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December 21, 2008
The US is in a period of transition between Presidents. Though the future will be no more climate change denial or downplaying from the White House, the cap-and-trade model of climate legislation, which many in Washington believed had achieved bipartisan consensus, remains out of reach.
Nor is likely to change quickly, since Obama faces the deepest recession the United States has seen in decades, a failing health system, and a crumbling infrastructure. So his top priority will be to get the U.S. economy back on its feet not addressing climate change.
Peter Brookes
If carbon pricing and pollution trading are politically dead, what is possible is major federal investment la to radically drive down the costs of clean-energy technologies---including carbon capture and storage, and solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and tidal energy---in a competitive environment along with investing in the enabling technologies necessary to broadly deploy them. This pathway is what the Australian Government has avoided as it primarily concerned with carbon capture and storage to save the coal industry.
Obama still support for a cap-and-trade system, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, giving the private sector $15 billion each year to support their investments efforts in clean energy and creating green jobs. The strategy looks good. The US's aging infrastructure is in need of repair and modernization, the massive job-creation needed to fix that is a strong antidote to rising unemployment levels, whilst ramping up renewable energy use is essential for moving to a more sustainable economy and for mitigating climate change.
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Given the huge percentage of GDP the US spends on health, without getting better outcomes than we do, if they picked up the health model of the more efficient countries (oz,nz,canada,west europeans, etc) they'd have ooodles of cash available, so the "the economy is too bad so we can't save it from climate change" argument should go away.