It’s difficult not to feel optimistic about Barack Obama’s historic election win. Under Bush, the US has wasted a the best part of a decade in the increasingly urgent fight against climate change, and in doing so, undermined the possibility of a global response to humanity’s greatest challenge. The fear is that it was the only decade we had. The hope that yesterday’s election result offers, is that Obama has been elected with a strong mandate for change on a wide range of fronts – climate and energy being one of them.
With the US economy slipping into recession, Obama went to the polls with a proposal for a new ‘green’ deal. Apart from pledging to introduce an emissions trading scheme (with full auctioning of permits) and to rejoin the international process, Obama has pledged to make his “New Apollo” project his number one priority.
At a recent speech in Michigan, America’s flagging industrial heartland, Obama said: “If I am president, I will immediately direct the full resources of the federal government and the full energy of the private sector to a single, overarching goal: in 10 years, we will eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela.”
Of course, there is some off shore drilling, and nukes thown into the mix, but he has made his preference clear: “We’ll invest $15bn a year over the next decade in renewable energy, creating five million new green jobs that pay well, can’t be outsourced and help end our dependence on foreign oil.”
The idea that clean energy could help to kick-start the economy is so appealing that even McCain was promising “millions” of green jobs if he won.
Even without any federal leadership on climate change, many parts of the US have been leading the world in renewable energy and emissions reductions. California has been positioning itself as the engine room (if I can still use that metaphor) of the new renewable energy economy, as it did for the IT revolution in the 80’s and 90’s. One expression of this is Google’s RE<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. Renewables are already cheaper than coal in some parts of the US and the shift is happening quickly in others. Add to that $15billion a year and some sensible renewables policies from the US federal government, and the price for renewables will drop further – and quickly.
So what does this mean for Australia?
It might be too late. Australia has led the world in renewable energy research and development and we could have been positioning our economy to benefit from the renewable revolution that is now set to accelerate even faster. Instead, we’ll most likely be buying in solar panels and other renewables technologies from the US, Germany, China.
And in terms of our own energy sector, we’re still stuck in the dark ages, with proposals for a number of new coal power stations in several states. With the costs of renewables coming down rapidly, and the costs of coal set to increase with a price on carbon, the crossover point is likely to be sometime within the next few years. Once this happens, the age of coal will slip rapidly into decline.
The challenge for the climate is to stop new coal plants being built in the meantime. The challenge for our economy is to rapidly invest in renewables to ensure that Australia doesn’t get left behind in the new economy. And with a looming recession, what better time to make this investment in green jobs?
One Comment
So true, John. Obama’s victory has already given me an invigorated sense of what can be done and hope that we can in fact do it. An energy revolution is what the world needs to get us out of, not only a climate change disaster, but the whole 20th century way of thinking about how the world relates to itself.
With the advent of overwhelming scientific consensus, the people who were formally climate change deniers are now shifting their focus to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reducing emissions. They often use the technique of bringing it home to the individual – ‘will you stop driving? Have you changed your light bulbs? The truth is that this is a massive problem that will need more than individual actions. It will need the wholesale restructure of the way we have operated our economies for the last 100 years. Difficult, yes, but so exciting.
As President-elect Obama said:
“… we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective”.