The Official 2009 Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition™, will be held at IIT, Kharagpur, November 6-7, 2009. Now in its second year, the competition invites students from India’s apex institutes of engineering, science and technology, and management, such as its fabled IITs, IIMs and NITs to come up with new and renewable sustainable technology business plans to combat climate change and fortify India’s — and, by analogy, the world’s — crucial energy security. The Chair and Founder of the competition, Oopali Operajita, thought up and named the unique and exclusive All India sustainable technology competition for Al Gore, after personally connecting with one of Gore's top advisers from his tenure in the White House.
ASSOCHAM, India's leading industry body, is the industry partner. Mercedes-Benz India is the official sponsor.
Deadline for electronic submission of business plans to: joysen (at) arp (dot) iitkgp (dot) ernet (dot) in and agstvc (at) gmail (dot) com: October 10, 2009.
Cash Prizes of Rs. 1,00,000 and Rs. 70,000 will be awarded to the winners and runners up.
Please visit http://www.cicerotransnational.com/agstvc.html and http://www.iitkgp.ac.in for details of the competition.
For further information, please contact: joysen (at) arp (dot) iitkgp (dot) ernet (dot) in or agstvc (at) gmail (dot) com.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
UK 'could face blackouts by 2016'
By Roger Harrabin
Environment analyst, BBC News
Coal-fired power station
The lights could go out when coal and nuclear power stations are phased out
The government's new energy adviser says the UK could face blackouts by 2016 because green energy is not coming on stream fast enough.
Ministers have previously denied that the UK is heading for an energy gap.
But David MacKay, who takes up his post at the Department of Energy on 1 October, says that the public keep objecting to energy projects.
This, he says, is creating a huge problem, which could turn out the lights.
Professor MacKay is a researcher at Cambridge University.
His recent book, Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air, won applause for its examination of current government plans to keep the lights on whilst also cutting carbon emissions.
It concluded that policy is moving in the right direction, but the sums on energy provision simply do not add up - not enough power capacity is being built.
Speaking unofficially, he told BBC News that this meant that Britain could face blackouts in 2016 - when coal and nuclear stations are phased out.
Professor David MacKay: "The scale of building required is absolutely enormous"
"There is a worry that in 2016 there might not be enough electricity. My guess is that what the market might do is fix that problem by making more gas power stations, which isn't the direction we want to be going in," he said.
"So we really should be upping the build rate of the alternatives as soon as possible."
Professor MacKay blamed the public for opposing wind farms, nuclear power, and energy imports, whilst demanding an unchanged lifestyle.
You cannot oppose them all, he said, and hope to have a viable policy on energy and climate change.
Blackouts might make people realise we need to invest in modern nuclear power stations and other means of clean fuel
"We've got to stop saying no to these things and understand that we do have a serious building project on our hands," he said.
Professor MacKay said he looked forward to engaging the public in a more open debate about what he calls the realities of energy policy when he takes up his post.
His says his new masters in Department of Energy and Climate Change have impressive commitment to solve the issues.
Professor MacKay's many supporters will hope that he is allowed to continue speaking openly to the public after he takes office.
Environment analyst, BBC News
Coal-fired power station
The lights could go out when coal and nuclear power stations are phased out
The government's new energy adviser says the UK could face blackouts by 2016 because green energy is not coming on stream fast enough.
Ministers have previously denied that the UK is heading for an energy gap.
But David MacKay, who takes up his post at the Department of Energy on 1 October, says that the public keep objecting to energy projects.
This, he says, is creating a huge problem, which could turn out the lights.
Professor MacKay is a researcher at Cambridge University.
His recent book, Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air, won applause for its examination of current government plans to keep the lights on whilst also cutting carbon emissions.
It concluded that policy is moving in the right direction, but the sums on energy provision simply do not add up - not enough power capacity is being built.
Speaking unofficially, he told BBC News that this meant that Britain could face blackouts in 2016 - when coal and nuclear stations are phased out.
Professor David MacKay: "The scale of building required is absolutely enormous"
"There is a worry that in 2016 there might not be enough electricity. My guess is that what the market might do is fix that problem by making more gas power stations, which isn't the direction we want to be going in," he said.
"So we really should be upping the build rate of the alternatives as soon as possible."
Professor MacKay blamed the public for opposing wind farms, nuclear power, and energy imports, whilst demanding an unchanged lifestyle.
You cannot oppose them all, he said, and hope to have a viable policy on energy and climate change.
Blackouts might make people realise we need to invest in modern nuclear power stations and other means of clean fuel
"We've got to stop saying no to these things and understand that we do have a serious building project on our hands," he said.
Professor MacKay said he looked forward to engaging the public in a more open debate about what he calls the realities of energy policy when he takes up his post.
His says his new masters in Department of Energy and Climate Change have impressive commitment to solve the issues.
Professor MacKay's many supporters will hope that he is allowed to continue speaking openly to the public after he takes office.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Image in blog -- Extreme cold in Nova Scotia, NASA.
This exquisite picture of a dense snowstorm in Nova Scotia, my home for close to a decade, is by NASA.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Oopali Operajita shares a glass of wine with Merce Cunningham, legendary choreographer, at The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
We talked about the saint Ramakrishna a lot that evening. And about India's vibrant colours.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Oopali Operajita introduces Carnegie Mellon's President Jared Cohon to India's Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, at the latter's residence
March 15, 2005. The Prime Minister's Residence, 7, Race Course Road, New Delhi.
This was a memorable meeting because I managed, with luck, to arrange this within a couple of days. Our Prime Minister was characteristically gracious and invited us to tea. Dr. Cohon thus became the first western university president to meet Dr. Singh after he assumed office as Prime Minister.
Barack Obama's $1.8bn vision of greener biofuel
• President takes on the powerful farming lobby
• Switch from food crops to fight climate change
The Obama administration took on the powerful farming interests in America's heartland today, making clear it does not see corn-based ethanol as part of the long-term solution to climate change.
The new proposals on the biofuel – in the face of intense pressure from agricultural companies and members of Congress from corn-growing states – were seen as the first test of Barack Obama's promise to put science above politics in deciding America's energy future.
Ethanol had once appeared to provide a transport fuel which did not increase carbon dioxide. But studies have suggested that the fuel needed to process the corn meant the ethanol could be more polluting than the fossil fuel it was meant to replace. Furthermore, the use of food crops for biofuel was blamed for a substantial part of the large price rises seen in 2008.
Administration officials set out a $1.8bn (£1.19bn) plan to develop a new generation of more environmentally-friendly biofuels that are not made from food crops and have a lower carbon footprint, while also providing an immediate bail-out of existing corn ethanol producers, which are suffering in the global economic crisis: falling petrol prices have undercut demand for ethanol at the pump.
Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, made clear she does not see corn-based ethanol as a permanent part of America's clean energy mix. "Corn-based ethanol is a bridge... to the next generation of fuels ," she said.
The EPA proposed a new standard for advanced biofuels, ensuring they are at least 50% cleaner than petrol. Jackson said existing bio-ethanol resulted in a 16% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
The agency said it would also take into account the environmental impact of turning land over to biofuel crops, a key demand of the industry's critics.
Environmentalists saw the move as an early indication that the Obama administration would stand its ground against powerful industrial interests.
"For an administration that has already staked so much on restoring science to the process of governing, this was a really critical test," said Nathanael Greene, a renewable energy expert at the National Resources Defence Council. "This was the first big industry where we are starting to see some of the potential changes required by climate policy and the administration is ready to stick to the science and not get rolled by industry."
The country's fuel producers gave a cautious welcome to the announcement, but added that they would continue to challenge the EPA's criteria for measuring the environmental cost of fuel crops.
The impact on the ethanol industry of the agency's proposal, which now undergoes public review, was softened by Obama's decision to put the agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, who is from the corn growing state of Iowa, in charge of a new task force that will oversee biofuel development. The officials also said there would be considerable sums available to farmers to make the transition from using corn to make biofuels to using pulp and agricultural waste.
The programme envisages $1.1bn to help ethanol producers market the fuel, and to convert their processing plants from fossil fuels to renewable energy. "There is over $1.1 billion of opportunity here," Vilsack said.
Energy secretary Steven Chu said there would be an additional $786m towards the development of new biofuel refineries and the design of flex-fuel cars.
The administration's move on ethanol comes nearly two years after Congress ordered fuel refineries to increase their use of ethanol, and by 2022 to step up the share of advanced biofuels in the country's fuel mix.
The law ordered all ethanol produced after 2007 to meet a standard 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and for advanced biofuels to meet a 50% reduction target.
Existing ethanol producers will be exempt from those targets, but new plant will be required to make the grade. That represents a big challenge for the production technology.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
• Switch from food crops to fight climate change
The Obama administration took on the powerful farming interests in America's heartland today, making clear it does not see corn-based ethanol as part of the long-term solution to climate change.
The new proposals on the biofuel – in the face of intense pressure from agricultural companies and members of Congress from corn-growing states – were seen as the first test of Barack Obama's promise to put science above politics in deciding America's energy future.
Ethanol had once appeared to provide a transport fuel which did not increase carbon dioxide. But studies have suggested that the fuel needed to process the corn meant the ethanol could be more polluting than the fossil fuel it was meant to replace. Furthermore, the use of food crops for biofuel was blamed for a substantial part of the large price rises seen in 2008.
Administration officials set out a $1.8bn (£1.19bn) plan to develop a new generation of more environmentally-friendly biofuels that are not made from food crops and have a lower carbon footprint, while also providing an immediate bail-out of existing corn ethanol producers, which are suffering in the global economic crisis: falling petrol prices have undercut demand for ethanol at the pump.
Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, made clear she does not see corn-based ethanol as a permanent part of America's clean energy mix. "Corn-based ethanol is a bridge... to the next generation of fuels ," she said.
The EPA proposed a new standard for advanced biofuels, ensuring they are at least 50% cleaner than petrol. Jackson said existing bio-ethanol resulted in a 16% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
The agency said it would also take into account the environmental impact of turning land over to biofuel crops, a key demand of the industry's critics.
Environmentalists saw the move as an early indication that the Obama administration would stand its ground against powerful industrial interests.
"For an administration that has already staked so much on restoring science to the process of governing, this was a really critical test," said Nathanael Greene, a renewable energy expert at the National Resources Defence Council. "This was the first big industry where we are starting to see some of the potential changes required by climate policy and the administration is ready to stick to the science and not get rolled by industry."
The country's fuel producers gave a cautious welcome to the announcement, but added that they would continue to challenge the EPA's criteria for measuring the environmental cost of fuel crops.
The impact on the ethanol industry of the agency's proposal, which now undergoes public review, was softened by Obama's decision to put the agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, who is from the corn growing state of Iowa, in charge of a new task force that will oversee biofuel development. The officials also said there would be considerable sums available to farmers to make the transition from using corn to make biofuels to using pulp and agricultural waste.
The programme envisages $1.1bn to help ethanol producers market the fuel, and to convert their processing plants from fossil fuels to renewable energy. "There is over $1.1 billion of opportunity here," Vilsack said.
Energy secretary Steven Chu said there would be an additional $786m towards the development of new biofuel refineries and the design of flex-fuel cars.
The administration's move on ethanol comes nearly two years after Congress ordered fuel refineries to increase their use of ethanol, and by 2022 to step up the share of advanced biofuels in the country's fuel mix.
The law ordered all ethanol produced after 2007 to meet a standard 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and for advanced biofuels to meet a 50% reduction target.
Existing ethanol producers will be exempt from those targets, but new plant will be required to make the grade. That represents a big challenge for the production technology.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
AL GORE, SAJJAN JINDAL AND THE AL GORE SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY VENTURE COMPETITION™
The Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition™ is delighted to welcome Mr Sajjan Jindal and ASSOCHAM, India's apex chamber of commerce and industry on board. Mr Jindal is actively involved in Vice President Gore's "Climate Project" and an industry leader in the alternative energy domain:
http://www.jsw.in/organization/message.shtml
For further details about the current competition, please visit:
www.assocham.com
and scroll down to "The Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition™".
http://www.jsw.in/organization/message.shtml
For further details about the current competition, please visit:
www.assocham.com
and scroll down to "The Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition™".
Thursday, April 30, 2009
President Obama "After the Great Recession" -- Interview in The New York Times
Magazine Preview
After the Great Recession
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: April 28, 2009
On April 14, President Obama gave a speech at Georgetown University, trying to explain why he was taking on so many economic issues so early in his administration. He argued that the country needed to break its bubble-and-bust cycle and cited the New Testament in calling for a new economic foundation for the nation. This foundation would be built on better schools, alternative energy, more affordable health care and a more regulated Wall Street, he said. Later that afternoon (shortly before the Obama family introduced its new dog, Bo, on the South Lawn of the White House), I sat down with the president to talk about how his agenda might change daily life in this country.
This was our third interview about the economy, the first two occurring during last year’s campaign. And while the setting was decidedly more formal this time — the Oval Office — the interview felt as conversational as those earlier ones. We sat at the far end of the office from his desk and spoke for 50 minutes. None of his economic advisers were there. As the conversation progressed, Obama spoke in increasingly personal terms. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that interview.
At the end of our conversation, when I asked him if he was reading anything good, he said he had become sick enough of briefing books to begin reading a novel in the evenings — “Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill.
I. The Future of Finance
Q: The idea here is to look beyond the current moment and try to think about what American life is going to be like on the other side of the so-called Great Recession. And so I thought it might make sense to start where the trouble started — finance. People who want to get a sense for how you think about education and jobs and all sorts of other issues can get a really good sense for your thinking by reading “The Audacity of Hope,” or by reading your old speeches, where you basically lay out your learning curve. But there’s no chapter on finance in “The Audacity of Hope.” And so I wonder if you would be willing to describe a little bit of your learning curve about finance, and what you envision finance being in tomorrow’s economy: Does it need to be smaller? Will it inevitably be smaller?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, I think that we should distinguish between finance as the lifeblood of our economy and finance as a significant industry where we have a comparative advantage — right? So in terms of just growing our economy, we’ve got to have enough credit out there to fund businesses, large and small, to allow consumers the flexibility to make long-term purchases like cars or homes. So that’s not going to change. And I would be concerned if our credit market shrunk in ways that did not allow for the financing of long-term growth.
What that means is not only do we have to have a healthy banking sector, but we’re going to have to figure out what we do with the nonbanking sector that was providing almost half of our credit out there. And we’re going to have to determine whether or not as a consequence of some of the steps that the Fed has been taking, the Treasury has been taking, that we see the market for securitized products restored.
I’m optimistic that ultimately we’re going to be able to get that part of the financial sector going again, but it could take some time to regain confidence and trust.
What I think will change, what I think was an aberration, was a situation where corporate profits in the financial sector were such a heavy part of our overall profitability over the last decade. That I think will change. And so part of that has to do with the effects of regulation that will inhibit some of the massive leveraging and the massive risk-taking that had become so common.
Now, in some ways, I think it’s important to understand that some of that wealth was illusory in the first place.
So we won’t miss it?
THE PRESIDENT: We will miss it in the sense that as a consequence of 25-year-olds getting million-dollar bonuses, they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and that waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious. And so some of the dynamic of the financial sector will have some trickle-down effects, particularly in a place like Manhattan.
