Energy and Climate Change: C+

Daphne Wysham, Fellow and Board member at the Institute for Policy Studies, and contributor to Mandate for Change, discusses Obama’s energy and climate change policy choices in IPS’s report Barely Making the Grade: Obama’s First Year.

When Barack Obama was elected president, many climate activists were thrilled. With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reaching dangerous levels, and Democrats controlling the House and Senate, hopes couldn’t have been higher among climate campaigners that Obama would act swiftly to make energy and climate change one of his top priorities.

Click here to read the full report.

Cap And Trade Should Go The Way Of The DoDo Before We Do

Daphne Wysham, Fellow and Board Member at the Institute for Policy Studies, and contributor to Mandate for Change, discusses Cap and Trade with The Huffington Post.

President Barack Obama’s announcement that the U.S. will offer an unprecedented pledge to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 at the Copenhagen climate talks in December may seem impressive at first blush. But look closely, and you’ll see the “cuts” he has offered are, at least in the short-term, essentially meaningless.

Click here to read the article.

Obama veers from Bush’s environmental course

Robert Alvarez, contributing author to Mandate for Change, was quoted by USA Today discussing possible developments in the Obama administration’s nuclear waste policy.

Some experts, such as Robert Alvarez, a top Energy Department official during the Clinton administration, want the government to pick a new site for storing the waste. Alvarez recognizes the political difficulties ahead. “Everybody will just get angry if they learn their backyard might be a candidate site,” he says.

Read the entire article here.

Does Stimulus Package Keep Green Goals In Sight?

Mandate author, Michael Replogle discusses the environmental short-comings of the stimulus package in an interview with NPR.

Replogle says spending stimulus money to widen I-95 and on other new highways around the country will mean more cars, more development and more greenhouse gas pollution.

“It’s not the kind of investment we need to be making in the 21st century, particularly when we have good leadership in the state and federal level that is calling on us to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to get serious about the severe climate change challenge that is ahead of us,” Replogle says.

Read the full interview here.

Green Jobs for a Sustainable Economy

One of the major roadblocks that is currently preventing our country from developing a green economy is that, as of yet, there is no central body that is specifically responsible for funding environmentally-friendly infrastructure projects and green jobs. The next administration should establish an Infrastructure Capital Development Bank to provide long-term funding, worker training, and business services for sustainable-economy projects. This bank would promote the manufacturing of equipment and materials needed for a green economy, thus creating more blue-collar jobs.

Author: Jon Rynn, Grist Magazine