New America on Energy and the Environment

Two years ago, the New York Times reported that China was "choking on growth," with rapid economic development ravaging its environment. But in a recent column, the Times' Tom Friedman declared that "Red China [has] decided to become Green China," writing that the developing country now outpaces the United States in its pursuit of alternative energy.

China awoke to climate change with a storm. It was late January 2008, a time when people across the country were busily gathering recipes, stocking fireworks, and preparing to welcome relatives to celebrate the Lunar New Year. But suddenly, severe ice storms brought much of the nation to a standstill. For two weeks, fierce winds, sleet, and snow downed power lines, shuttered businesses, and razed more than 200,000 homes across southern and central China.

The lessons of geography appear to be ignored by policymakers in Washington D.C. these days. The Obama administration is pursuing tenuous negotiations with Iran regarding its supply of low-enriched uranium, in the hopes of taking the first step to erase the longstanding animosity between the two countries. It is also rethinking its Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to emphasize reconstruction and economic development. These two strategies are unfortunately disconnected -- despite the fact that Afghanistan shares a 600-mile-long strategic border with Iran.

While environmentalists are keen to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions, rank-and-file voters seem more taken by the promise of energy independence. Last year, Republicans energized the conservative base by promising to "drill here, drill now," a rallying cry that promised to exploit domestic energy reserves to reduce America's reliance on foreign oil. Energy experts insisted, however, that because oil is a global commodity, exploiting offshore oil would have a trivial impact on our exposure to geopolitical instability in

Even as China overtakes the U.S. in the dubious category of "world's leading greenhouse gas producer," it is also well ahead of the U.S. in developing the technologies and policies to solve the problem--and selling those solutions to us at massive profits which could have been ours.

Right now is a great time to be an environmentalist in China--especially if you're a foreigner. The politicians here care, at last, about your issues.

After the release of a miserable June jobs report, President Obama stood with a group of green company CEOs and told reporters that "men and women like these will help lead us out of this recession and into a better future."

But if the White House puts too many eggs in the green recovery basket, we may all be disappointed. The green sector is simply not large enough or competitive enough to be a major engine of job creation.

Picture, if you will, an America apparently like our own. A country like ours bogged down in war on two fronts and suffering from the greatest economic slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s. An America indistinguishable from ours in every respect except that when you turn on the nightly news you see the face of President John Sidney McCain ...

As someone who drove a clattering old pickup in the slow lane for nine years, I watched with interest earlier this month as House Democrats reached a compromise on “cash for clunkers” legislation that would give people vouchers worth as much as $4,500 to replace their older cars with new ones. But the plan, which would cost $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion, is a huge disappointment; any program that expensive should deliver much better mileage.

The unincorporated community of Mountain Pass, California, has little to recommend it to tourists. A scraggly outcrop of rocks and Joshua trees alongside Route 15, it has no kitschy landmarks like the 134-foot-tall thermometer that nearby Baker, California, installed in the Mojave Desert, and no casinos like Las Vegas has an hour up the road. But behind a Band-Aid-colored industrial gate lies an attraction of sorts: a 55-acre open-pit mine created by a 21st-century gold rush, one result of the… more

As Earth Day approaches, environmentalists are bemoaning the impending death of cap-and-trade. The Obama White House offered ambitious revenue estimates for a cap-and-trade program in its proposed budget, but Congressional Democrats have made it fairly clear that they won’t risk following through, at least not this year. Whereas health care legislation has a chance of getting through Congress, any successful cap-and-trade legislation would have to secure at least sixty votes in the Senate--and that, simply put, is unimaginable.

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital,

In 1979 Gus Speth, a Yale-trained lawyer and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), became chair of President Carter's Council on Environmental Quality. He was 37. Approached by two scientists concerned about the rise in the earth's temperatures as a result of increased carbon emissions, Speth commissioned a study. "It created quite a stir," he says. "It got a lot of media attention.... In 1981 we knew enough that I'm quoted in the New York Times saying we ought to cap greenhouse [gases]

Even as my plane was landing in Jinan, the capital of China's heavily industrialized Shandong province, I could see cranes. By the time I got to the city center I'd counted 76 more construction cranes along the way. There were probably more, but in the city proper the smog was so thick I couldn't see any farther than the sidewalk. When I visited, just a few weeks before last summer's Olympic extravaganza kicked off, Shandong had just been named to the Chinese EPA's "green blacklist" for its

Throughout the campaign that culminated in his inauguration yesterday, President Barack Obama called America’s dependence on oil its greatest threat and outlined ambitious plans for energy independence – the American politician’s favorite buzzwords. His energy plan has called for oil savings equivalent to the amount that the United States imports from the Middle East and Venezuela, and he expects these savings to eliminate entirely imports from the Middle East.

The inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, along with the deepening of the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, marks more than a shift in the pendulum swings of partisan politics. In these pages I have suggested that it marks the dawn of a Fourth American Republic, in the way that the New Deal marked the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's Third Republic of the United States and the Civil War and Reconstruction began Lincoln's Second… more

The inauguration of the 44th president of the United States looks like the most dramatic debut since the Beatles arrived in New York. But now that the buildup and the hype are over and it's time for Team Obama to produce, President Obama would do well to look to Europe for guidance, particularly when it comes to three of the president-elect's top priorities: energy and climate change, health care and jump-starting the economy.