But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Silicon Valley is still not a huge, critical, important part of our economy, and Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s. It just won’t be half of our economy. And that means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. And I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design.
And so I think what you’ll see is some shift, but I don’t think that we will lose the enormous advantages that come from transparency, openness, the reliability of our markets. If anything, a more vigorous regulatory regime, I think, will help restore confidence, and you’re still going to see a lot of global capital wanting to park itself in the United States.
Are there tangible ways that Wall Street has made the average person’s life better in the way that Silicon Valley has?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that some of the democratization of finance is actually beneficial if properly regulated. So the fact that large numbers of people could participate in the equity markets in ways that they could not previously — and for much lower costs than they used to be able to participate — I think is important.
Now, the fact that we had such poor regulation means — in some of these markets, particularly around the securitized mortgages — means that the pain has been democratized as well. And that’s a problem. But I think that overall there are ways in which people have been able to participate in our stock markets and our financial markets that are potentially healthy. Again, what you have to have, though, is an updating of the regulatory regimes comparable to what we did in the 1930s, when there were rules that were put in place that gave investors a little more assurance that they knew what they were buying.
There was this great debate among F.D.R.’s advisers about whether you had to split up companies — not just banks — you had to split up companies in order to regulate them effectively, or whether it was possible to have big, huge, sprawling, powerful companies — even not just possible, but better — and then have strong regulators. And it seems to me there’s an analogy of that debate now. Which is, do you think it is O.K. to have these “supermarkets” regulated by strong regulators actually trying to regulate, or do we need some very different modern version of Glass-Steagall, (1)
THE PRESIDENT: You know, I’ve looked at the evidence so far that indicates that other countries that have not seen some of the problems in their financial markets that we have nevertheless don’t separate between investment banks and commercial banks, for example. They have a “supermarket” model that they’ve got strong regulation of.
Like Canada?
THE PRESIDENT: Canada being a good example. (2) And they’ve actually done a good job in managing through what was a pretty risky period in the financial markets.
So — that doesn’t mean that, for example, an insurance company like A.I.G. grafting a hedge fund on top of it is something that is optimal. Even with the best regulators, if you start having so much differentiation of functions and products within a single company, a single institution, a conglomerate, essentially, things could potentially slip through the cracks. And people just don’t know what they’re getting into. I mean, I guarantee you that the average A.I.G. insurance policyholder had no idea that this stuff was going on. And in that sense I think you can make an argument that there may be a breaking point in which functions are so different that you don’t want a single company doing everything.
But when it comes to something like investment banking versus commercial banking, the experience in a country like Canada would indicate that good, strong regulation that focuses less on the legal form of the institution and more on the functions that they’re carrying out is probably the right approach to take.
II. The Ticket to the Middle Class
Staying on the Great Depression, it led to a surge in high-school graduation. A high-school diploma during that decade or two went from being elite to the norm, and it became a ticket to the middle class. I’m curious what you think today’s ticket to the middle class is. Do you want everybody aspiring to a four-year-college degree? Is a two-year or vocational degree enough? Or is simply attending college, whether or not you graduate, sufficient to reach the middle class?
THE PRESIDENT: We set out a goal in my speech to the joint session that said everybody should have at least one year of post-high-school training. And I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year-college degree. I think everybody needs enough post-high-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that — or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.
And so to the extent that we can upgrade not only our high schools but also our community colleges to provide a sound technical basis for being able to perform complicated tasks in a 21st-century economy, then I think that not only is that good for the individuals, but that’s going to be critical for the economy as a whole.
I want to emphasize, though, that part of the challenge is making sure that folks are getting in high school what they need as well. You know, I use my grandmother as an example for a lot of things, but I think this is telling. My grandmother never got a college degree. She went to high school. Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill, even though she worked on a bomber assembly line. She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —
Today, you mean?
THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.
And that means that we’ve got to — in our education-reform agenda — we’ve got to focus not just on increasing graduation rates, but we’ve also got to make what’s learned in the high-school and college experience more robust and more effective.
I was in West Virginia recently talking to some college students, and these are kids in college, fully intending to graduate, and yet they were still telling me they’re not sure whether a college education is worth it. They’re going to be graduating in a recession. They’re worried their jobs will go to China. You hear these things all the time. What would you say — there are a large number of very thoughtful people who have those concerns — what would you say to them?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, I’d start off by saying just look at the statistics. The unemployment rate for high-school graduates is at least three times what it is for a college graduate. So it’s true that in this recession you’re seeing white-collar jobs impacted. Even before the recession, it’s true that you saw some outsourcing of white-collar jobs. But if you’re working the odds, your likelihood of getting a job that pays you a good, solid middle-class wage is vastly increased upon graduating from college — unless you’re LeBron James. And so I think the evidence (3) speaks for itself.
Now, what is true is that a postgraduate education that isn’t giving you skills that are measurable in some way, that provide you with some differentiation, means that you’re going to have a little bit of a harder time. I would argue that anybody — that young people generally are going to benefit from a good, solid liberal-arts education. That’s what I got.
If you’re only going to go to school for two years, though, then making sure that you’re enrolled in a program where at the end of that journey you can see a job or a career or a field that’s growing instead of contracting certainly can make some sense.
But, again, I think the big challenge that we’ve got on education is making sure that from kindergarten or prekindergarten through your 14th or 15th year of school, or 16th year of school, or 20th year of school, that you are actually learning the kinds of skills that make you competitive and productive in a modern, technological economy.
That’s why I don’t just want to see more college graduates; I also want to specifically see more math and science graduates, I specifically want to see more folks in engineering. I think part of the postbubble economy that I’m describing is one in which we are restoring a balance between making things and providing services, whether it’s marketing or catering to people or servicing folks in some way. Those are all good jobs, and we’re not going to return to an economy in which manufacturing is as large a percentage as it was back in the 1940s just because of automation and technological advance.
And there are advantages to service jobs, right? Less injury —
THE PRESIDENT: Less injury, less strain. And I’ve always claimed that if a Wal-Mart associate was getting paid 25 bucks an hour like the autoworker, then there’s no reason for complaint.
Although I do think that there’s a culture of making things in a factory that appeals to people and that I understand. Whenever I’d walk into a factory during the campaign and would see these big turbines — things that, you know, you’d say, well, this is neat stuff — in a way you wouldn’t when you walk into a retail store.
But the broader point is that if you look at who our long-term competition will be in the global economy — China, India, the E.U., Brazil, Korea — the countries that are producing the best-educated work force, whose education system emphasizes the sciences and mathematics, who can translate those technology backgrounds or those science backgrounds into technological applications, they are going to have a significant advantage in the economy. And I think that we’ve got to have enough of that in order to maintain our economic strength.
III. The New Gender Gap
Those factories are obviously filled disproportionately with men. There’s a way in which that reminds me of your grandparents, even though I know your grandfather wasn’t a factory worker. You talk about the fact that your grandmother outearned your grandfather. And in a way your family was a forerunner of a much larger trend: There’s still sexism, there’s still a pay gap, clearly, but the pay of men has stagnated, and the pay of women has gone up.
I think there are a lot of men out there today, working at G.M. and Chrysler and other places, who feel the same kind of dejection (4) that your grandfather did. What do you think the future of work looks like for men?
THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s an interesting question, because as I said, you know, you go in to factories all across the Midwest and you talk to the men who work there — they’ve got extraordinary skill and extraordinary pride in what they make. And I think that for them, the loss of manufacturing is a loss of a way of life and not just a loss of income.
I think a healthy economy is going to have a broad mix of jobs, and there has to be a place for somebody with terrific mechanical aptitude who can perform highly skilled tasks with his hands, whether it’s in construction or manufacturing. And I don’t think that those jobs should vanish. I do think that they will constitute a smaller percentage of the overall economy. And so what we’re going to have to do is, with a younger generation, find new places for that kind of work.
The possibilities are there, though. I spoke during the campaign of this company that I visited, McKinstry, in Seattle, where you’ve got a bunch of welders and tradesmen who are now retrofitting buildings. They’re not performing the same kind of manufacturing that their fathers might have, but with similar skill sets they are now making hospitals and schools and office buildings much more energy efficient, and then that’s providing enormous value to the economy as a whole.
In shaping our recovery package, one of the things I was pushing very hard was the smart grid (5) as a big project similar to the Interstate that could have some enormous ramifications for energy utilization. One of the biggest constraints that we’ve got in building a smart grid in addition to siting issues, which are sort of classic political jurisdictional battles, is actually we don’t have enough trained electricians to lay down those lines. Now, you can’t tell me that there aren’t a whole bunch of men and women out there who are interested in those jobs. But somehow we have not done a good job of matching up the training with the need out there. And that’s one of the things where government can help, help to guide and steer our education process in a way that meets future needs and not just the needs of the past.
Would you also encourage men to become more comfortable working in fields that they traditionally have not? I mean, nursing is a very well-paying field. There’s a shortage there.
THE PRESIDENT: I mean, nursing, teaching are all areas where we need more men. I’ve always said if we can get more men in the classroom, particularly in inner cities where a lot of young people don’t have fathers, that could be of enormous benefit.
Now, as you and I both know, in a lot of those fields they have been underpaid because they were predominantly women’s fields. And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically important. And we’ve already taken action, for example, with the Lilly Ledbetter bill (6) to try to move in that direction.
I think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.
Did Michelle ever make more than you did?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Probably only for a brief time, because I was working three jobs most of the time that I was in the State Senate. I was still practicing law and I was still teaching. So when you kind of put everything together, I think I was still making a little bit more. But when I started campaigning for the U.S. Senate and I had to drop some of those jobs, then she carried us for a couple years.
IV. Where the Economists are Coming From
I want to talk broadly about policy. When you and I spoke during the campaign, you made it clear that you had thought a lot about the economic debates within the Clinton administration. And you said that you wanted to have a Robert Rubin type and a Robert Reich type having a vigorous debate in front of you. And clearly you have a spectrum of Democrats within your economic-policy team.
THE PRESIDENT: But I don’t have Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz. (7) (Laughter.)
No, this wasn’t about them. But they have made it clear that they are not working in your administration, haven’t they?
But in your inner circle, it really is dominated by Rubin protégés. And I’d be interested if —
THE PRESIDENT: You know, the — I mean, look, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner obviously worked at Treasury under Rubin.
And Peter Orszag, I think.
THE PRESIDENT: And Orszag — fair enough. You know, Christy Romer didn’t.
Jared Bernstein doesn’t — and Jared sits here every morning as part of my economic team. And Austan Goolsbee doesn’t. (8)
I mean, the truth is that what I’ve been constantly searching for is a ruthless pragmatism when it comes to economic policy. It is probably true that, given the financial crisis that had arisen, that the fact that both Tim and Larry had familiarity with financial crises was a plus, because I thought that we needed some people who could hit the ground running and would be comfortable dealing with some very large and difficult economic issues. And frankly, that list is pretty small, because the last Democratic president we had was Bill Clinton; he was on the scene for eight years, and for a big chunk of that time, Bob Rubin was his primary economic-policy maker. So it’s not surprising that anybody who had experience in those fronts was going to be coming out of a shop that would have been influenced by that.
Keep in mind, though, I mean, I have enormous respect for somebody like Joe Stiglitz. I read his stuff all the time. I actually am looking forward to having these folks in for ongoing discussion. Somebody who has enormous influence over my thinking is Paul Volcker, who is robust enough that, having presided over the Carter and Reagan years, he’s still sharp as a tack and able to give me huge advice and to provide some counterbalance.
The last point I’d make, though, is I think that — and I may have mentioned this to you — but now that I think about it, maybe it was post-election. When I first started having a round table of economic advisers, and Bob Reich was part of that, and he was sitting across the table from Bob Rubin and others, what you discovered was that some of the rifts that had existed back in the Clinton years had really narrowed drastically.
They agree a lot more than they used to, but not entirely.
THE PRESIDENT: Not entirely. But, I mean, the fact is that Larry Summers right now is very comfortable making arguments, often quite passionately, that Bob Reich used to be making when he was in the Clinton White House. Now Larry might not like me saying that —
Larry Summers is the new Bob Reich —
THE PRESIDENT: — that he’s become a soft touch. But, no, I think that one of the things that we all agree to is that the touchstone for economic policy is, does it allow the average American to find good employment and see their incomes rise; that we can’t just look at things in the aggregate, we do want to grow the pie, but we want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions and occupations and genders and races; and that economic policy should focus on growing the pie, but it also has to make sure that everybody has got opportunity in that system.
I also think that there’s very little disagreement that there are lessons to be learned from this crisis in terms of the importance of regulation in the financial markets. And I think that this notion that there is somehow resistance to that — to those lessons within my economic team — just isn’t borne out by the discussions that I have every day.
If anything, the only thing I notice, I think, that I do think is something of a carry-over from Bob Rubin — I see it in Larry, I see it in Tim — is a great appreciation of complexity.
And a willingness to admit what you don’t know, in many cases.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, exactly. And so what that means is that, as we’re making economic policy, I think there is a certain humility about the consequences of the actions we take, intended and unintended, that may make some outside observers impatient. I mean, you’ll recall Geithner was just getting hammered for months. But he, I think, is very secure in saying we need to get these things right, and if we act too abruptly, we can end up doing more harm than good. Those are qualities that I think have been useful.
V. Postreform Health care
You have suggested that health care is now the No. 1 legislative priority. It seems to me this is only a small generalization — to say that the way the medical system works now is, people go to the doctor; the doctor tells them what treatments they need; they get those treatments, regardless of cost or, frankly, regardless of whether they’re effective. I wonder if you could talk to people about how going to the doctor will be different in the future; how they will experience medical care differently on the other side of health care reform.
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I do think consumers have gotten more active in their own treatments in a way that’s very useful. And I think that should continue to be encouraged, to the extent that we can provide consumers with more information about their own well-being — that, I think, can be helpful.
I have always said, though, that we should not overstate the degree to which consumers rather than doctors are going to be driving treatment, because, I just speak from my own experience, I’m a pretty-well-educated layperson when it comes to medical care; I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, You know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.
And so, in that sense, there’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider. And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options. And certainly that’s true when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, where the taxpayers are footing the bill and we have an obligation to get those costs under control.
And right now we’re footing the bill for a lot of things that don’t make people healthier.
THE PRESIDENT: That don’t make people healthier. So when Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies (9) as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.
Won’t that be hard, because of the trust that people put in their doctors, just as you said? Won’t people say, Wait a second, my doctor is telling me to take the red pill, and the government is saving money by saying take the blue —
THE PRESIDENT: Let me put it this way: I actually think that most doctors want to do right by their patients. And if they’ve got good information, I think they will act on that good information.
Now, there are distortions in the system, everything from the drug salesmen and junkets to how reimbursements occur. Some of those things government has control over; some of those things are just more embedded in our medical culture. But the doctors I know — both ones who treat me as well as friends of mine — I think take their job very seriously and are thinking in terms of what’s best for the patient. They operate within particular incentive structures, like anybody else, and particular habits, like anybody else.
