who have money and inertia on their side.

It’s a battle that must be fought and won. Today, our public policy is riddled with crisis-inducing, self-defeating contradictions. The next Congress will have to resolve some tough questions that past Congresses avoided. For example:

1.) What action will Congress take to prove to the world that the United States is serious about addressing climate action?

There is no lack of ideas for what President Obama and the 111th Congress should do to address three of the most pressing issues they will face when they take office in January -- global climate change, the energy crisis and economic transformation. It may be winter in Washington, D.C., but it’s springtime in national politics. Policy agendas are blooming like cherry blossoms.

For example, last week alone, Washington D.C. was introduced to three comprehensive plans to address economy, energy and climate. Two were issued by the Center for American Progress, headed by John Podesta, co-chair of President-elect Obama’s transition team, including an excellent strategy for green recovery by Bracken Hendricks and Benjamin Goldstein.

The other was the Presidential Climate Action Plan (PCAP) released during a standing-room only briefing on Capitol Hill, after two years of gestation at the University of Colorado. PCAP contains more than 180 proposals for President Obama and the next Congress, across 18 topics, ranging from natural resource stewardship to public health and from farm policy to zero-carbon buildings and transportation systems.

Now that we know Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States, we can turn to the next critical question of national leadership: In this historic moment, how bold will President Obama be?

It was Candidate Obama who introduced the theme of change to the 2008 campaign, and it proved so powerful among voters that the other leading candidates quickly adopted it. It’s a cliché for candidates to run against the status quo in Washington, no matter how long they’ve been there. But in 2008, Obama seems to grasp that “change” has a much deeper meaning.

Here is an important rule of thumb when you see a television commercial sponsored by an oil company: Don’t believe a word it says.

Some time ago, I posted a piece about the oil industry’s shenanigans when California voted a couple of years ago on a ballot initiative to increase its gasoline tax. The measure was heavily supported by voters until the oil industry went on the air and warned that everyone’s gasoline prices would go up. The TV spots showed a distressed woman pumping gas as the price went ka-ching, ka-ching.