Green Options

Concerns are raised as the Bureau of Land Management plans to evaluate environmental, social, and economic impacts associated with solar energy development.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist endorsed John McCain right before the Florida Republican primary. His endorsement might have been a significant factor in McCain winning the Florida primary, and subsequently the Republican nomination.

Speculation began immediately thereafter that Crist might make a great running mate for McCain, given his popularity in Florida, and his potential ability to swing the crucial electoral state toward McCain during the general [...]

Over the last month or so, I’ve been keeping my eye on a fantastic new project called On Day One (which I’ve written about here). The organizing theme behind the project is to help ’set the agenda’ for the next president of the United States by providing policy suggestions and political direction based on user-submitted material.

Now, On Day One is honing-in on the critical environmental issues of today in an upcoming five-day online debate co-sponsored with Grist.org’’s Gristmill, and UN Dispatch. And I am excited that I’ve been invited, along with Dave Roberts and Kate Sheppard from Grist, Nigel Purvis from the Brookings Institute and Resources for the Future, to be one of four online panelists invited to debate and discuss the user-submitted ideas - one idea a day throughout the week.

Editor’s Note: This is a follow up post to Obama’s Plan to Reduce Foreign Oil Dependence.

Regardless of who is elected next November, both candidates agree that climate change is a fact and not a theory. “I know that climate change is real,” said John McCain. “We can have a debate about how serious it is, but the debate about climate change is over.”

McCain and Obama however vary widely in their response to this issue, leaving the American people with a choice of approaches when choosing the next president. McCain’s primary weapons in this battle includes implementing a cap and trade system for emissions and utilizing greater amounts of nuclear power.

Cap and Trade

“Cap and trade is being implemented in Europe and they have stumbled and they’ve had problems but it is still the right thing to do,” said John McCain. “It is what we did in relation to acid rain.”

One of the reasons McCain supports this approach is because it encourages the market to respond with the lowest cost approach. He believes the market will correct itself with the use of cleaner technologies without the need for intervention, such as a tax credit or major investment from the government.

Following on from Monday’s article from Low Impact Living, “Who’s the Greenest? Obama vs. McCain”, I’ve decided to take a bit more of an in depth look at their policies. But all of this has a little bit of a twist, because unlike most political pundits around here, I’m from Australia, and can’t vote! Sadly, because, not surprisingly, I’d vote Obama all the way peoples!

The American political season is now in full swing, and with Barack Obama finally securing the nomination for Democratic Presidential nominee, the games can really begin to heat up. One of the big topics – alongside or just underneath the economy – will be the environment, and how to best preserve it (or resurrect it after George W. Bush is finished with it).

And, not surprisingly, a lot of the end results being pitched by Senator Obama and Senator John McSame McCain are looking mighty similar. However how they want to get there are bipolar at best.

Editor’s note: Let the race begin! As Senator Obama is now the presumptive Democratic nominee, it’s time to start comparing his plans and record with that of presumptive Republican nominee Senator McCain. Our friends at Low Impact Living get the ball rolling… This post was originally published on Wednesday, June 4, 2008.

Now that we seem to have a Democratic candidate, we all need to be digging into the environmental views and policy plans of Senators Obama and McCain.

To help us sort it out, Reuters has published a featured called FACTBOX: U.S. Presidential Candidates on the Environment and Energy. It’s a good piece and we encourage you to read it. Here are some highlights:

On Climate Change

• Obama would cut carbon dioxide emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and require fuel suppliers to cut carbon content by 10 percent by 2020.
• McCain favors a cap-and-trade approach to carbon emissions. He sponsored legislation in 2007 to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2050.

Oh, I admit it; I’ve fallen hard for Obama. Perhaps it is his handsome face or eloquent manner of speech, or perhaps it is because he is the first viable candidate (sorry Kucinich and Nader) to speak the truth. First, Obama opposed the gas tax holiday, designed to distract Americans from the bigger picture of our energy usage. Now, he is blaming the Iraq war for America’s utter failure as a climate leader.

