President Obama Edges Toward Straight Talk on Climate & Energy

MailaK said:

All right, this seems to be a nice speech but the people wants to see improvement and not talks. He wants $600 million to hopefully get the border security issues under control. I am glad the president is doing something, but I am willing to take out a personal unsecured loan to bet that America will support his decision a lot more than Arizona's.

Geoffrey Styles said:

Osha,

If this were simply a matter of will, it would have been done a long time ago.  We may be highly motivated today, but motivation organization simply aren't enough when energy solutions must combat not only political barriers but also intrinsic factors of energy density, energy return on energy invested, the turnover of staggeringly large fleets of vehicles and capital equipment, and in some cases the laws of Thermodynamics.  Moreover, as attention-grabbing as the "addicted to oil" comment was back in 2006, it has severe limits as a metaphor.  There's no cold turkey or 12-step program that is going to break our oil addiction.

I agree with the President that we need to start working on our clean energy future, and I'd argue that the transition is already in the works, evidenced by growth rates of renewables and global investment in cleantech that apparently hit $160 B last year.  At the same time, "straight talk" requires telling us that this can't be done overnight, it's not a free lunch in the form of the cost-free creation of millions of green jobs, and that we are going to burn many billions of barrels of oil on our way to that clean, green future.