And so if it turns out that doctors in Florida are spending 25 percent more on treating their patients as doctors in Minnesota, and the doctors in Minnesota are getting outcomes that are just as good — then us going down to Florida and pointing out that this is how folks in Minnesota are doing it and they seem to be getting pretty good outcomes, and are there particular reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing? — I think that conversation will ultimately yield some significant savings and some significant benefits.
Now, I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care —
Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.
THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.
So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.
And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.
I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.
And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
So how do you — how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
VI. Out of the Rough?
Do you think this recession is a big-enough event to make us as a country willing to make some of the sorts of hard choices that we need to make on health care, on taxes in the long term — which will not cover the cost of government — on energy? Traditionally those choices get made in times of depression or war, and I’m not sure whether this rises to that level.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, part of it will depend on leadership. So I’ve got to make some good arguments out there. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do since I came in, is to say now is the time for us to make some tough, big decisions.
The critics have said, you’re doing too much, you can’t do all this at once, Congress can’t digest everything. I just reject that. There’s nothing inherent in our political process that should prevent us from making these difficult decisions now, as opposed to 10 years from now or 20 years from now.
It is true that as tough an economic time as it is right now, we haven’t had 42 months of 20, 30 percent unemployment. And so the degree of desperation and the shock to the system may not be as great. And that means that there’s going to be more resistance to any of these steps: reforming the financial system or reforming our health care system or doing something about energy. On each of these things — you know, things aren’t so bad in the eyes of a lot of Americans that they say, We’re willing to completely try something new.
But part of my job I think is to bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future.
Are you worried that the economic cycle will make that much harder? I mean, Roosevelt took office four years after the stock market crashed. You took office four months after Lehman Brothers collapsed. At some point people may start saying, Hey, why aren’t things getting better?
THE PRESIDENT: It’s something that we think about. I knew even before the election that this was going to be a very difficult journey and that the economy had gone through a sufficient shock and that it wasn’t going to recover right away.
In some ways it’s liberating, though, in the sense that whether I’m a one-termer or a two-termer, the problems are big enough and fundamental enough that I can’t sort of game it out. It’s not one of these things where I can say, Oh, you know what, if I time it just right, then the market is going to be going up and unemployment will be going down right before re-election. These are much bigger, much more systemic problems. And so in some ways you just kind of set aside the politics.
What I’m very confident about is that given the difficult options before us, we are making good, thoughtful decisions. I have enormous confidence that we are weighing all our options and we are making the best choices. That doesn’t mean that every choice is going to be right, is going to work exactly the way we want it to. But I wake up in the morning and go to bed at night feeling that the direction we are trying to move the economy toward is the right one and that the decisions we make are sound.
David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
copyright: The New York Times
After the Great Recession
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: April 28, 2009
On April 14, President Obama gave a speech at Georgetown University, trying to explain why he was taking on so many economic issues so early in his administration. He argued that the country needed to break its bubble-and-bust cycle and cited the New Testament in calling for a new economic foundation for the nation. This foundation would be built on better schools, alternative energy, more affordable health care and a more regulated Wall Street, he said. Later that afternoon (shortly before the Obama family introduced its new dog, Bo, on the South Lawn of the White House), I sat down with the president to talk about how his agenda might change daily life in this country.
This was our third interview about the economy, the first two occurring during last year’s campaign. And while the setting was decidedly more formal this time — the Oval Office — the interview felt as conversational as those earlier ones. We sat at the far end of the office from his desk and spoke for 50 minutes. None of his economic advisers were there. As the conversation progressed, Obama spoke in increasingly personal terms. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that interview.
At the end of our conversation, when I asked him if he was reading anything good, he said he had become sick enough of briefing books to begin reading a novel in the evenings — “Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill.
I. The Future of Finance
Q: The idea here is to look beyond the current moment and try to think about what American life is going to be like on the other side of the so-called Great Recession. And so I thought it might make sense to start where the trouble started — finance. People who want to get a sense for how you think about education and jobs and all sorts of other issues can get a really good sense for your thinking by reading “The Audacity of Hope,” or by reading your old speeches, where you basically lay out your learning curve. But there’s no chapter on finance in “The Audacity of Hope.” And so I wonder if you would be willing to describe a little bit of your learning curve about finance, and what you envision finance being in tomorrow’s economy: Does it need to be smaller? Will it inevitably be smaller?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, I think that we should distinguish between finance as the lifeblood of our economy and finance as a significant industry where we have a comparative advantage — right? So in terms of just growing our economy, we’ve got to have enough credit out there to fund businesses, large and small, to allow consumers the flexibility to make long-term purchases like cars or homes. So that’s not going to change. And I would be concerned if our credit market shrunk in ways that did not allow for the financing of long-term growth.
What that means is not only do we have to have a healthy banking sector, but we’re going to have to figure out what we do with the nonbanking sector that was providing almost half of our credit out there. And we’re going to have to determine whether or not as a consequence of some of the steps that the Fed has been taking, the Treasury has been taking, that we see the market for securitized products restored.
I’m optimistic that ultimately we’re going to be able to get that part of the financial sector going again, but it could take some time to regain confidence and trust.
What I think will change, what I think was an aberration, was a situation where corporate profits in the financial sector were such a heavy part of our overall profitability over the last decade. That I think will change. And so part of that has to do with the effects of regulation that will inhibit some of the massive leveraging and the massive risk-taking that had become so common.
Now, in some ways, I think it’s important to understand that some of that wealth was illusory in the first place.
So we won’t miss it?
THE PRESIDENT: We will miss it in the sense that as a consequence of 25-year-olds getting million-dollar bonuses, they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and that waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious. And so some of the dynamic of the financial sector will have some trickle-down effects, particularly in a place like Manhattan.
But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Silicon Valley is still not a huge, critical, important part of our economy, and Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s. It just won’t be half of our economy. And that means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. And I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design.
And so I think what you’ll see is some shift, but I don’t think that we will lose the enormous advantages that come from transparency, openness, the reliability of our markets. If anything, a more vigorous regulatory regime, I think, will help restore confidence, and you’re still going to see a lot of global capital wanting to park itself in the United States.
Are there tangible ways that Wall Street has made the average person’s life better in the way that Silicon Valley has?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that some of the democratization of finance is actually beneficial if properly regulated. So the fact that large numbers of people could participate in the equity markets in ways that they could not previously — and for much lower costs than they used to be able to participate — I think is important.
Now, the fact that we had such poor regulation means — in some of these markets, particularly around the securitized mortgages — means that the pain has been democratized as well. And that’s a problem. But I think that overall there are ways in which people have been able to participate in our stock markets and our financial markets that are potentially healthy. Again, what you have to have, though, is an updating of the regulatory regimes comparable to what we did in the 1930s, when there were rules that were put in place that gave investors a little more assurance that they knew what they were buying.
There was this great debate among F.D.R.’s advisers about whether you had to split up companies — not just banks — you had to split up companies in order to regulate them effectively, or whether it was possible to have big, huge, sprawling, powerful companies — even not just possible, but better — and then have strong regulators. And it seems to me there’s an analogy of that debate now. Which is, do you think it is O.K. to have these “supermarkets” regulated by strong regulators actually trying to regulate, or do we need some very different modern version of Glass-Steagall, (1)
THE PRESIDENT: You know, I’ve looked at the evidence so far that indicates that other countries that have not seen some of the problems in their financial markets that we have nevertheless don’t separate between investment banks and commercial banks, for example. They have a “supermarket” model that they’ve got strong regulation of.
Like Canada?
THE PRESIDENT: Canada being a good example. (2) And they’ve actually done a good job in managing through what was a pretty risky period in the financial markets.
So — that doesn’t mean that, for example, an insurance company like A.I.G. grafting a hedge fund on top of it is something that is optimal. Even with the best regulators, if you start having so much differentiation of functions and products within a single company, a single institution, a conglomerate, essentially, things could potentially slip through the cracks. And people just don’t know what they’re getting into. I mean, I guarantee you that the average A.I.G. insurance policyholder had no idea that this stuff was going on. And in that sense I think you can make an argument that there may be a breaking point in which functions are so different that you don’t want a single company doing everything.
But when it comes to something like investment banking versus commercial banking, the experience in a country like Canada would indicate that good, strong regulation that focuses less on the legal form of the institution and more on the functions that they’re carrying out is probably the right approach to take.
II. The Ticket to the Middle Class
Staying on the Great Depression, it led to a surge in high-school graduation. A high-school diploma during that decade or two went from being elite to the norm, and it became a ticket to the middle class. I’m curious what you think today’s ticket to the middle class is. Do you want everybody aspiring to a four-year-college degree? Is a two-year or vocational degree enough? Or is simply attending college, whether or not you graduate, sufficient to reach the middle class?
THE PRESIDENT: We set out a goal in my speech to the joint session that said everybody should have at least one year of post-high-school training. And I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year-college degree. I think everybody needs enough post-high-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that — or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.
And so to the extent that we can upgrade not only our high schools but also our community colleges to provide a sound technical basis for being able to perform complicated tasks in a 21st-century economy, then I think that not only is that good for the individuals, but that’s going to be critical for the economy as a whole.
I want to emphasize, though, that part of the challenge is making sure that folks are getting in high school what they need as well. You know, I use my grandmother as an example for a lot of things, but I think this is telling. My grandmother never got a college degree. She went to high school. Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill, even though she worked on a bomber assembly line. She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —
Today, you mean?
THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.
And that means that we’ve got to — in our education-reform agenda — we’ve got to focus not just on increasing graduation rates, but we’ve also got to make what’s learned in the high-school and college experience more robust and more effective.
I was in West Virginia recently talking to some college students, and these are kids in college, fully intending to graduate, and yet they were still telling me they’re not sure whether a college education is worth it. They’re going to be graduating in a recession. They’re worried their jobs will go to China. You hear these things all the time. What would you say — there are a large number of very thoughtful people who have those concerns — what would you say to them?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, I’d start off by saying just look at the statistics. The unemployment rate for high-school graduates is at least three times what it is for a college graduate. So it’s true that in this recession you’re seeing white-collar jobs impacted. Even before the recession, it’s true that you saw some outsourcing of white-collar jobs. But if you’re working the odds, your likelihood of getting a job that pays you a good, solid middle-class wage is vastly increased upon graduating from college — unless you’re LeBron James. And so I think the evidence (3) speaks for itself.
Now, what is true is that a postgraduate education that isn’t giving you skills that are measurable in some way, that provide you with some differentiation, means that you’re going to have a little bit of a harder time. I would argue that anybody — that young people generally are going to benefit from a good, solid liberal-arts education. That’s what I got.
If you’re only going to go to school for two years, though, then making sure that you’re enrolled in a program where at the end of that journey you can see a job or a career or a field that’s growing instead of contracting certainly can make some sense.
But, again, I think the big challenge that we’ve got on education is making sure that from kindergarten or prekindergarten through your 14th or 15th year of school, or 16th year of school, or 20th year of school, that you are actually learning the kinds of skills that make you competitive and productive in a modern, technological economy.
That’s why I don’t just want to see more college graduates; I also want to specifically see more math and science graduates, I specifically want to see more folks in engineering. I think part of the postbubble economy that I’m describing is one in which we are restoring a balance between making things and providing services, whether it’s marketing or catering to people or servicing folks in some way. Those are all good jobs, and we’re not going to return to an economy in which manufacturing is as large a percentage as it was back in the 1940s just because of automation and technological advance.
And there are advantages to service jobs, right? Less injury —
THE PRESIDENT: Less injury, less strain. And I’ve always claimed that if a Wal-Mart associate was getting paid 25 bucks an hour like the autoworker, then there’s no reason for complaint.
Although I do think that there’s a culture of making things in a factory that appeals to people and that I understand. Whenever I’d walk into a factory during the campaign and would see these big turbines — things that, you know, you’d say, well, this is neat stuff — in a way you wouldn’t when you walk into a retail store.
But the broader point is that if you look at who our long-term competition will be in the global economy — China, India, the E.U., Brazil, Korea — the countries that are producing the best-educated work force, whose education system emphasizes the sciences and mathematics, who can translate those technology backgrounds or those science backgrounds into technological applications, they are going to have a significant advantage in the economy. And I think that we’ve got to have enough of that in order to maintain our economic strength.
III. The New Gender Gap
Those factories are obviously filled disproportionately with men. There’s a way in which that reminds me of your grandparents, even though I know your grandfather wasn’t a factory worker. You talk about the fact that your grandmother outearned your grandfather. And in a way your family was a forerunner of a much larger trend: There’s still sexism, there’s still a pay gap, clearly, but the pay of men has stagnated, and the pay of women has gone up.
I think there are a lot of men out there today, working at G.M. and Chrysler and other places, who feel the same kind of dejection (4) that your grandfather did. What do you think the future of work looks like for men?
THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s an interesting question, because as I said, you know, you go in to factories all across the Midwest and you talk to the men who work there — they’ve got extraordinary skill and extraordinary pride in what they make. And I think that for them, the loss of manufacturing is a loss of a way of life and not just a loss of income.
I think a healthy economy is going to have a broad mix of jobs, and there has to be a place for somebody with terrific mechanical aptitude who can perform highly skilled tasks with his hands, whether it’s in construction or manufacturing. And I don’t think that those jobs should vanish. I do think that they will constitute a smaller percentage of the overall economy. And so what we’re going to have to do is, with a younger generation, find new places for that kind of work.
The possibilities are there, though. I spoke during the campaign of this company that I visited, McKinstry, in Seattle, where you’ve got a bunch of welders and tradesmen who are now retrofitting buildings. They’re not performing the same kind of manufacturing that their fathers might have, but with similar skill sets they are now making hospitals and schools and office buildings much more energy efficient, and then that’s providing enormous value to the economy as a whole.
In shaping our recovery package, one of the things I was pushing very hard was the smart grid (5) as a big project similar to the Interstate that could have some enormous ramifications for energy utilization. One of the biggest constraints that we’ve got in building a smart grid in addition to siting issues, which are sort of classic political jurisdictional battles, is actually we don’t have enough trained electricians to lay down those lines. Now, you can’t tell me that there aren’t a whole bunch of men and women out there who are interested in those jobs. But somehow we have not done a good job of matching up the training with the need out there. And that’s one of the things where government can help, help to guide and steer our education process in a way that meets future needs and not just the needs of the past.
Would you also encourage men to become more comfortable working in fields that they traditionally have not? I mean, nursing is a very well-paying field. There’s a shortage there.
THE PRESIDENT: I mean, nursing, teaching are all areas where we need more men. I’ve always said if we can get more men in the classroom, particularly in inner cities where a lot of young people don’t have fathers, that could be of enormous benefit.
Now, as you and I both know, in a lot of those fields they have been underpaid because they were predominantly women’s fields. And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically important. And we’ve already taken action, for example, with the Lilly Ledbetter bill (6) to try to move in that direction.
I think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.
Did Michelle ever make more than you did?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Probably only for a brief time, because I was working three jobs most of the time that I was in the State Senate. I was still practicing law and I was still teaching. So when you kind of put everything together, I think I was still making a little bit more. But when I started campaigning for the U.S. Senate and I had to drop some of those jobs, then she carried us for a couple years.
IV. Where the Economists are Coming From
I want to talk broadly about policy. When you and I spoke during the campaign, you made it clear that you had thought a lot about the economic debates within the Clinton administration. And you said that you wanted to have a Robert Rubin type and a Robert Reich type having a vigorous debate in front of you. And clearly you have a spectrum of Democrats within your economic-policy team.