Shortly after last week’s primaries, Obama stated:

I think the way we have run this war in Iraq has lessened our ability to move our allies. It has led us to ignore the critical needs for us to focus on a sound energy policy in this country. It has left us unable to lead on critical global issues like global warming. And it has led us to neglect what ultimately is the most important thing to keeping America safe, and that is having an economy that is the envy of the world and that gives us the resources and the power to project ourselves around the world.

In a recent post, my colleague Jennifer Lance asked whether Hillary Clinton can take on big oil. Among other things, Jennifer concluded that despite the good intentions of Senator Clinton,”A gas tax holiday will not solve the problem of peak oil.” And that is exactly the same message the Obama campaign wants to deliver in an ad now running in North Carolina ahead of next Tuesday’s primary.

The commercial denounces the proposed gas-tax cut, a proposal which Senators Clinton [...]

Americans are feeling the pain of high gas prices; I just paid $4.20 a gallon at the pump in northern California. Needless to say, the presidential candidates are scrambling to be the savior of the gas guzzling voter. Both McCain and Clinton support suspending federal excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel over the summer, but is this the right solution? Barack Obama disagrees, and I can’t help but think this is a band-aid solution.

The federal excise tax on gasoline was first implemented in 1932, although the states began taxing fuel in 1919. It is estimated that suspending this tax, as proposed by Clinto and McCain, would result in a loss of revenue of nine billion dollars for the Highway Trust Fund, which is used for interstate maintenance. McCain says he would shift revenue from other sources, and Clinton proposes enacting windfall-profits tax on big oil companies to make up for the loss. Both candidates are making Obama look like the bad guy for not wanting to save consumers 18 cents per gallon, but would this temporary suspension of the federal excise tax on gasoline really be the catalyst to change our current oil dependency and the harm it causes to the environment?

Word has it that the farm bill congressional conferees hammered out at the end of last week would most likely be vetoed by President Bush. The ink has not dried on the agreement, and that is why Congress had to pass an extension of the existing farm bill last week. The extension gives lawmakers until May 2, when they must either pass another stopgap measure or resort to the permanent 1949 agriculture law, if a new bill is not completed.

According to Ryan Grimm at Politico.com, when asked what the President would do if the current iteration of the farm bill made its way to the President’s desk White House spokesman Scott Stanzel replied, “as it stands now, it is not something the president would support.” Stanzel wrote in an email:

“The proposal before Congress would dramatically increase spending, in part by masking additional spending in budgetary gimmicks and accounting tricks.”

Farm bills pass - that’s what they do

Despite the threat, there may be enough Congressional support to override the veto. According to House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN), “If the White House is stupid enough to veto this, they’re going to get overridden.”

The farm bill is a very popular funding mechanism for Congressional spending. Every state’s congressional delegation works extremely hard to get their slice of the agricultural pie - not doing so does not bode well in the eyes of powerful ag interests and the voters of agricultural states. In short, farm bills do not get vetoed. At least very rarely do they get vetoed - there are a few exceptions.

For Teddy Roosevelt it was the creation of our system of National Parks. For Richard Nixon it was the passage of landmark environmental reforms found in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. For Bill Clinton it was an eleventh-hour preservation of millions of acres of public lands. For George W. Bush it will be tackling the issues of global warming and climate change.

huh?

In light of my recent post about the demoralizing effect this administration has had upon EPA scientists and other agency ‘lifers’, I was more than just a little surprised to hear about the story leaked in Monday’s Washington Times that reports President Bush is “poised to change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming, and will lay out principles for what that should include.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declined on Monday to confirm rumors that action was imminent, though she would not rule it out. She said the administration’s discussions are building toward an expected debate on climate change in the Senate in June [watch video of White House press conference here].

If President George W. Bush throws his support behind mandatory carbon dioxide regulations, it would indeed be a major shift away from his insistence that placing binding caps on emissions would harm the U.S. economy.