“We probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right,” President Obama told The New York Times this week. “There is probably a perverse pride in my administration . . . that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular.”
Yes, it is perverse.
It’s pure fiction to say that the White House has crafted brilliant strategies to save America. It should get credit for averting another Great Depression but one smart (but flawed) policy doesn’t excuse the drift on areas of intense importance to the United States.
Take cap and trade: What exactly was it about taxing businesses in the middle of a major recession that seemed like it would be a popular idea?
Then there was the whole “we are going to jump-start the economy by retrofitting homes” argument.
If something doesn’t sound right, it probably isn’t. The idea that we’d revitalize our economy with what are essentially janitorial jobs was absurd from the beginning.
The administration promised that 900,000 jobs would come from building retrofits. Turns out, according to the Energy Department, just 13,000 such jobs were created in the last reported quarter.
That’s not a public-relations or political problem. That’s a problem with the policy.
While Obama was pushing a losing strategy, the world’s other leading economies were taking environmental and economic policy seriously. China alone plans to spend more than $740 billion over the next 10 years on developing clean technology.
Yesterday, a group of environmental experts from all points on the spectrum released a “postpartisan” plan for America to become a leader in clean energy.
The White House should take a look at it.
Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution’s Mark Muro and the progressive Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus and
Michael Shellenberger have crafted a
commonsense approach that focuses
on areas where Democrats and Republicans can genuinely agree.
The plan, “Post Partisan Power: How a Limited and Direct Approach to Energy Innovation Can Deliver Clean, Cheap Energy, Economic Productivity and National Prosperity,” argues for more direct investment by the US government, which would also be a prime purchaser of new clean technologies.
Michael Shellenberger, a liberal environmentalist, told me, “In late May, President Obama told employees at a solar-panel factory in California, ‘I’m not prepared to cede American leadership in clean energy.’ But that, in effect, is what his policies have done. While US policymakers have fetishized carbon pricing and energy-efficiency retrofitting, America’s competitors have been investing heavily to deepen their domination of solar, wind, nuclear, electric-car and high-speed rail technology and manufacturing.”
The report asserts that in order to survive and prosper, US clean-energy industries need sustained public investments. The only way clean energy will become cheaper — and thus able to compete with fossil fuels — is through innovation.
There’s a long history of the US government fostering innovation with direct investments. It played an important role with investments in the development of nuclear power, computers, the Internet, biomedical research and jet turbines.
So what will it cost us?
The plan was crafted so it wouldn’t increase the deficit. It covers its $25 billion a year price tag by phasing out existing subsidies for wind, solar and corn ethanol; raising the royalty rate for gas production on public lands and with a small carbon tax of $5 a ton (which translates to 5 cents a gallon of gas).
Brookings’ Mark Munro warns, “We have a major political problem in this country on a matter of grave importance for our economic future. There is potential room for people of good conscience to work out a valuable pathway forward.”
This is no joke. If America wants to remain the leader of the world economy, Washington has to attack this issue.
Time is running out.
kirstenpowers@aol.com