THE PRESIDENT: But I don’t have Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz. (7) (Laughter.)
No, this wasn’t about them. But they have made it clear that they are not working in your administration, haven’t they?
But in your inner circle, it really is dominated by Rubin protégés. And I’d be interested if —
THE PRESIDENT: You know, the — I mean, look, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner obviously worked at Treasury under Rubin.
And Peter Orszag, I think.
THE PRESIDENT: And Orszag — fair enough. You know, Christy Romer didn’t.
Jared Bernstein doesn’t — and Jared sits here every morning as part of my economic team. And Austan Goolsbee doesn’t. (8)
I mean, the truth is that what I’ve been constantly searching for is a ruthless pragmatism when it comes to economic policy. It is probably true that, given the financial crisis that had arisen, that the fact that both Tim and Larry had familiarity with financial crises was a plus, because I thought that we needed some people who could hit the ground running and would be comfortable dealing with some very large and difficult economic issues. And frankly, that list is pretty small, because the last Democratic president we had was Bill Clinton; he was on the scene for eight years, and for a big chunk of that time, Bob Rubin was his primary economic-policy maker. So it’s not surprising that anybody who had experience in those fronts was going to be coming out of a shop that would have been influenced by that.
Keep in mind, though, I mean, I have enormous respect for somebody like Joe Stiglitz. I read his stuff all the time. I actually am looking forward to having these folks in for ongoing discussion. Somebody who has enormous influence over my thinking is Paul Volcker, who is robust enough that, having presided over the Carter and Reagan years, he’s still sharp as a tack and able to give me huge advice and to provide some counterbalance.
The last point I’d make, though, is I think that — and I may have mentioned this to you — but now that I think about it, maybe it was post-election. When I first started having a round table of economic advisers, and Bob Reich was part of that, and he was sitting across the table from Bob Rubin and others, what you discovered was that some of the rifts that had existed back in the Clinton years had really narrowed drastically.
They agree a lot more than they used to, but not entirely.
THE PRESIDENT: Not entirely. But, I mean, the fact is that Larry Summers right now is very comfortable making arguments, often quite passionately, that Bob Reich used to be making when he was in the Clinton White House. Now Larry might not like me saying that —
Larry Summers is the new Bob Reich —
THE PRESIDENT: — that he’s become a soft touch. But, no, I think that one of the things that we all agree to is that the touchstone for economic policy is, does it allow the average American to find good employment and see their incomes rise; that we can’t just look at things in the aggregate, we do want to grow the pie, but we want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions and occupations and genders and races; and that economic policy should focus on growing the pie, but it also has to make sure that everybody has got opportunity in that system.
I also think that there’s very little disagreement that there are lessons to be learned from this crisis in terms of the importance of regulation in the financial markets. And I think that this notion that there is somehow resistance to that — to those lessons within my economic team — just isn’t borne out by the discussions that I have every day.
If anything, the only thing I notice, I think, that I do think is something of a carry-over from Bob Rubin — I see it in Larry, I see it in Tim — is a great appreciation of complexity.
And a willingness to admit what you don’t know, in many cases.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, exactly. And so what that means is that, as we’re making economic policy, I think there is a certain humility about the consequences of the actions we take, intended and unintended, that may make some outside observers impatient. I mean, you’ll recall Geithner was just getting hammered for months. But he, I think, is very secure in saying we need to get these things right, and if we act too abruptly, we can end up doing more harm than good. Those are qualities that I think have been useful.
V. Postreform Health care
You have suggested that health care is now the No. 1 legislative priority. It seems to me this is only a small generalization — to say that the way the medical system works now is, people go to the doctor; the doctor tells them what treatments they need; they get those treatments, regardless of cost or, frankly, regardless of whether they’re effective. I wonder if you could talk to people about how going to the doctor will be different in the future; how they will experience medical care differently on the other side of health care reform.
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I do think consumers have gotten more active in their own treatments in a way that’s very useful. And I think that should continue to be encouraged, to the extent that we can provide consumers with more information about their own well-being — that, I think, can be helpful.
I have always said, though, that we should not overstate the degree to which consumers rather than doctors are going to be driving treatment, because, I just speak from my own experience, I’m a pretty-well-educated layperson when it comes to medical care; I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, You know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.
And so, in that sense, there’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider. And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options. And certainly that’s true when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, where the taxpayers are footing the bill and we have an obligation to get those costs under control.
And right now we’re footing the bill for a lot of things that don’t make people healthier.
THE PRESIDENT: That don’t make people healthier. So when Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies (9) as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.
Won’t that be hard, because of the trust that people put in their doctors, just as you said? Won’t people say, Wait a second, my doctor is telling me to take the red pill, and the government is saving money by saying take the blue —
THE PRESIDENT: Let me put it this way: I actually think that most doctors want to do right by their patients. And if they’ve got good information, I think they will act on that good information.
Now, there are distortions in the system, everything from the drug salesmen and junkets to how reimbursements occur. Some of those things government has control over; some of those things are just more embedded in our medical culture. But the doctors I know — both ones who treat me as well as friends of mine — I think take their job very seriously and are thinking in terms of what’s best for the patient. They operate within particular incentive structures, like anybody else, and particular habits, like anybody else.
And so if it turns out that doctors in Florida are spending 25 percent more on treating their patients as doctors in Minnesota, and the doctors in Minnesota are getting outcomes that are just as good — then us going down to Florida and pointing out that this is how folks in Minnesota are doing it and they seem to be getting pretty good outcomes, and are there particular reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing? — I think that conversation will ultimately yield some significant savings and some significant benefits.
Now, I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care —
Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.
THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.
So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.
And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.
I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.
And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
So how do you — how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
VI. Out of the Rough?
Do you think this recession is a big-enough event to make us as a country willing to make some of the sorts of hard choices that we need to make on health care, on taxes in the long term — which will not cover the cost of government — on energy? Traditionally those choices get made in times of depression or war, and I’m not sure whether this rises to that level.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, part of it will depend on leadership. So I’ve got to make some good arguments out there. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do since I came in, is to say now is the time for us to make some tough, big decisions.
The critics have said, you’re doing too much, you can’t do all this at once, Congress can’t digest everything. I just reject that. There’s nothing inherent in our political process that should prevent us from making these difficult decisions now, as opposed to 10 years from now or 20 years from now.
It is true that as tough an economic time as it is right now, we haven’t had 42 months of 20, 30 percent unemployment. And so the degree of desperation and the shock to the system may not be as great. And that means that there’s going to be more resistance to any of these steps: reforming the financial system or reforming our health care system or doing something about energy. On each of these things — you know, things aren’t so bad in the eyes of a lot of Americans that they say, We’re willing to completely try something new.
But part of my job I think is to bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future.
Are you worried that the economic cycle will make that much harder? I mean, Roosevelt took office four years after the stock market crashed. You took office four months after Lehman Brothers collapsed. At some point people may start saying, Hey, why aren’t things getting better?
THE PRESIDENT: It’s something that we think about. I knew even before the election that this was going to be a very difficult journey and that the economy had gone through a sufficient shock and that it wasn’t going to recover right away.
In some ways it’s liberating, though, in the sense that whether I’m a one-termer or a two-termer, the problems are big enough and fundamental enough that I can’t sort of game it out. It’s not one of these things where I can say, Oh, you know what, if I time it just right, then the market is going to be going up and unemployment will be going down right before re-election. These are much bigger, much more systemic problems. And so in some ways you just kind of set aside the politics.
What I’m very confident about is that given the difficult options before us, we are making good, thoughtful decisions. I have enormous confidence that we are weighing all our options and we are making the best choices. That doesn’t mean that every choice is going to be right, is going to work exactly the way we want it to. But I wake up in the morning and go to bed at night feeling that the direction we are trying to move the economy toward is the right one and that the decisions we make are sound.
David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
copyright: The New York Times
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Obama focuses on green economy in speech before Congress
Barack Obama greets members of the U.S. Congress before addressing a joint meeting of the two legislative houses. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
• Barack Obama presses Capitol Hill on energy reforms
• Budget will include $15bn a year for alternative fuels
* Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Barack Obama raised the development of a green economy to the top of America's agenda tonight, calling on Congress to pass a law cutting the carbon emissions that cause global warming.
The president, in a rousing speech to both houses of Congress, tried to put to rest fears that the economic recession would force him to scale back ambitious plans for energy reforms.
Instead, he made it clear that he sees a direct link between America's long-term economic interests and the development of clean energy, budgeting additional funds for research into wind and solar power.
The president also pressed Congress to push ahead on a new law to cut greenhouse gas emissions, defying critics who say cap-and-trade measures could be a brake on economic recovery.
"To truly transform our economy, protect our security and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy," the president said. "So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America."
Barely a week after the passage of his $787bn economic rescue plan, Obama came back to Congress with plans for further green investment.
The recovery plan devoted more than $100bn to making private homes and government buildings more efficient, developing wind and solar power and spending money on public transport.
But the president promised even more tonight, saying his budget, which will be announced on Thursday, would allocate $15bn a year to develop wind and solar power and more fuel-efficient cars.
"We are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry," he said. "The nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."
Obama also set out a plan to modernise the electric grid.
He said America needed to re-establish its leading role in the development of solar and other renewable energy technologies, after losing ground to China, Germany and Japan.
"I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders – and I know you don't either. It is time for America to lead again,"
The direct appeal for climate change legislation could re-energise efforts to produce legislation before global climate change talks get underway in Copenhagen next December.
White House officials admitted on Monday it was increasingly uncertain such legislation could pass in time, and that the deadline might slip to 2010.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
OBAMA VOWS TO RENEW US
Link to the full text of the speech:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7909271.stm
Image: Courtesy BBC
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Obama's stimulus bill green lights green spending
Obama's stimulus bill green lights green spending
BusinessGreen.com takes the microscope to the environmental spending in President Obama's wide-ranging economic stimulus package
John Sterlicchi, BusinessGreen, 17 Feb 2009
Barack Obama
US President Barack Obama will today sign the $787bn (£551bn) economic stimulus package in Denver, Colorado with proponents of green business celebrating that a tenth of the money will be directly targeted at environmental initiatives.
Echoing the sentiments of many environmentalists, Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Clinton Administration, hailed the bill as a landmark in America's transition to a lower carbon economy.
"Years from now, long after the economy has recovered, this moment may well be remembered as the time that progressives, led by Obama, began the transition to a sustainable economy built around green jobs," he said.
The final compromise on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed the House on Friday by 246-183 without a single Republican vote, having passed the Senate by 60-38 with the help of three Republican senators.
The stimulus bill initially passed by the House had a projected cost of $820bn and the Senate's was even higher at $838bn, but the lower final figure was agreed in an attempt to bring the Republican senators on board and assure the bill's speedy passage.
Environment America, a federation of state-based, environmental advocacy organisations, analysed the final bill and said there were $32.80bn in funding for clean energy projects, $26.86bn for energy efficiency initiatives and $18.95bn for green transportation, giving a total of $78.61bn directly earmarked for green projects.
Obama has said that he hopes the act will create or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years, and a sizable chunk of these jobs are now expected to be so-called "green-collar jobs".
While some popular projects took a hit as a result of the compromise deal, environmentalists were as pleased almost as much at what did not make the final cut as what did.
For instance, in the Senate version of the package there was a provision for $50bn in federal loan guarantees that could have been utilised by the nuclear and coal industries. Its original inclusion caused 243 advocacy groups to send a joint letter to senators expressing their "dismay and anger over the inclusion by the Senate Appropriations Committee of a provision in the economic stimulus bill to provide up to $50bn in additional taxpayer loan guarantees that could be used for construction of new nuclear reactors and 'clean coal' plants" .
The provision was subsequently ditched from the final bill, in a move that Kevin Kamps of campaign group Beyond Nuclear hailed as "a big victory for common sense and the American taxpayer".
"This toxic nuclear pork had no place in a bill designed to put Americans back to work and salvage our economy," he said. "Our legislators are to be applauded for getting their priorities right and saying no to yet another blatant attempt to prop up an industry that has never stood on its own financial feet."
However, less contentious green investments also took a hit with the plan to upgrade the country's electricity transmission system to better take advantage of renewable energy and improve efficiency seeing proposed funding of $11bn cut to just $4.5bn. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission acting chairman Jon Wellinghoff said the funding was "seed money... but it really isn't enough money to make huge advances in the overall backbone grid that we're talking about to integrate substantial amounts of wind."
The full investment to meet the type of renewable growth that Obama's targeted would cost more than $200bn, he said, but added that based on the proposals already submitted to the agency he now expected the rest of the funding to come from the private sector.
The need for private capital to piggyback the US government’s initiatives was highlighted by University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin writing in this week's Nation magazine. Banks could be required to devote a percentage of loan portfolios to green investments, he wrote, while expanded tax credits could be provided to homes and businesses for installation of solar and other renewable energy. Funds from a cap-and-trade emissions programme or a carbon tax could also be recycled back to the public in rebates to spend on energy saving measures, he predicted.
Pollin also joined with green groups in praising a stimulus package that will simultaneously cut carbon emissions and create jobs.
"The central facts here are irrefutable: spending the same amount of money on building a clean energy economy will create three times more jobs within the US than would spending on our existing fossil fuel infrastructure," he observed. " The transformation to a clean energy economy can therefore serve as a major long-term engine of job creation."
His comments were echoed by the Solar Energy Industries Association, which forecasts that the stimulus package will create 67,000 solar jobs in 2009, and 119,000 in total through 2010. The stimulus plan will "catapult the US to be the world's largest solar market by the end of 2010", predicted Suvi Sharma, chief executive of Solaria, a solar-cell maker.
Striking a similarly upbeat note was Kevin Surace, president and chief executive of Serious Materials, a Silicon Valley company that makes green building materials. With the final document providing $5bn for a Weatherization Assistance Program, enough to supposedly prevent 9.7 million tons of global warming pollution and create 375,000 jobs, he predicted that the company would "be hiring hundreds of people over the next 12 to 18 months".
Plans to invest $8bn in new high-speed rail projects also secured praise from an unlikely quarter, when Florida Republican House representative John Mica, who voted against the package, issued a statement praising the focus on high-speed rail.
"I applaud President Obama's recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America's future," he said.
A spokesman for Mica said that he voted against the bill as he saw the high-speed rail provisions as just a "silver lining". It has become a popular tactic for politicians to tout in press releases local benefits of legislation they voted against in the hope that voters did not follow the debate too closely.
As well as green initiatives, the new act will provide money for road building, new bridges, new schools and the expansion of broadband networks to rural communities, all of which it could be argued could help curb overall emissions. There are also funds to computerise healthcare records, extend federal unemployment benefits and boost healthcare funding for low-income and disabled Americans. It also provides an estimated $280bn in tax cuts.
The White House is establishing a website to track the spending, and green groups can now be expected to be keeping a close eye on how and where the new funding will be spent.
"This historic step won't be the end of what we do to turn our economy around, but the beginning,'' President Obama said over the weekend. "The problems that led us into this crisis are deep and widespread. Our response must be equal to the task."
