RFK Jr on Obama’s energy plan

This is a post about policy; it’s dense reading, so stick with me because it’s important. Why is energy policy important to people with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity? Because we need fresh, clean air to live healthy and productive lives. In fact, clean air is everybody’s business, so listen up!

Chelsea Green blogs today about Robert F. Kennedy’s take on Barack Obama’s energy plan. Take note about the focus on truly clean and green energy: solar, wind and geothermal. Imagine a world where each home and business, from America to Africa, is its own power plant, self sufficient with solar panels or a wind mill. I’m not a big proponent of biomass energy, it’s still a dirty smokestack industry and questionable on the sustainability issue, but I fully support solar, wind and geothermal.

Give this a read and see what you think about Obama’s plan. Kennedy should know, he’s senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the country’s leading authorities on protecting the environment.

In this article from CNN.com, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hails Sen. Barack Obama’s energy plan as “sophisticated and well-crafted.”

Like many of us, he believes Obama could be a truly transformative leader, a president who would overhaul our energy policy by encouraging the U.S. to tap our abundant natural resources—solar, wind, and geothermal—and guide us into a new era of energy independence, while at the same time cutting carbon emissions and stimulating the economy.

From the article:

Barack Obama is a transformational figure in American history who’s been able to excite the same intensity of feeling among Americans as I saw during my father’s 1968 campaign and my uncle John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign.

[…]

Obama’s policy, which anticipates eliminating imports by 2012 or earlier, is feasible and desirable. Respected economists and energy industry entrepreneurs, high-level business representatives from Fortune 500 companies and large investors are already enlisting to invest in the infrastructure to facilitate the transition.

Every nation that has taken serious steps to de-carbonize its energy portfolio has reaped immediate economic growth. Sweden announced in 2006 the phase-out of all fossil fuels (and nuclear energy) by 2020. In 1991, the Swedes enacted a carbon tax — now up to $150 a ton — closed two nuclear reactors, and still dropped greenhouse emissions to 5 tons per person, compared with the U.S. per-capita rate of 20 tons.

Thousands of entrepreneurs rushed to develop new ways of generating energy from wind, the sun and the tides, and from wood chips, agricultural waste and garbage. Growth rates climbed and the heavily taxed Swedish economy is now the world’s eighth richest by gross domestic product.

Iceland was 80 percent dependent on imported coal and oil in the 1970s and was among the poorest economies in Europe. Today, Iceland is 100 percent energy independent, and according to the International Monetary Fund is now the fourth most affluent nation on Earth.

There are many other examples: Brazil’s efforts to de-carbonize its transportation system has resulted in the largest and most robust economic expansion in its history.

The United States has far greater domestic energy resources than Iceland or Sweden. We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind. Solar installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation’s electricity needs even if every American owned an electric car.

Obama’s vision of de-carbonizing our economy begins with a market-based carbon cap-and-trade system designed to put downward pressure on carbon emissions. He will invest billions to revamp the nation’s antiquated high-voltage power transmission system and press for cost-saving building and appliance standards that would cut our energy demand by half.

For a tiny fraction of the projected cost of the Iraq war, we could completely wean the country from carbon. Homes and businesses will become power plants as people cash in by installing solar panels and wind turbines on their buildings, and selling the stored energy in their plug-in hybrids back to the grid at peak hours. By kicking its carbon addiction, America will increase its national wealth. Everyone will profit from the green gold rush.

Link

Link to CNN story.