David Roberts and Brian Beutler have much more on the energy plan Obama released yesterday, but here are the basics:
- He supports a cap-and-trade system that would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 80 percent by 2050, and he wants 100 percent of those carbon credits to be auctioned off.
- He wants the up to $50 billion-a-year generated by auctioning those credits over the next 10 years to be used for research, development, and deployment of clean energy technology, as well helping low-income workers both transition to a new energy economy and afford higher energy bills. That's $150 billion for clean energy over the next 10 years, which makes his plan the most ambitious we've seen so far.
- He wants to create a Clean Technologies Capital Venture Fund to help get green tech on the market, and he wants to commit to drawing a full quarter of our electricity from solar, wind, geothermal or other renewable sources by 2025. He also hypes energy efficiency, which not nearly enough politicians talk about, and wants all new buildings to be carbon neutral by 2030. As for transportation, he promised to raise CAFE standards and even mentioned policies to reduce our reliance on personal automobiles for transportation.
- He calls for the a ban on "new traditional coal facilities," which means he would require that all new facilities be Integrated Gasification Combined Cycles plants, but he doesn't go so far as to call for a ban on all new plants unless they are equipped to capture and sequester their carbon emissions. While IGCC plants are a slight improvement over traditional plants (about 10-20 percent less carbon emissions), unless the new plants have CCS, they're not going to do much to stop global warming.
Read the full plan here, and full speech here.
In some areas, it overlaps with the policy coming from both Edwards and Clinton, but in many ways, this goes a lot further than they have. Calling for 100 percent auction on carbon credits is big, and his push for investment in research, development, and deployment is equally impressive. It would be nice if he called for an all-out ban on new coal-fired plants until CCS is in place, as Dodd has, and it could use a more solid plan for fuel efficiency increases, but it definitely raises the bar for Edwards and Clinton on the climate and energy front.
--Kate Sheppard