He could of just as easily been talking about climate change, as well as the economic crisis – and given the make up of his stimulus package, perhaps he was.
BusinessGreen.com takes the microscope to the environmental spending in President Obama's wide-ranging economic stimulus package
John Sterlicchi, BusinessGreen, 17 Feb 2009
Barack Obama
US President Barack Obama will today sign the $787bn (£551bn) economic stimulus package in Denver, Colorado with proponents of green business celebrating that a tenth of the money will be directly targeted at environmental initiatives.
Echoing the sentiments of many environmentalists, Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Clinton Administration, hailed the bill as a landmark in America's transition to a lower carbon economy.
"Years from now, long after the economy has recovered, this moment may well be remembered as the time that progressives, led by Obama, began the transition to a sustainable economy built around green jobs," he said.
The final compromise on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed the House on Friday by 246-183 without a single Republican vote, having passed the Senate by 60-38 with the help of three Republican senators.
The stimulus bill initially passed by the House had a projected cost of $820bn and the Senate's was even higher at $838bn, but the lower final figure was agreed in an attempt to bring the Republican senators on board and assure the bill's speedy passage.
Environment America, a federation of state-based, environmental advocacy organisations, analysed the final bill and said there were $32.80bn in funding for clean energy projects, $26.86bn for energy efficiency initiatives and $18.95bn for green transportation, giving a total of $78.61bn directly earmarked for green projects.
Obama has said that he hopes the act will create or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years, and a sizable chunk of these jobs are now expected to be so-called "green-collar jobs".
While some popular projects took a hit as a result of the compromise deal, environmentalists were as pleased almost as much at what did not make the final cut as what did.
For instance, in the Senate version of the package there was a provision for $50bn in federal loan guarantees that could have been utilised by the nuclear and coal industries. Its original inclusion caused 243 advocacy groups to send a joint letter to senators expressing their "dismay and anger over the inclusion by the Senate Appropriations Committee of a provision in the economic stimulus bill to provide up to $50bn in additional taxpayer loan guarantees that could be used for construction of new nuclear reactors and 'clean coal' plants" .
The provision was subsequently ditched from the final bill, in a move that Kevin Kamps of campaign group Beyond Nuclear hailed as "a big victory for common sense and the American taxpayer".
"This toxic nuclear pork had no place in a bill designed to put Americans back to work and salvage our economy," he said. "Our legislators are to be applauded for getting their priorities right and saying no to yet another blatant attempt to prop up an industry that has never stood on its own financial feet."
However, less contentious green investments also took a hit with the plan to upgrade the country's electricity transmission system to better take advantage of renewable energy and improve efficiency seeing proposed funding of $11bn cut to just $4.5bn. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission acting chairman Jon Wellinghoff said the funding was "seed money... but it really isn't enough money to make huge advances in the overall backbone grid that we're talking about to integrate substantial amounts of wind."
The full investment to meet the type of renewable growth that Obama's targeted would cost more than $200bn, he said, but added that based on the proposals already submitted to the agency he now expected the rest of the funding to come from the private sector.
The need for private capital to piggyback the US government’s initiatives was highlighted by University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin writing in this week's Nation magazine. Banks could be required to devote a percentage of loan portfolios to green investments, he wrote, while expanded tax credits could be provided to homes and businesses for installation of solar and other renewable energy. Funds from a cap-and-trade emissions programme or a carbon tax could also be recycled back to the public in rebates to spend on energy saving measures, he predicted.
Pollin also joined with green groups in praising a stimulus package that will simultaneously cut carbon emissions and create jobs.
"The central facts here are irrefutable: spending the same amount of money on building a clean energy economy will create three times more jobs within the US than would spending on our existing fossil fuel infrastructure," he observed. " The transformation to a clean energy economy can therefore serve as a major long-term engine of job creation."
His comments were echoed by the Solar Energy Industries Association, which forecasts that the stimulus package will create 67,000 solar jobs in 2009, and 119,000 in total through 2010. The stimulus plan will "catapult the US to be the world's largest solar market by the end of 2010", predicted Suvi Sharma, chief executive of Solaria, a solar-cell maker.
Striking a similarly upbeat note was Kevin Surace, president and chief executive of Serious Materials, a Silicon Valley company that makes green building materials. With the final document providing $5bn for a Weatherization Assistance Program, enough to supposedly prevent 9.7 million tons of global warming pollution and create 375,000 jobs, he predicted that the company would "be hiring hundreds of people over the next 12 to 18 months".
Plans to invest $8bn in new high-speed rail projects also secured praise from an unlikely quarter, when Florida Republican House representative John Mica, who voted against the package, issued a statement praising the focus on high-speed rail.
"I applaud President Obama's recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America's future," he said.
A spokesman for Mica said that he voted against the bill as he saw the high-speed rail provisions as just a "silver lining". It has become a popular tactic for politicians to tout in press releases local benefits of legislation they voted against in the hope that voters did not follow the debate too closely.
As well as green initiatives, the new act will provide money for road building, new bridges, new schools and the expansion of broadband networks to rural communities, all of which it could be argued could help curb overall emissions. There are also funds to computerise healthcare records, extend federal unemployment benefits and boost healthcare funding for low-income and disabled Americans. It also provides an estimated $280bn in tax cuts.
The White House is establishing a website to track the spending, and green groups can now be expected to be keeping a close eye on how and where the new funding will be spent.
"This historic step won't be the end of what we do to turn our economy around, but the beginning,'' President Obama said over the weekend. "The problems that led us into this crisis are deep and widespread. Our response must be equal to the task."
He could of just as easily been talking about climate change, as well as the economic crisis – and given the make up of his stimulus package, perhaps he was.
Obama green stimulus to cut US emissions by at least 61m tonnes
Obama green stimulus to cut US emissions by at least 61m tonnes
New research finds "Green New Deal" spending plan could have equivalent effect on cutting carbon emissions as taking 13 million cars off the road
Tom Young, BusinessGreen, 10 Feb 2009
Barack Obama
The proposed "Green New Deal" environmental measures proposed as part of President Obama's $800bn economic stimulus package will deliver minimum greenhouse gas emissions savings of 61 million tonnes a year – equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road – and could result in far deeper emission cuts.
That is the conclusion of a new report from climate change consultants ICF International (ICFI), commissioned by Greenpeace, which aimed to measure the impact on US carbon emissions of the president's wide-ranging green spending plans.
The report concluded that the impact of many of the proposed measures on carbon emissions were too difficult to quantify, and as a result the ultimate long-term savings arising from the plan could be far higher.
The proposed spending, which is still being debated on Capitol Hill and is expected to be passed by the Senate later this week, breaks down into 18 key areas. But while they are all expected to result in net carbon emission reductions, ICFI was only able to quantify the savings that will arise from seven proposals.
The report says that much of the estimated saving will come from building efficiency measures, calculating that plans to provide $6.9bn in grants to support local government energy efficiency schemes will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20.1m tons a year, while proposals to invest $6.7bn in improving the efficiency of federal buildings, $6.2bn in "home weatherisation" and $2.5bn in domestic energy efficiency efforts should cut emissions by 17.5m, eight million, and 7.28m tonnes respectively.
Proposed energy efficiency grants and loans to schools and other government institutions worth $1.5bn should cut emissions by 4.6m tonnes, according to the report, while $500m of investment in industrial energy efficiency programmes designed to pilot combined heat and power technologies promises to cut emissions by up to a quarter of current levels for those firms involved.
Moreover, plans for up to $300m in rebates for consumers who buy energy efficient and smart appliances that carry the Energy Star label are estimated to deliver emissions savings of more than 100,000 tonnes a year.
However, speaking to news agency Reuters, Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, said that as the study focused only on those areas where carbon savings could be accurately quantified, the total savings were likely to be far higher.
ICFI concluded that there were too many variables attached to a raft of investment proposals designed to bolster clean technologies for it to accurately attach emission-savings figures.
For example, Obama's flagship plans to invest $11bn in rolling out smart grid technologies, provide $8bn in loan guarantees to renewable energy and transmission projects, and offer $2.4bn in funding to carbon capture and storage projects all have the potential to deliver huge emissions savings, but it is too early to estimate the precise scale of the savings and the timeline for their delivery.
Similarly, it is also difficult to quantify emissions cuts that will arise from a raft of projects to help cut transport emissions, such as the $2bn in loans to be offered to developers of advanced battery technologies; $600m earmarked for greening federal vehicles; $400m initiative for the government to purchase more fuel efficient buses and trucks; $300m in funding to help develop cleaner diesel technologies; and $200m to promote the adoption of electric vehicles and provide recharging infrastructure.
New research finds "Green New Deal" spending plan could have equivalent effect on cutting carbon emissions as taking 13 million cars off the road
Tom Young, BusinessGreen, 10 Feb 2009
Barack Obama
The proposed "Green New Deal" environmental measures proposed as part of President Obama's $800bn economic stimulus package will deliver minimum greenhouse gas emissions savings of 61 million tonnes a year – equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road – and could result in far deeper emission cuts.
That is the conclusion of a new report from climate change consultants ICF International (ICFI), commissioned by Greenpeace, which aimed to measure the impact on US carbon emissions of the president's wide-ranging green spending plans.
The report concluded that the impact of many of the proposed measures on carbon emissions were too difficult to quantify, and as a result the ultimate long-term savings arising from the plan could be far higher.
The proposed spending, which is still being debated on Capitol Hill and is expected to be passed by the Senate later this week, breaks down into 18 key areas. But while they are all expected to result in net carbon emission reductions, ICFI was only able to quantify the savings that will arise from seven proposals.
The report says that much of the estimated saving will come from building efficiency measures, calculating that plans to provide $6.9bn in grants to support local government energy efficiency schemes will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20.1m tons a year, while proposals to invest $6.7bn in improving the efficiency of federal buildings, $6.2bn in "home weatherisation" and $2.5bn in domestic energy efficiency efforts should cut emissions by 17.5m, eight million, and 7.28m tonnes respectively.
Proposed energy efficiency grants and loans to schools and other government institutions worth $1.5bn should cut emissions by 4.6m tonnes, according to the report, while $500m of investment in industrial energy efficiency programmes designed to pilot combined heat and power technologies promises to cut emissions by up to a quarter of current levels for those firms involved.
Moreover, plans for up to $300m in rebates for consumers who buy energy efficient and smart appliances that carry the Energy Star label are estimated to deliver emissions savings of more than 100,000 tonnes a year.
However, speaking to news agency Reuters, Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, said that as the study focused only on those areas where carbon savings could be accurately quantified, the total savings were likely to be far higher.
ICFI concluded that there were too many variables attached to a raft of investment proposals designed to bolster clean technologies for it to accurately attach emission-savings figures.
For example, Obama's flagship plans to invest $11bn in rolling out smart grid technologies, provide $8bn in loan guarantees to renewable energy and transmission projects, and offer $2.4bn in funding to carbon capture and storage projects all have the potential to deliver huge emissions savings, but it is too early to estimate the precise scale of the savings and the timeline for their delivery.
Similarly, it is also difficult to quantify emissions cuts that will arise from a raft of projects to help cut transport emissions, such as the $2bn in loans to be offered to developers of advanced battery technologies; $600m earmarked for greening federal vehicles; $400m initiative for the government to purchase more fuel efficient buses and trucks; $300m in funding to help develop cleaner diesel technologies; and $200m to promote the adoption of electric vehicles and provide recharging infrastructure.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
UK government announces green makeover for every home by 2030
UK government announces green makeover for every home by 2030
Environment minister unveils 'great British refurb' to cut household emissions one-third by 2020 with insulation and low-carbon technologies
* Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 February 2009 13.25 GMT
Loft insulation
Millions of British homes will be insulated under government plans. Photograph: Graham Turner
All UK households will have a green makeover by 2030 under government plans to reduce carbon emissions and cut energy bills.
Cavity wall and loft insulation will be available for all suitable homes, with plans to retrofit 400,000 homes a year by 2015. Financial incentives for householders will also be available for low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, biomass boilers and ground source heat pumps, paid for by a levy on utility companies.
The government wants a quarter of homes (7m) to benefit from the schemes by 2020, extending to all UK households by 2030.
The strategy could help cut household carbon emissions by a third by 2020, part of its target to reduce overall UK emissions by 80% by 2050. Currently, homes account for 27% of the UK's carbon emissions through heating and power.
The plans were welcomed in principle by green groups and energy campaigners, though many were still concerned by the lack urgency in the proposals – which might only begin in 2013 – or detail on how the majority of the plans will be funded.
Energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband said: "We need to move from incremental steps forward on household energy efficiency to a comprehensive national plan – the Great British refurb."
"We know the scale of the challenge: wasted energy is costing families on average £300 a year, and more than a quarter of all our emissions are from our homes. Energy efficiency and low-carbon energy are the fairest routes to curbing emissions, saving money for families, improving our energy security and insulating us from volatile fossil fuel prices."
Under the proposals, a Renewable Heating Incentive would tax utility companies and then use the money to build up smaller-scale energy networks. A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said the levy, intended to start in 2011, would not affect today's household bills. "We have to consult on how it will work and, in fact, our proposals would have little impact on prices for many years, apart from cutting billing for those who take up the offer of help."
In addition, householders could be paid for any electricity they feed into the national grid from their power-generating facilities.
Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) said the proposals were suitably ambitious but also needed the Treasury behind them. "As Lord Stern said yesterday, energy efficiency in homes and buildings should be part of a green stimulus. Financial incentives are needed to encourage major green refurbishments – the precedent has already been set with stamp duty rebates for zero-carbon homes."
According to Greenpeace UK, a programme to upgrade the housing stock alone would require £3.5-£6.5bn per year until 2050. Nathan Argent, head of energy solutions at Greenpeace, said: "Tackling energy efficiency is the fastest way to cut emissions, boost our energy security, revitalise the economy and create tens of thousands of jobs. And, obviously, this will cut household bills too. But this plan needs much more investment right now. The government needs to put their wallet where their mouth is."
Andrew Warren of the Association for the Conservation of Energy was concerned that the government had redefined the meaning of insulation to meet the target, set by Gordon Brown last year, of getting 6m homes fully insulated over three years.
"Most people think of insulation as the stuff you shove in your loft or put around your walls," he said. The current DECC definition, he said, can also include draft-proofing of letterboxes or replacing windows. "At the moment, even by the most generous interpretation, you're not even halfway towards the 6m [target announced by Gordon Brown].."
Danny Stevens, policy director of the Environmental Industries Commission said that setting targets for energy efficiency was not enough. "All we have today is the launch of yet another consultation. This undermines the urgency of tackling climate change and ignores the huge economic benefits of ambitious environmental protection measures."
That sentiment was echoed by Philip Sellwood, chief executive of the Energy Saving Trust (EST), who said the time for talking is now over. "We are not short of ideas; we just need action and now. Armed with the knowledge that 70% of our current housing stock will still be around in 2050, we know we need to be bold."
He added: "If we throw everything at our existing housing stock – based on today's technologies only – we could reduce household carbon emissions by 50%."
The EST said there are 7.3m cavity walls that could be filled with insulation, 7m solid walls that could be insulated, and 12.9m lofts which do not have the recommended depth of insulation, and 4.5m G-rated (the least efficient) gas boilers.
