Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Published on Friday, March 20, 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle
Obama's Post-Environmental Moment
A little more than four years after we started a debate about the future of environmentalism, President Obama has largely ended it. In his State of the Union address, Obama called for the most far-reaching program ever proposed by an American president to remake America's energy economy -- with hardly a mention of the environment.
In our 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," we argued that global warming was an unprecedented ecological challenge that would lead to the death of environmentalism. What we meant was that the environmental movement, as America had known it for the better part of four decades, would be forced to reconsider the central role that environmental protection and nature preservation played in its politics and policy proposals.
Reaction from many environmentalists was swift and harsh. Yet, today, environmental organizations have largely relegated images of polar bears and melting ice flows to the back pages of their magazines. Green jobs and clean energy investment are the eco-ideas of the moment.
This new post-environmental politics is only beginning to reveal itself and, like any revolution, will continue to advance in fits and starts. Along with the rhetorical shift that has already occurred, there is an important policy shift that is just beginning to take shape. Just a year or two ago, most advocates for climate change action viewed carbon caps and carbon trading as the central front in the effort to reduce emissions. And while green groups and President Obama are still overly reliant on these strategies, there is a growing acknowledgement that carbon regulations and carbon pricing alone will not be sufficient to achieve the goal of deep reductions in global carbon emissions.
This consensus has emerged as evidence has mounted that similar policies have failed to either reduce carbon emissions or create a thriving clean energy economy in the European Union.
Today a growing number of energy scientists, economists and even environmentalists have recognized that only enormous public investments in research, development and deployment of clean energy technologies (several times larger than the $15 billion in annual investments that President Obama has proposed) will bring us the cheap and scalable clean energy technologies that we need.
Such an approach will not be cheap. The best estimates of how much the United States needs to spend annually on research, development and deployment of clean energy technologies in order to drive down their costs so they are a cost-effective alternative to fossil-fuel based energy is somewhere between $50 billion and $80 billion.
It was never realistic to have expected pollution regulations and carbon taxes to drive a global energy modernization project of the scale necessary to transform the global energy economy. We did not invent the personal computer by placing a "market-based cap" on typewriters nor create the Internet by taxing telegraphs and fax machines. To the contrary, government investment was largely responsible for bringing these revolutionary technologies, and a raft of others, into our lives. This included not only funding research and development at universities and national laboratories but also directly procuring and deploying cutting-edge technologies that were not yet ready for broad commercialization.
In the coming years, as recognition of the failure of carbon regulation and pricing to make much progress toward reducing global carbon emissions becomes ever more apparent, advocates for climate action, including environmentalists, will increasingly embrace a technology-and-investment centered framework. For as surely as the politics of climate and energy has forced environmentalists to abandon their nature-based rhetoric, the economic and technological challenges inherent to the climate crisis will ultimately force them to abandon their pollution-focused remedies.
Let us hope that President Obama is quick to recognize this reality and moves quickly to make a commitment to invest in our clean energy future commensurate with the scale of the transformation we must make.
In our 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," we argued that global warming was an unprecedented ecological challenge that would lead to the death of environmentalism. What we meant was that the environmental movement, as America had known it for the better part of four decades, would be forced to reconsider the central role that environmental protection and nature preservation played in its politics and policy proposals.
Reaction from many environmentalists was swift and harsh. Yet, today, environmental organizations have largely relegated images of polar bears and melting ice flows to the back pages of their magazines. Green jobs and clean energy investment are the eco-ideas of the moment.
This new post-environmental politics is only beginning to reveal itself and, like any revolution, will continue to advance in fits and starts. Along with the rhetorical shift that has already occurred, there is an important policy shift that is just beginning to take shape. Just a year or two ago, most advocates for climate change action viewed carbon caps and carbon trading as the central front in the effort to reduce emissions. And while green groups and President Obama are still overly reliant on these strategies, there is a growing acknowledgement that carbon regulations and carbon pricing alone will not be sufficient to achieve the goal of deep reductions in global carbon emissions.
This consensus has emerged as evidence has mounted that similar policies have failed to either reduce carbon emissions or create a thriving clean energy economy in the European Union.
Today a growing number of energy scientists, economists and even environmentalists have recognized that only enormous public investments in research, development and deployment of clean energy technologies (several times larger than the $15 billion in annual investments that President Obama has proposed) will bring us the cheap and scalable clean energy technologies that we need.
Such an approach will not be cheap. The best estimates of how much the United States needs to spend annually on research, development and deployment of clean energy technologies in order to drive down their costs so they are a cost-effective alternative to fossil-fuel based energy is somewhere between $50 billion and $80 billion.
It was never realistic to have expected pollution regulations and carbon taxes to drive a global energy modernization project of the scale necessary to transform the global energy economy. We did not invent the personal computer by placing a "market-based cap" on typewriters nor create the Internet by taxing telegraphs and fax machines. To the contrary, government investment was largely responsible for bringing these revolutionary technologies, and a raft of others, into our lives. This included not only funding research and development at universities and national laboratories but also directly procuring and deploying cutting-edge technologies that were not yet ready for broad commercialization.
