The Necessary and the Insufficient

This month, I'm been invited to be the guest blogger at www.onthecommons.org. So I'll be double-posting in the hopes that many of you will take a look at this project of the Tomales Bay Institute, which describes itself as "a group of outside-the-box thinkers seeking to expand the scope of the possible in American politics and policy." I like the sound of that and I hope you do, too. For now, here's my first post. Future posts will start here with links to the www.onthecommons.org website. Have a peak and enjoy!

It’s going to take a lot more than pouring money into research to protect public goods like the global environment. Once President Bush turned to domestic issues in last night’s State of the Union address (most of the talk was devoted to justifying the ongoing deceit and demagoguery that has marked his administration’s incompetent response to global terrorism), he sounded downright Clintonesque. The cornerstone of his new proposals was a major “American Competitiveness Initiative,” which would double research funding for physical sciences over the next ten years (remember how Clinton doubled the National Institutes of Health’s budget over five years?). Our oil-man-in-chief promised major investments in clean coal, nuclear energy and ethanol. Did I actually hear the president say “switch grass” last night?

But as the New York Times pointed out in a hard hitting editorial this morning, we’re way beyond the research phase when it comes to weaning this country from reliance on foreign oil (which requires weaning ourselves from reliance on oil, period). Ice caps are melting, islands are sinking below the waves, unprecedented droughts are ravaging parts of Africa and the Amazon, and New Orleans is gone. And the President? His eyes are firmly fixed on 2025. Where was the call for raising the fleet fuel efficiency standard to, say, 40 miles per gallon in 2009 (having reported on the Midwestern auto industry for many years, I recognize that a three-year breathing space for retooling is necessary), 50 mpg in 2011 and 70 mpg and 2013?

Research clean coal? This administration has done everything in its power to avoid forcing electric power plants to curb their emissions by installing technologies that already exist. Career enforcement officials like Eric Schaeffer, now at the Center on Environmental Integrity, fled the government because they couldn’t do their jobs.

And how about renewable energy and fuels? This country spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 billion to subsidize farmers to grow sugar for soda pop, corn for animal feed and other commodities. Pay farmers to grow switch grass for ethanol and they will come. This isn’t a research question, it’s a priorities question.

The national government has always played a key role in creating the public goods that set the stage for the next phase of the U.S. economy. It sometimes comes in the form of big infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Interstate Highway System. It sometimes comes in the form of prudent regulation. We have transparent financial markets because of the Securities and Exchange Commission. We have a housing market because of the post-World War II FHA loan program. We have a cleaner and safer environment today because of the 1970s era Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

There is no greater challenge facing America today than becoming a responsible member of planet earth. That means deploying the vast public resources of our government to the task of creating the next generation public good – an energy and transportation system compatible with substantially lower carbon emissions. This research President found time to issue a call for banning embryonic cloning (a direct slap in the face to the stem cell research community), but never once mentioned global warming. That’s all historians will need to know about the content of the 2006 State of the Union address.