Shadow energy and climate change secretary Greg Clark said the government was "delaying rather than getting on and adopting our scheme immediately, when it is desperately needed." Last month, the Conservatives proposed giving an allowance of up to £6,500 to every household in the UK for energy efficiency improvements.
Today's DECC strategy also includes ideas to encourage microgeneration, where homeowners and local communities generate their own heat or power.
Public building CO2 footprints revealed
2 Oct 2008:
The Palace of Westminster and the Bank of England have been exposed as some of the UK's least energy efficient public buildings by a new law to measure carbon dioxide emissions from the national estate. Find out how other public buildings fared
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Environment minister unveils 'great British refurb' to cut household emissions one-third by 2020 with insulation and low-carbon technologies
* Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 February 2009 13.25 GMT
Loft insulation
Millions of British homes will be insulated under government plans. Photograph: Graham Turner
All UK households will have a green makeover by 2030 under government plans to reduce carbon emissions and cut energy bills.
Cavity wall and loft insulation will be available for all suitable homes, with plans to retrofit 400,000 homes a year by 2015. Financial incentives for householders will also be available for low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, biomass boilers and ground source heat pumps, paid for by a levy on utility companies.
The government wants a quarter of homes (7m) to benefit from the schemes by 2020, extending to all UK households by 2030.
The strategy could help cut household carbon emissions by a third by 2020, part of its target to reduce overall UK emissions by 80% by 2050. Currently, homes account for 27% of the UK's carbon emissions through heating and power.
The plans were welcomed in principle by green groups and energy campaigners, though many were still concerned by the lack urgency in the proposals – which might only begin in 2013 – or detail on how the majority of the plans will be funded.
Energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband said: "We need to move from incremental steps forward on household energy efficiency to a comprehensive national plan – the Great British refurb."
"We know the scale of the challenge: wasted energy is costing families on average £300 a year, and more than a quarter of all our emissions are from our homes. Energy efficiency and low-carbon energy are the fairest routes to curbing emissions, saving money for families, improving our energy security and insulating us from volatile fossil fuel prices."
Under the proposals, a Renewable Heating Incentive would tax utility companies and then use the money to build up smaller-scale energy networks. A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said the levy, intended to start in 2011, would not affect today's household bills. "We have to consult on how it will work and, in fact, our proposals would have little impact on prices for many years, apart from cutting billing for those who take up the offer of help."
In addition, householders could be paid for any electricity they feed into the national grid from their power-generating facilities.
Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) said the proposals were suitably ambitious but also needed the Treasury behind them. "As Lord Stern said yesterday, energy efficiency in homes and buildings should be part of a green stimulus. Financial incentives are needed to encourage major green refurbishments – the precedent has already been set with stamp duty rebates for zero-carbon homes."
According to Greenpeace UK, a programme to upgrade the housing stock alone would require £3.5-£6.5bn per year until 2050. Nathan Argent, head of energy solutions at Greenpeace, said: "Tackling energy efficiency is the fastest way to cut emissions, boost our energy security, revitalise the economy and create tens of thousands of jobs. And, obviously, this will cut household bills too. But this plan needs much more investment right now. The government needs to put their wallet where their mouth is."
Andrew Warren of the Association for the Conservation of Energy was concerned that the government had redefined the meaning of insulation to meet the target, set by Gordon Brown last year, of getting 6m homes fully insulated over three years.
"Most people think of insulation as the stuff you shove in your loft or put around your walls," he said. The current DECC definition, he said, can also include draft-proofing of letterboxes or replacing windows. "At the moment, even by the most generous interpretation, you're not even halfway towards the 6m [target announced by Gordon Brown].."
Danny Stevens, policy director of the Environmental Industries Commission said that setting targets for energy efficiency was not enough. "All we have today is the launch of yet another consultation. This undermines the urgency of tackling climate change and ignores the huge economic benefits of ambitious environmental protection measures."
That sentiment was echoed by Philip Sellwood, chief executive of the Energy Saving Trust (EST), who said the time for talking is now over. "We are not short of ideas; we just need action and now. Armed with the knowledge that 70% of our current housing stock will still be around in 2050, we know we need to be bold."
He added: "If we throw everything at our existing housing stock – based on today's technologies only – we could reduce household carbon emissions by 50%."
The EST said there are 7.3m cavity walls that could be filled with insulation, 7m solid walls that could be insulated, and 12.9m lofts which do not have the recommended depth of insulation, and 4.5m G-rated (the least efficient) gas boilers.
Shadow energy and climate change secretary Greg Clark said the government was "delaying rather than getting on and adopting our scheme immediately, when it is desperately needed." Last month, the Conservatives proposed giving an allowance of up to £6,500 to every household in the UK for energy efficiency improvements.
Today's DECC strategy also includes ideas to encourage microgeneration, where homeowners and local communities generate their own heat or power.
Public building CO2 footprints revealed
2 Oct 2008:
The Palace of Westminster and the Bank of England have been exposed as some of the UK's least energy efficient public buildings by a new law to measure carbon dioxide emissions from the national estate. Find out how other public buildings fared
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Obama 'must act now' on climate
BBC NEWS
Obama 'must act now' on climate
The planet will be in "huge trouble" unless Barack Obama makes strides in tackling climate change, says a leading scientist.
Prof James McCarthy spoke on the eve of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which he heads.
The US president has just four years to save the planet, said Prof McCarthy.
If major policy changes do not happen within Mr Obama's term of office, they will not happen at all, he warned.
"We have a moment right now of extraordinary opportunity, with a new president, positioned with scientific leadership that has known no equal in recent times," the AAAS president told BBC News.
"The calibre of scientific advice that is close to this man is truly exceptional.
"If in his first term, in the next four years, we don't make significant progress in these areas, then I think the planet is in huge trouble.
"Without US leadership, which has been sorely lacking, we will not get to where we need to be."
Moment of opportunity
Climate change is high on the agenda of this year's AAAS meeting in Chicago.
Former US Vice President Al Gore is among the speakers at the event, with 10,000 scientists expected to attend across the five days of the meeting.
On the eve of the conference, Prof McCarthy told BBC News there was now a moment of opportunity to draw up policies that would be effective in combating climate change.
He said: "Many scientists have wondered whether President Obama will be able to make commitments to investments in energy technology and understanding climate change - that were an important part of his campaign.
"I know many of my colleagues looking at the fiscal situation, have felt that these good ideas might be put on the back burner.
"That would be a terrible thing if that happened.
"This is our window, with the science advice he has, with the realisation that these issues are pressing, if they are made second order I think we have really lost it."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7885036.stm
Published: 2009/02/12 02:36:06 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Obama 'must act now' on climate
The planet will be in "huge trouble" unless Barack Obama makes strides in tackling climate change, says a leading scientist.
Prof James McCarthy spoke on the eve of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which he heads.
The US president has just four years to save the planet, said Prof McCarthy.
If major policy changes do not happen within Mr Obama's term of office, they will not happen at all, he warned.
"We have a moment right now of extraordinary opportunity, with a new president, positioned with scientific leadership that has known no equal in recent times," the AAAS president told BBC News.
"The calibre of scientific advice that is close to this man is truly exceptional.
"If in his first term, in the next four years, we don't make significant progress in these areas, then I think the planet is in huge trouble.
"Without US leadership, which has been sorely lacking, we will not get to where we need to be."
Moment of opportunity
Climate change is high on the agenda of this year's AAAS meeting in Chicago.
Former US Vice President Al Gore is among the speakers at the event, with 10,000 scientists expected to attend across the five days of the meeting.
On the eve of the conference, Prof McCarthy told BBC News there was now a moment of opportunity to draw up policies that would be effective in combating climate change.
He said: "Many scientists have wondered whether President Obama will be able to make commitments to investments in energy technology and understanding climate change - that were an important part of his campaign.
"I know many of my colleagues looking at the fiscal situation, have felt that these good ideas might be put on the back burner.
"That would be a terrible thing if that happened.
"This is our window, with the science advice he has, with the realisation that these issues are pressing, if they are made second order I think we have really lost it."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7885036.stm
Published: 2009/02/12 02:36:06 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Former US vice-president told Senate that environmental initiatives would help job growth
* Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Al Gore reprised his role as environmental prophet today, laying out a road map for Barack Obama to push through his ambitious green agenda and re-assert American leadership on global climate change negotiations.
The former US vice-president and Nobel prize laureate called for swift passage of Obama's economic recovery plan, with its emphasis on green jobs and renewable energy.
He said Barack Obama's multibillion-dollar stimulus plan was a first step to moving America away from fossil fuels and reaching an international treaty on climate change in Copenhagen later this year.
"The road to Copenhagen has three steps to it," Gore told the Senate foreign relations committee.
Gore urged Congress not to be distracted by the economic recessions. Recent opinion polls have also shown a decline in concern about the environment as economic worries take hold.
Gore said the plan would spur economic recovery - not stand in its way.
"The solutions to the climate crisis are the very same solutions that will address our economic and national security crises as well," he said. "The plan's unprecedented and critical investments in four key areas - energy efficiency, renewables, a unified national energy grid and the move to clean cars - represent an important down payment."
He went on to call for "decisive action" towards mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, saying the reductions achieved under the short-term economic recovery plan would make it easier for America to meet subsequent targets.
The knock-on effect would lay the foundation to a successful negotiation of a sequel to the Kyoto agreements later this year, Gore said.
"The United States will regain its credibility and enter the Copenhagen treaty talks with a renewed authority to lead the world in shaping a fair and effective treaty."
He said the scientific consensus of recent years would ensure support in Congress for an international treaty. Congress refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol a decade ago.
"The scientists are practically screaming from the rooftops," Gore said.
The largely reverential reception for Gore, from Republicans as well as Democrats on the Senate committee, was further evidence of the dramatic shift in thinking on the environment.
With Obama in the White House and Democrats in control of Congress, there is now broad support for dealing with climate change.
John Kerry, the incoming chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, has said he intends to use his new role to help further efforts for an international treaty on climate. "The committee is going to be relentless and super-focused," he said.
"As the new administration sets a new tone with the global community, this issue will be an early test of our capacity to exert thoughtful, forceful diplomatic and moral leadership on any future challenge that the world faces," Kerry said.
With Bush's exit from the White House, there was little sign today of the once formidable constituency of climate change deniers. Instead, the committee room was reduced to respectful silence as Gore deployed his now famous slide show on the urgency of dealing with climate change.
He included data showing that if emissions rise at current levels, the earth could see an 11 degree Fahrenheit rise in global average temperatures.
"This would bring a screeching halt to human civilisation and threaten the fabric of life everywhere on Earth," Gore said. "And this is within the century, if we don't change."
Obama took his first steps to make good on an election promise to put the environment at the top of his agenda on Monday.
In a pair of executive orders, Obama asked the Environmental Protection Agency to review its refusal to allow California and more than a dozen other states to enact stringent emission requirements.
Gore's testimony was part of a broader strategy by Obama to get Congress behind his stimulus package, but also to line up support further down the road for legislation to promote clean energy and counter the effects of climate change.
Since the success of his film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore has launched a public campaign for America to stop using fossil fuels entirely and move to clean energy sources within 10 years. Such targets are more ambitious than those set by Obama.
However, Gore did not refer to those targets today.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
THINK AGAIN by Stanley Fish
February 8, 2009, 10:00 pm
The Two Languages of Academic Freedom
Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?
The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be fired.” Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American university. What then?
I answered this one myself: “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.”
My assessment of the way in which some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom has now been at once confirmed and challenged by events at the University of Ottawa, where the administration announced on Feb. 6 that it has “recommended to the Board of Governors the dismissal with cause of Professor Denis Rancourt from his faculty position.” Earlier, Rancourt, a tenured professor of physics, had been suspended from teaching and banned from campus. When he defied the ban he was taken away in handcuffs and charged with trespassing.
What had Rancourt done to merit such treatment? According to the Globe and Mail, Rancourt’s sin was to have informed his students on the first day of class that “he had already decided their marks : Everybody was getting an A+.”
But that, as the saying goes, is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it is the mass of reasons Rancourt gives for his grading policy and for many of the other actions that have infuriated his dean, distressed his colleagues (a third of whom signed a petition against him) and delighted his partisans.
Rancourt is a self-described anarchist and an advocate of “critical pedagogy,” a style of teaching derived from the assumption (these are Rancourt’s words) “that our societal structures . . . represent the most formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever to occupy the planet” (Activist Teacher.blogspot.com, April 13, 2007).
Among those structures is the university in which Rancourt works and by which he is paid. But the fact of his position and compensation does not insulate the institution from his strictures and assaults; for, he insists, “schools and universities supply the obedient workers and managers and professionals that adopt and apply [the] system’s doctrine — knowingly or unknowingly.”
It is this belief that higher education as we know it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters that underlies Rancourt’s refusal to grade his students. Grading, he says, “is a tool of coercion in order to make obedient people” (rabble.ca., Jan. 12, 2009).
It turns out that another tool of coercion is the requirement that professors actually teach the course described in the college catalogue, the course students think they are signing up for. Rancourt battles against this form of coercion by employing a strategy he calls “squatting” – “where one openly takes an existing course and does with it something different.” That is, you take a currently unoccupied structure, move in and make it the home for whatever activities you wish to engage in. “Academic squatting is needed,” he says, “because universities are dictatorships . . . run by self-appointed executives who serve capital interests.”
Rancourt first practiced squatting when he decided that he “had to do something more than give a ‘better’ physics course.” Accordingly, he took the Physics and Environment course that had been assigned to him and transformed it into a course on political activism, not a course about political activism, but a course in which political activism is urged — “an activism course about confronting authority and hierarchical structures directly or through defiant or non-subordinate assertion in order to democratize power in the workplace, at school, and in society.”
Clearly squatting itself is just such a “defiant or non-subordinate assertion.” Rancourt does not merely preach his philosophy. He practices it.
This sounds vaguely admirable until you remember what Rancourt is, in effect, saying to those who employ him: I refuse to do what I have contracted to do, but I will do everything in my power to subvert the enterprise you administer. Besides, you’re just dictators, and it is my obligation to undermine you even as I demand that you pay me and confer on me the honorific title of professor. And, by the way, I am entitled to do so by the doctrine of academic freedom, which I define as “the ideal under which professors and students are autonomous and design their own development and interactions.”
Of course, as Rancourt recognizes, if this is how academic freedom is defined, its scope is infinite and one can’t stop with squatting: “The next step is academic hijacking, where students tell a professor that she can stay or leave but that this is what they are going to do and these are the speakers they are going to invite.” O, brave new world!
The record shows exchanges of letters between Rancourt and Dean Andre E. Lalonde and letters from each of them to Marc Jolicoeur, chairman of the Board of Governors. There is something comical about some of these exchanges when the dean asks Rancourt to tell him why he is not guilty of insubordination and Rancourt replies that insubordination is his job, and that, rather than ceasing his insubordinate activities, he plans to expand them. Lalonde complains that Rancourt “does not acknowledge any impropriety regarding his conduct.” Rancourt tells Jolicoeur that “Socrates did not give grades to students,” and boasts that everything he has done was done “with the purpose of making the University of Ottawa a better place,” a place “of greater democracy.” In other words, I am the bearer of a saving message and those who need it most will not hear it and respond by persecuting me. It is the cry of every would-be messiah.
