OBAMA ON FOOD POLICY.

In an interview with the Other Klein, Barack Obama brings up Michael Pollan's food policy article unbidden and begins sounding a lot like, well, an Ezra Klein blog post:

From a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that's going to be my number one priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to just stabilize the immediate economic situation.

There's no doubt that macro policies like carbon pricing are huge here, but it's really good to hear Obama telegraph an understanding of the role systems play: The food production system, the transportation system, the construction industry. All these sectors operate under heavy, and frequently ad hoc, government regulations and mandates. And so we do have a food policy, and we do have a buildings policy, and we do have a transportation policy. It's just that the collection of laws and subsidies and regulations that make up those policies weren't built in any particularly coherent way, and certainly aren't fit for an age when there's a pressing national interest in reducing carbon consumption and childhood obesity. It's important that the president realizes both that the government already exists in those sectors and that its efforts need to be reformed, redirected, and rendered coherent.Anyway, Joe Klein has his full interview with obama over at the Swampland blog. People should give it a read.