Climate 411

In a video message delivered this week to a bipartisan group of governors at a global warming summit in California, President-Elect Obama made it clear that his climate change priorities start with a cap and trade system to reduce America’s global warming pollution and unleash a clean energy revolution.

My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process. That will start with a federal cap-and-trade system. We’ll establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050. Further, we’ll invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private-sector efforts to build a clean-energy future.

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It’s a momentous statement that lights the fuse for climate change legislation in 2009. This is exactly what America and the world needs now – a strong cap-and-trade bill will jump-start job creation in new energy industries, and take a huge step toward solving climate change.

This post is by Tony Kreindler, media director for the National Climate Campaign at Environmental Defense Fund.

There’s a lot of buzz right now about the potential for "green" economic stimulus – policies and investments that grow the economy, create jobs, and protect the planet at the same time.

• Treehugger reports that energy efficiency investment in California has led to 1.5 million new jobs and $56 billion in savings between 1972 and 2006.
• An editorial in the Seattle Times explains how heavy investment in green infrastructure can put people back to work as well as solve the climate crisis.
• A post on Gristmill cites Paul Krugman’s argument that federal spending is the only way out of our economic woes, and suggests that this spending should include a Green Jobs program.

Investing in projects to repair and update our aging infrastructure would pay off in new jobs and a more efficient America. But where will the money come from? Stuck between pay-as-you-go rules and no new middle-class taxes, Congress doesn’t have a lot of options. One could be the auction of pollution allowances under a national greenhouse gas emissions cap. Estimates are that an auction could generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion per year.

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