Rancourt’s views are the opposite of those announced by a court in an Arizona case where the issue was also whether a teaching method could be the basis of dismissal. Noting that the university had concluded that the plaintiff’s “methodology was not successful,” the court declared “Academic freedom is not a doctrine to insulate a teacher from evaluation by the institution that employs him” (Carley v. Arizona, 1987).
The Arizona court thinks of academic freedom as a doctrine whose scope is defined by the purposes and protocols of the institution and its limited purposes. Rancourt thinks of academic freedom as a local instance of a global project whose goal is nothing less than the freeing of revolutionary energies, not only in the schools but everywhere.
It is the difference between being concerned with the establishing and implementing of workplace-specific procedures and being concerned with the wholesale transformation of society. It is the difference between wanting to teach a better physics course and wanting to save the world. Given such divergent views, not only is reconciliation between the parties impossible; conversation itself is impossible. The dispute can only be resolved by an essentially political decision, and in this case the narrower concept of academic freedom has won. But only till next time.
copyright: The New York Times
The Two Languages of Academic Freedom
Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?
The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be fired.” Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American university. What then?
I answered this one myself: “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.”
My assessment of the way in which some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom has now been at once confirmed and challenged by events at the University of Ottawa, where the administration announced on Feb. 6 that it has “recommended to the Board of Governors the dismissal with cause of Professor Denis Rancourt from his faculty position.” Earlier, Rancourt, a tenured professor of physics, had been suspended from teaching and banned from campus. When he defied the ban he was taken away in handcuffs and charged with trespassing.
What had Rancourt done to merit such treatment? According to the Globe and Mail, Rancourt’s sin was to have informed his students on the first day of class that “he had already decided their marks : Everybody was getting an A+.”
But that, as the saying goes, is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it is the mass of reasons Rancourt gives for his grading policy and for many of the other actions that have infuriated his dean, distressed his colleagues (a third of whom signed a petition against him) and delighted his partisans.
Rancourt is a self-described anarchist and an advocate of “critical pedagogy,” a style of teaching derived from the assumption (these are Rancourt’s words) “that our societal structures . . . represent the most formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever to occupy the planet” (Activist Teacher.blogspot.com, April 13, 2007).
Among those structures is the university in which Rancourt works and by which he is paid. But the fact of his position and compensation does not insulate the institution from his strictures and assaults; for, he insists, “schools and universities supply the obedient workers and managers and professionals that adopt and apply [the] system’s doctrine — knowingly or unknowingly.”
It is this belief that higher education as we know it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters that underlies Rancourt’s refusal to grade his students. Grading, he says, “is a tool of coercion in order to make obedient people” (rabble.ca., Jan. 12, 2009).
It turns out that another tool of coercion is the requirement that professors actually teach the course described in the college catalogue, the course students think they are signing up for. Rancourt battles against this form of coercion by employing a strategy he calls “squatting” – “where one openly takes an existing course and does with it something different.” That is, you take a currently unoccupied structure, move in and make it the home for whatever activities you wish to engage in. “Academic squatting is needed,” he says, “because universities are dictatorships . . . run by self-appointed executives who serve capital interests.”
Rancourt first practiced squatting when he decided that he “had to do something more than give a ‘better’ physics course.” Accordingly, he took the Physics and Environment course that had been assigned to him and transformed it into a course on political activism, not a course about political activism, but a course in which political activism is urged — “an activism course about confronting authority and hierarchical structures directly or through defiant or non-subordinate assertion in order to democratize power in the workplace, at school, and in society.”
Clearly squatting itself is just such a “defiant or non-subordinate assertion.” Rancourt does not merely preach his philosophy. He practices it.
This sounds vaguely admirable until you remember what Rancourt is, in effect, saying to those who employ him: I refuse to do what I have contracted to do, but I will do everything in my power to subvert the enterprise you administer. Besides, you’re just dictators, and it is my obligation to undermine you even as I demand that you pay me and confer on me the honorific title of professor. And, by the way, I am entitled to do so by the doctrine of academic freedom, which I define as “the ideal under which professors and students are autonomous and design their own development and interactions.”
Of course, as Rancourt recognizes, if this is how academic freedom is defined, its scope is infinite and one can’t stop with squatting: “The next step is academic hijacking, where students tell a professor that she can stay or leave but that this is what they are going to do and these are the speakers they are going to invite.” O, brave new world!
The record shows exchanges of letters between Rancourt and Dean Andre E. Lalonde and letters from each of them to Marc Jolicoeur, chairman of the Board of Governors. There is something comical about some of these exchanges when the dean asks Rancourt to tell him why he is not guilty of insubordination and Rancourt replies that insubordination is his job, and that, rather than ceasing his insubordinate activities, he plans to expand them. Lalonde complains that Rancourt “does not acknowledge any impropriety regarding his conduct.” Rancourt tells Jolicoeur that “Socrates did not give grades to students,” and boasts that everything he has done was done “with the purpose of making the University of Ottawa a better place,” a place “of greater democracy.” In other words, I am the bearer of a saving message and those who need it most will not hear it and respond by persecuting me. It is the cry of every would-be messiah.
Rancourt’s views are the opposite of those announced by a court in an Arizona case where the issue was also whether a teaching method could be the basis of dismissal. Noting that the university had concluded that the plaintiff’s “methodology was not successful,” the court declared “Academic freedom is not a doctrine to insulate a teacher from evaluation by the institution that employs him” (Carley v. Arizona, 1987).
The Arizona court thinks of academic freedom as a doctrine whose scope is defined by the purposes and protocols of the institution and its limited purposes. Rancourt thinks of academic freedom as a local instance of a global project whose goal is nothing less than the freeing of revolutionary energies, not only in the schools but everywhere.
It is the difference between being concerned with the establishing and implementing of workplace-specific procedures and being concerned with the wholesale transformation of society. It is the difference between wanting to teach a better physics course and wanting to save the world. Given such divergent views, not only is reconciliation between the parties impossible; conversation itself is impossible. The dispute can only be resolved by an essentially political decision, and in this case the narrower concept of academic freedom has won. But only till next time.
copyright: The New York Times
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The ripple effect of cutting water
The ripple effect of cutting water
Clare Davidson, BBC News
Port Sunlight, Merseyside
Less water meant smaller bottles and less packaging
"For far too long, businesses like ours have been effectively shipping water around the globe," says Gavin Neath, a spokesperson for Unilever.
He leans across a table in the firm's London office, as if confiding something secretive.
Like other multinational firms, Unilever is assessing its environmental impact, including how it uses water.
In doing so the firm is reassessing the way it does business, but this also creates a number of benefits.
The firm singles out two detergents - Small and Mighty, and Surf Excel - as examples of this shift. Small and Mighty, for example, requires half as much water per bottle and half as much packaging.
Shift in size
As we arrive at the firm's Port Sunlight factory, near Liverpool, Keith Rutherford - who has been closely involved in developing small & mighty in the UK - has set up a display of detergents to illustrate the change.
Brands sold in different countries over the years are neatly arranged.
What would have been considered the norm now appear absurdly big in scale.
"In the past, especially in the US, big was always best," explains Mr Rutherford.
Old and new versions of detergent
In the past, especially in the US, big was always best
Keith Rutherford, a director of Unilever's laundry R&D
"And the more bubbles and foam the better."
Making goods smaller challenges such assumptions.
As we enter liquid factory number one, we are hit by an intense waft of perfumed detergent.
As a robotic arm lifts bottles into a cardboard box, Mr Rutherford lists the benefits across the supply chain of making the detergent more concentrated.
Smaller bottles mean less packaging, meaning fewer carbon emissions.
"It also means more can be transported on fewer lorries which reduces fuel, which in turn lowers emissions.
"And making a more concentrated liquid means more goes further, so customers don't have to lug as much detergent from the supermarket as often."
'Whole puzzle'
As part of its overall environmental assessment, the firm has also looked at the consumer's role.
This is effectively about looking at water used across the supply chain. While embedded carbon has been much talked about, embedded water, the water that is used in the life cycle of the product, has not. It is also called virtual water.
Water consumption at all stages is calculated; irrigation of the raw materials, the manufacturing process, water per consumer use, waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
"By looking at water we have an opportunity to look at the whole puzzle," says Mr Rutherford, gleefully.
A brief look at the firm's range of goods, from brands such as Knorr stock to Dove soap, underlines how important the end user's role is.
"It might be through boiling a kettle for tea, or making stock cubes or putting on the laundry", he lists.
Even pasta in tomato sauce needs water, albeit indirectly, since pasta needs to be boiled in water.
In fact, Unilever estimates that the water added by end users represents around 45% of the total water used for its products.
For detergent that figure is even greater - around 95% of the water is used by the consumer, mostly for rinsing.
Education
"But you can't just abdicate that aspect, you need to raise awareness," says Mr Neath.
In countries such as India, washing clothes can represent around a quarter of the domestic water used and most water is used in the rinsing phase.
ENVIRONMENTAL SAVINGS SMALL & MIGHTY
Water: 41 million litres
Shelf space: 36 football fields
Carbon dioxide: 1 030 000 kg
Plastic: (equivalent) 272 million bags
Card: (equivalent) 383 million A4 sheets
Surf Excel Quick Wash, used in India, produces less lather, so the clothes need less rinsing, saving around two buckets of water per wash.
Some parts of the world where Unilever operates are water stressed, and many areas have no piped water.
Reducing the amount of water needed not only cuts the water required, it also means less physical work, with women and girls standing to benefit the most since they do most of the water carrying, said Mr Neath.
So reducing the water in goods not only stands to benefit the environment. It also has social implications.
Much has changed since the days of William Hesketh Lever, who co-founded the eponymous soap firm with his brother long before it was incorporated into Unilever.
But he might smile to think that aspects of his mission statement had been carried out.
"To make cleanliness commonplace; to lessen work for women; to foster health and contribute to personal attractiveness."
Clare Davidson, BBC News
Port Sunlight, Merseyside
Less water meant smaller bottles and less packaging
"For far too long, businesses like ours have been effectively shipping water around the globe," says Gavin Neath, a spokesperson for Unilever.
He leans across a table in the firm's London office, as if confiding something secretive.
Like other multinational firms, Unilever is assessing its environmental impact, including how it uses water.
In doing so the firm is reassessing the way it does business, but this also creates a number of benefits.
The firm singles out two detergents - Small and Mighty, and Surf Excel - as examples of this shift. Small and Mighty, for example, requires half as much water per bottle and half as much packaging.
Shift in size
As we arrive at the firm's Port Sunlight factory, near Liverpool, Keith Rutherford - who has been closely involved in developing small & mighty in the UK - has set up a display of detergents to illustrate the change.
Brands sold in different countries over the years are neatly arranged.
What would have been considered the norm now appear absurdly big in scale.
"In the past, especially in the US, big was always best," explains Mr Rutherford.
Old and new versions of detergent
In the past, especially in the US, big was always best
Keith Rutherford, a director of Unilever's laundry R&D
"And the more bubbles and foam the better."
Making goods smaller challenges such assumptions.
As we enter liquid factory number one, we are hit by an intense waft of perfumed detergent.
As a robotic arm lifts bottles into a cardboard box, Mr Rutherford lists the benefits across the supply chain of making the detergent more concentrated.
Smaller bottles mean less packaging, meaning fewer carbon emissions.
"It also means more can be transported on fewer lorries which reduces fuel, which in turn lowers emissions.
"And making a more concentrated liquid means more goes further, so customers don't have to lug as much detergent from the supermarket as often."
'Whole puzzle'
As part of its overall environmental assessment, the firm has also looked at the consumer's role.
This is effectively about looking at water used across the supply chain. While embedded carbon has been much talked about, embedded water, the water that is used in the life cycle of the product, has not. It is also called virtual water.
Water consumption at all stages is calculated; irrigation of the raw materials, the manufacturing process, water per consumer use, waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
"By looking at water we have an opportunity to look at the whole puzzle," says Mr Rutherford, gleefully.
A brief look at the firm's range of goods, from brands such as Knorr stock to Dove soap, underlines how important the end user's role is.
"It might be through boiling a kettle for tea, or making stock cubes or putting on the laundry", he lists.
Even pasta in tomato sauce needs water, albeit indirectly, since pasta needs to be boiled in water.
In fact, Unilever estimates that the water added by end users represents around 45% of the total water used for its products.
For detergent that figure is even greater - around 95% of the water is used by the consumer, mostly for rinsing.
Education
"But you can't just abdicate that aspect, you need to raise awareness," says Mr Neath.
In countries such as India, washing clothes can represent around a quarter of the domestic water used and most water is used in the rinsing phase.
ENVIRONMENTAL SAVINGS SMALL & MIGHTY
Water: 41 million litres
Shelf space: 36 football fields
Carbon dioxide: 1 030 000 kg
Plastic: (equivalent) 272 million bags
Card: (equivalent) 383 million A4 sheets
Surf Excel Quick Wash, used in India, produces less lather, so the clothes need less rinsing, saving around two buckets of water per wash.
Some parts of the world where Unilever operates are water stressed, and many areas have no piped water.
Reducing the amount of water needed not only cuts the water required, it also means less physical work, with women and girls standing to benefit the most since they do most of the water carrying, said Mr Neath.
So reducing the water in goods not only stands to benefit the environment. It also has social implications.
Much has changed since the days of William Hesketh Lever, who co-founded the eponymous soap firm with his brother long before it was incorporated into Unilever.
But he might smile to think that aspects of his mission statement had been carried out.
"To make cleanliness commonplace; to lessen work for women; to foster health and contribute to personal attractiveness."
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
What Obama did on his first day in office (a lesson for India's leadership, and, much more, for its fuddy duddy, recalcitrant, complacent bureaucrats)
Upon taking office, Obama ordered all secret U.S. prisons
closed immediately, and the detention center at Guantanamo
Bay closed within a year; he stopped the torture of
American prisoners; granted access to all U.S. detainees
to the International Red Cross; ended the practice by
which detainees could be sent to countries where they
might be tortured; froze the salaries of all White House
officials making more than $100,000; ordered all
government agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor of
disclosure" regarding Freedom of Information Act requests;
ordered all administration appointees to take an ethics
pledge; ended a government ban on funding for groups that
provide abortion services or counseling abroad; and
revoked Executive Order 13233, which placed limits on
public access to the records of former presidents.
copyright: Harpers Magazine
closed immediately, and the detention center at Guantanamo
Bay closed within a year; he stopped the torture of
American prisoners; granted access to all U.S. detainees
to the International Red Cross; ended the practice by
which detainees could be sent to countries where they
might be tortured; froze the salaries of all White House
officials making more than $100,000; ordered all
government agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor of
disclosure" regarding Freedom of Information Act requests;
ordered all administration appointees to take an ethics
pledge; ended a government ban on funding for groups that
provide abortion services or counseling abroad; and
revoked Executive Order 13233, which placed limits on
public access to the records of former presidents.
copyright: Harpers Magazine
The Greens are going nuclear
Angela Saini
Power struggle
For decades, it was the scourge of the environmental movement. But now, discovers Angela Saini, the greens are going nuclear.