In the coming years, as recognition of the failure of carbon regulation and pricing to make much progress toward reducing global carbon emissions becomes ever more apparent, advocates for climate action, including environmentalists, will increasingly embrace a technology-and-investment centered framework. For as surely as the politics of climate and energy has forced environmentalists to abandon their nature-based rhetoric, the economic and technological challenges inherent to the climate crisis will ultimately force them to abandon their pollution-focused remedies.
Let us hope that President Obama is quick to recognize this reality and moves quickly to make a commitment to invest in our clean energy future commensurate with the scale of the transformation we must make.
© 2009 The San Francisco Chronicle
- Posted in
Comments are closed
11 Comments so far
Show AllAs NYC faces budget crises for its transit system, St. Louis is forced to sell off buses, and New Jersey Transit fails to roll back the 20% and more service cuts it made in May, 2008 where is the outcry for the gas tax?
If you want the quickest savings in energy and greenhouse gases then up the gas taxes at State and Federal levels and put that money into running more trains, buses and mass transit in 6 months. When gas went to $4 per gallon all forms of mass transit were totally packed as people were forced to pay just a part of the
true costs of our auto obsession.
If you create the economic incentives for people to get out of their cars and at the same time actually make it practical by INCREASING service then you will make
a major dent almost immediately in the 30% contribution of autos to greenhouse emissions and 70% oil usage.
Increase the gas tax now before oil prices rise again and there is a clamor for
"gas tax holidays"!
While I am all for new green energy technologies, I want to know where is the leadership for the application of existing low-carbon technologies. I and thousands of other people have spent decades and millions of dollars of private capital searching for and developing alternatives to global warming. We are marginalized by the silence. Nothing could be more frustrating than to know that solutions are in hand that are totally ignored by Nordhaus & Shellenberger, and our new president. How about some action and support instead of more talk?
There are many existing energy technologies that cost much less than fossil fuels (even at today's prices) in China, India, and here in the USA. Where is the leadership?
"In our 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," we argued that global warming was an unprecedented ecological challenge that would lead to the death of environmentalism. What we meant was that the environmental movement, as America had known it for the better part of four decades, would be forced to reconsider the central role that environmental protection and nature preservation played in its politics and policy proposals."
I think you just wanted a catchy title for publicity.
"In the coming years, as recognition of the failure of carbon regulation and pricing to make much progress toward reducing global carbon emissions becomes ever more apparent, advocates for climate action, including environmentalists, will increasingly embrace a technology-and-investment centered framework. For as surely as the politics of climate and energy has forced environmentalists to abandon their nature-based rhetoric, the economic and technological challenges inherent to the climate crisis will ultimately force them to abandon their pollution-focused remedies."
What are you saying? That enviros should abandon clamoring for reduced population growth, resource depletion, pollution, species extinctions and extreme wealth/power concentration? That we should focus on technological fixes and Wall Street Casino "investments"? I don't follow.
I admired the Death of Environmentalism challenge because it was mostly correct. However, I don't recall if it raised the fundemental question of whether our Amercian/European lifestyle is the basis of our problem?
The mainstream environmental movement, whether it is national or even at a local city level, is too soft and will not challenge the premise that the American/European lifestle is still desirable and achievable on a planet with finite resources. Just about every group out there seems to be saying everything will be OK if we just reduce our carbon footprint.
That is what my freinds would call sustainbullshit.
The American/European lifestyle which is a lifestyle of living like royalty beyond that of early 20th century King and Queens must be challenged because it is killing us and the whole biosphere. Sure we can keep some technology around that is not toxic to create and use but most of our luxurious technology and daily consumed products need to go. Luxuries such as airliner travel, freeways and long distance trucking, the automobile, space travel, plastics made of toxic materials, maintenance of empire with huge militaries, thousands of toxic products, pesticides, petroleum based fertilizers, disposable packaging, strip mining, industrial agriculture, 2nd and third homes, and the list goes on and on.
We can not have all these things and maintain a livable biosphere at the same time.
We, every single human being, must reach for the ultimate achievement of becoming symbiotic with our natural world and all the world's people (human, mammal, bird, fish, fungi, and plant).
If we do not address this fundemental premise then there is no hope for us and most of life on this planet.
"if you think in your wildest fantasies we will give it up under any circumstances except force you're nuts."
-------------------------------
Than I'm nuts too. I state that if we give not up our bad habits to have more than one child we doom our planet for return to pre-techological era will not sustain 6+ billion bipeds. And we "we will [not] give it up under any circumstances except force"; force of nature.
v.purto
They are just writers clamoring for a headline and attention.
Major enviro organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy have been corrupted for some time.
Nature based rhetoric will only disappear when there is no more Nature left, and by that time humans would be gone first.
You're right. Both "nature-based" approaches and these authors' approach are worthy. These guys just want to be cutting edge so they disparage other environmentalists: "as surely as the politics of climate and energy has forced environmentalists to abandon their nature-based rhetoric" -- what a crock of shit.
They want to have some sort of "unified field theory", they want people to be impressed that they have it "figured out". But things aren't one-dimensional, and need to be battled on many fronts: climate and energy, as well as overpopulation, destruction of species, toxic pollution, preservation of resources, etc.
Carbon cap and trade is not the answer, nor is increased government spending. The answer lies within each of us. That answer is to live your life with conservation formost in your mind. A good steward of earth, living with the idea that your children will need resources etc.
If a commuter service has to cut service, raise the cost of the ride so that service won't have to be cut. That is not hard to do is it?