The fight has already been lost. Exactly a year ago, the British government confirmed rumours that a new generation of nuclear power plants would go online by 2020. "They're wrong," insisted Greenpeace. "Nuclear power is not the answer," implored Friends of the Earth. But when their pleas fell on deaf ears, for many environmentalists, it was final, uncomfortable proof that most people simply don't hate nuclear power.
In fact some greens are even switching sides. Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy (EFN), a group that once may have been considered an oxymoron, today boasts more than 9,000 members in 60 countries. At its base in Paris, founder Bruno Comby is building extra space in his new eco-home to store the stacks of membership forms and correspondence he receives. The group has a catalogue of high-profile supporters, including James Lovelock, the so-called "father of environmentalism" and author of The Gaia Theory, and Patrick Moore, a former director of Greenpeace International. In 2008, green activists George Monbiot and Mark Lynas both also admitted that they would be prepared to consider nuclear power, under pressure to find non-carbon solutions to the energy crisis created by climate change.
"In some ways we think religiously about this topic," George Monbiot admitted as I filmed him for a documentary about nuclear power. "People start with a pre-existing position of being anti-nuclear and then go out and find the evidence to justify that position. Faced with this enormous challenge of climate change, we have to throw everything useful at the problem that we can, and it's now beginning to look as if nuclear power might be more useful than we first thought." This may seem a rational enough plea, but it flies in the face of the most entrenched tenet of the green movement: nature is not to be tampered with. Chopping down forests and endangering wildlife are reprehensible, but what could be worse than splitting nature's basic building block, the atom?
When the eponymous logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament turned 50 last year, it was remarkable to see that it had kept the power to evoke the same emotions felt by courageous protestors at Aldermaston decades earlier. And for those green activists belonging to the Aldermaston generation, the nuclear question cuts to the heart of their movement. Many have asked whether it is even ideologically possible to be both green and pro-nuclear, which makes it all the more incredible that a few have swallowed longstanding beliefs and embraced nuclear power.
"We've been opposed to nuclear power since our inception," Nathan Argent, a nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace, told me. "And our objections are made through a pragmatic appraisal of nuclear power. There are more effective and much cheaper ways of dealing with climate change." Even as more environmentalists begin to accept nuclear power, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have doggedly maintained that the solution lies in simultaneously slashing fossil fuel usage while ramping up the proportion of renewables in the energy mix. The trouble with this, in the UK at least, is that wind and solar provide only intermittent power depending on the weather conditions. A major move towards alternative energy would still need a constant, baseload source of power, which so far only fossil fuels or nuclear power can provide.
Scientists and engineers have been left with the mammoth task of convincing the public, many dedicating their lives to improving standards in the nuclear industry. In the effort to lose the chronic image problem it has endured under the dark shadows of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and Three Mile Island in 1979, nuclear power is now the world's most regulated energy source, overseen not only by dedicated national bodies but also the UN's eagle-eyed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Consequently there hasn't been a major nuclear incident since the 1980s. The meltdown at Three Mile Island, which was by any estimate the worst nuclear accident in the West, raised local levels of radiation in the atmosphere to only marginally above everyday background levels. To this day, not a single radiation-related death has been attributed to the accident.
Len Green, an engineer who helped build Sizewell B nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast, explained that modern plants are engineered to meet every possible contingency, including the kind of employee negligence that lead to the explosion at Chernobyl: "The designs have to be thoroughly assessed, then every stage of construction is assessed, and when they're operating, they're assessed." According to Professor Robin Grimes, a materials physicist at Imperial College London and former researcher at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, they're not just safe, they're foolproof: "The new designs of power stations use passive systems, which means that they automatically behave in such a way as to shut the reactor down. The operator doesn't even have to take any action at all."
The oft-repeated green allegation that nuclear is too expensive holds even less water than the claim it is unsafe. Although a new power station demands a hefty capital investment, when costs are averaged over its lifespan, it is cheaper than oil and gas. And when the costs of carbon capture and storage are factored into the price of fossil fuels, nuclear comes out firmly on top. Meanwhile, renewables cannot even hope to compete on price: a 2004 UK Royal Academy of Engineering report found the cost of generating wind power is more than twice that of nuclear. Also, massively increasing the proportion of renewables would introduce the huge expense of extending the national grid to meet solar panels, tidal barrages and wind farms.
Indeed the latest IAEA projections suggest that raw economics are helping to drive a nuclear renaissance. Nuclear power generation is expected to grow between 27 and 50 per cent by 2030, mainly in India and China. Even Lithuania, a small Baltic state still raising its economy out of the ashes of communism, is resolutely pushing for a new nuclear power station to replace its ageing old one near the small town of Ignalina. Offering cheap electricity and the tantalising assurance of energy independence, it makes economic sense, especially since a single reactor could provide Lithuania with all its electricity needs, plus some left over. In this nation, the director of the Lithuanian Energy Institute told me frankly, green groups haven't even attempted to block nuclear power.
"I think a number of other greens are slowly going to make the decision that nuclear power is better than the alternatives," Prof Grimes explained. Even the most common green objection to nuclear power – radioactive waste – is being resolved. Britain doesn't yet have a repository for spent nuclear fuel and continues to temporarily store it on the same sites as its power stations. After the new generation of reactors are switched on, they will eventually produce almost half a million tonnes of waste, some of which will remain dangerous for millennia. Contrary to green folklore, however, this is not an immutable problem. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, along with the country's best geologists and teams of nuclear engineers, has already begun the hunt for a new waste site. Encased in layers of lead, cement and under hundreds of metres of rock, they are entirely confident (as are those engineers constructing similar repositories in the US and Finland) that the waste will be safely contained. In fact their working timescale is a million years, which means that the repository will outlast not only our progeny, but probably also human civilisation.
For scientists like Grimes, the nuclear debate has become a simple matter of education. The green shift in the nuclear direction is, however marginal, a triumph of rationalism over fear. And the shift hasn't been only one-sided. Scientists and activists are used to finding themselves on opposite sides of a divide, violently clashing on topics like medical animal testing and GM crop cultivation. But pick up a copy of any science magazine these days and you are almost as likely to get advice about how to reduce your carbon footprint or recycle effectively as the latest research news. "The green argument challenges you, it makes you think about the way you apply your engineering and science. I welcome the debate," said Grimes. Climate change has united science and environmentalism as never before: where researchers have provided the critical scientific data, greens have supplied the political momentum, and this co-operation in turn has helped achieve the gradual consensus on nuclear power.
But the consensus remains limited. The nuclear debate is still riddled with irrationalism, to the point where pro-nuclear environmentalists are often criticised by more mainstream greens simply for daring to suggest that nuclear power might make ecological sense. Bruno Comby told me that fellow activists would not force him into silence: "We've been attacked with vitriol. But in the end our ideas will succeed simply because we are right on a scientific level, and the truth always comes out in the end," he said.
So how likely is it that the remainder of greens will be persuaded to join their growing list of dissenters and be swayed to the nuclear side? The signs aren't good. Greenpeace's opposition to anything remotely nuclear has gone so far as to slam one of the most exciting scientific endeavours of the century, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) at Cadarache in France. ITER is a multi-billion-Euro project funded by the European Union, Japan, China, India, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the USA. It aims to develop fusion power by binding pairs of atoms together, as opposed to atom-splitting fission that happens in a conventional nuclear reactor.
Fusion is a huge technical challenge, but if it succeeds it promises to bring almost limitless clean energy to future generations. It could be a green miracle, if only more greens would allow themselves to see it.
Published 2009-01-26
Original in English
First published in New Humanist 1/2009
Contributed by New Humanist
© Angela Saini/New Humanist
Power struggle
For decades, it was the scourge of the environmental movement. But now, discovers Angela Saini, the greens are going nuclear.
The fight has already been lost. Exactly a year ago, the British government confirmed rumours that a new generation of nuclear power plants would go online by 2020. "They're wrong," insisted Greenpeace. "Nuclear power is not the answer," implored Friends of the Earth. But when their pleas fell on deaf ears, for many environmentalists, it was final, uncomfortable proof that most people simply don't hate nuclear power.
In fact some greens are even switching sides. Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy (EFN), a group that once may have been considered an oxymoron, today boasts more than 9,000 members in 60 countries. At its base in Paris, founder Bruno Comby is building extra space in his new eco-home to store the stacks of membership forms and correspondence he receives. The group has a catalogue of high-profile supporters, including James Lovelock, the so-called "father of environmentalism" and author of The Gaia Theory, and Patrick Moore, a former director of Greenpeace International. In 2008, green activists George Monbiot and Mark Lynas both also admitted that they would be prepared to consider nuclear power, under pressure to find non-carbon solutions to the energy crisis created by climate change.
"In some ways we think religiously about this topic," George Monbiot admitted as I filmed him for a documentary about nuclear power. "People start with a pre-existing position of being anti-nuclear and then go out and find the evidence to justify that position. Faced with this enormous challenge of climate change, we have to throw everything useful at the problem that we can, and it's now beginning to look as if nuclear power might be more useful than we first thought." This may seem a rational enough plea, but it flies in the face of the most entrenched tenet of the green movement: nature is not to be tampered with. Chopping down forests and endangering wildlife are reprehensible, but what could be worse than splitting nature's basic building block, the atom?
When the eponymous logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament turned 50 last year, it was remarkable to see that it had kept the power to evoke the same emotions felt by courageous protestors at Aldermaston decades earlier. And for those green activists belonging to the Aldermaston generation, the nuclear question cuts to the heart of their movement. Many have asked whether it is even ideologically possible to be both green and pro-nuclear, which makes it all the more incredible that a few have swallowed longstanding beliefs and embraced nuclear power.
"We've been opposed to nuclear power since our inception," Nathan Argent, a nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace, told me. "And our objections are made through a pragmatic appraisal of nuclear power. There are more effective and much cheaper ways of dealing with climate change." Even as more environmentalists begin to accept nuclear power, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have doggedly maintained that the solution lies in simultaneously slashing fossil fuel usage while ramping up the proportion of renewables in the energy mix. The trouble with this, in the UK at least, is that wind and solar provide only intermittent power depending on the weather conditions. A major move towards alternative energy would still need a constant, baseload source of power, which so far only fossil fuels or nuclear power can provide.
Scientists and engineers have been left with the mammoth task of convincing the public, many dedicating their lives to improving standards in the nuclear industry. In the effort to lose the chronic image problem it has endured under the dark shadows of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and Three Mile Island in 1979, nuclear power is now the world's most regulated energy source, overseen not only by dedicated national bodies but also the UN's eagle-eyed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Consequently there hasn't been a major nuclear incident since the 1980s. The meltdown at Three Mile Island, which was by any estimate the worst nuclear accident in the West, raised local levels of radiation in the atmosphere to only marginally above everyday background levels. To this day, not a single radiation-related death has been attributed to the accident.
Len Green, an engineer who helped build Sizewell B nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast, explained that modern plants are engineered to meet every possible contingency, including the kind of employee negligence that lead to the explosion at Chernobyl: "The designs have to be thoroughly assessed, then every stage of construction is assessed, and when they're operating, they're assessed." According to Professor Robin Grimes, a materials physicist at Imperial College London and former researcher at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, they're not just safe, they're foolproof: "The new designs of power stations use passive systems, which means that they automatically behave in such a way as to shut the reactor down. The operator doesn't even have to take any action at all."
The oft-repeated green allegation that nuclear is too expensive holds even less water than the claim it is unsafe. Although a new power station demands a hefty capital investment, when costs are averaged over its lifespan, it is cheaper than oil and gas. And when the costs of carbon capture and storage are factored into the price of fossil fuels, nuclear comes out firmly on top. Meanwhile, renewables cannot even hope to compete on price: a 2004 UK Royal Academy of Engineering report found the cost of generating wind power is more than twice that of nuclear. Also, massively increasing the proportion of renewables would introduce the huge expense of extending the national grid to meet solar panels, tidal barrages and wind farms.
Indeed the latest IAEA projections suggest that raw economics are helping to drive a nuclear renaissance. Nuclear power generation is expected to grow between 27 and 50 per cent by 2030, mainly in India and China. Even Lithuania, a small Baltic state still raising its economy out of the ashes of communism, is resolutely pushing for a new nuclear power station to replace its ageing old one near the small town of Ignalina. Offering cheap electricity and the tantalising assurance of energy independence, it makes economic sense, especially since a single reactor could provide Lithuania with all its electricity needs, plus some left over. In this nation, the director of the Lithuanian Energy Institute told me frankly, green groups haven't even attempted to block nuclear power.
"I think a number of other greens are slowly going to make the decision that nuclear power is better than the alternatives," Prof Grimes explained. Even the most common green objection to nuclear power – radioactive waste – is being resolved. Britain doesn't yet have a repository for spent nuclear fuel and continues to temporarily store it on the same sites as its power stations. After the new generation of reactors are switched on, they will eventually produce almost half a million tonnes of waste, some of which will remain dangerous for millennia. Contrary to green folklore, however, this is not an immutable problem. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, along with the country's best geologists and teams of nuclear engineers, has already begun the hunt for a new waste site. Encased in layers of lead, cement and under hundreds of metres of rock, they are entirely confident (as are those engineers constructing similar repositories in the US and Finland) that the waste will be safely contained. In fact their working timescale is a million years, which means that the repository will outlast not only our progeny, but probably also human civilisation.
For scientists like Grimes, the nuclear debate has become a simple matter of education. The green shift in the nuclear direction is, however marginal, a triumph of rationalism over fear. And the shift hasn't been only one-sided. Scientists and activists are used to finding themselves on opposite sides of a divide, violently clashing on topics like medical animal testing and GM crop cultivation. But pick up a copy of any science magazine these days and you are almost as likely to get advice about how to reduce your carbon footprint or recycle effectively as the latest research news. "The green argument challenges you, it makes you think about the way you apply your engineering and science. I welcome the debate," said Grimes. Climate change has united science and environmentalism as never before: where researchers have provided the critical scientific data, greens have supplied the political momentum, and this co-operation in turn has helped achieve the gradual consensus on nuclear power.
But the consensus remains limited. The nuclear debate is still riddled with irrationalism, to the point where pro-nuclear environmentalists are often criticised by more mainstream greens simply for daring to suggest that nuclear power might make ecological sense. Bruno Comby told me that fellow activists would not force him into silence: "We've been attacked with vitriol. But in the end our ideas will succeed simply because we are right on a scientific level, and the truth always comes out in the end," he said.
So how likely is it that the remainder of greens will be persuaded to join their growing list of dissenters and be swayed to the nuclear side? The signs aren't good. Greenpeace's opposition to anything remotely nuclear has gone so far as to slam one of the most exciting scientific endeavours of the century, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) at Cadarache in France. ITER is a multi-billion-Euro project funded by the European Union, Japan, China, India, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the USA. It aims to develop fusion power by binding pairs of atoms together, as opposed to atom-splitting fission that happens in a conventional nuclear reactor.
Fusion is a huge technical challenge, but if it succeeds it promises to bring almost limitless clean energy to future generations. It could be a green miracle, if only more greens would allow themselves to see it.
Published 2009-01-26
Original in English
First published in New Humanist 1/2009
Contributed by New Humanist
© Angela Saini/New Humanist
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