The New New Deal (6 page)

What’s stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. What’s stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics—the ease with which
we’re distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems.

That was the essence of Obama’s case against Hillary Clinton.

And it was wrong.

It turned out that it was possible to make progress on long-term problems even while Washington remained distracted by the petty and the trivial. The proof would be in the Recovery Act. It would produce dramatic change on energy, health care, education, and the squeeze on struggling families—the four pillars of that “new foundation for growth” he would promise in his inaugural address—without any working consensus or any pause in the scoring of cheap political points.

During the campaign, his policy proposals in those areas didn’t attract much attention. But not even he imagined he’d make serious inroads on all four priorities in a single bill during his first month in office. Since he did so much of what he said he’d do, it’s worth recalling exactly what he was campaigning to change.

I
n his first policy speech of the campaign, Obama paid tribute to FDR’s greatest Yes We Can achievement, the transformation of the U.S. economy into a lethal arsenal of democracy after Pearl Harbor.
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When Roosevelt’s brain trust had warned that his goals for retooling civilian factories were impossibly audacious, he had insisted “the production people can do it if they really try.” And they had done it.

At the Detroit Economic Club in May 2007, Obama called for a similar miracle: the transformation of the U.S. energy sector. Once again, he warned, the future of the American experiment—and the planet—was at stake. “The country that faced down the tyranny of fascism and communism is now called to challenge the tyranny of oil,” he said. “The very resource that has fueled our way of life over the last 100 years now threatens to destroy it if our generation does not act now and act boldly.” Those last five words were straight out of FDR’s inaugural.
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Obama used his Detroit speech to call out the Big Three automakers for their overreliance on gas-guzzlers, a bit of speak-truth-to-power political theater that led the news coverage. But his deeper message was that energy was the challenge of his generation, a slow-motion existential
crisis that politicians always talked about but never solved. This was the kind of problem Obama was running to fix: “It will take leadership willing to turn the page on the can’t-do, won’t-do, won’t-even-try politics of the past, leadership willing to face down the doubters and cynics and simply say: ‘We can do it if we really try’.”

E
ver since 1973, when Richard Nixon vowed to end oil imports by the decade’s end, every president had made we-can-do-it promises about energy independence. “I happen to believe that we can do it,” said Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had proclaimed this crusade “the moral equivalent of war.” Even George W. Bush had pledged “to move beyond a petroleum-based economy.”

So far, the doubters and cynics had been right. Oil imports had more than doubled since 1973.
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We were shipping $1 billion overseas every day to buy crude, empowering petro-thugs, exposing our economy to the whims of OPEC and Mother Nature. When oil prices spiked, the pain we felt wasn’t just at the pump; tourism suffered, petroleum products like chemicals and plastics got pricier, and our manufacturers, farmers, airlines, and shippers all faced higher costs. We were a captive superpower. Osama bin Laden recognized this addiction as our Achilles’ heel, urging al Qaeda operatives to “focus your operations on oil.” And we couldn’t drill our way out of this mess; we were sitting on less than 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, devouring 25 percent of the world’s oil.

Meanwhile, a broad scientific consensus had emerged that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were warming the planet, and that the world needed to slash emissions 80 percent by 2050 to avoid science-fiction disaster scenarios. A documentary about Al Gore’s PowerPoint had just won the Academy Award, and Gore was about to win the Nobel Prize. The ten hottest years on record had all occurred in the previous twelve years; glaciers were retreating, droughts intensifying.
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Obviously, we couldn’t drill our way out of that mess, either.

Under Bush and Dick Cheney, a pair of Texas oilmen, White House loyalty to hydrocarbons approached self-parody. Bush renounced his
campaign pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and Cheney presided over a secretive energy task force dominated by Big Oil and other extraction industry interests. A former petroleum lobbyist on Bush’s staff was caught editing climate reports to downplay global warming, while a hard-nosed federal watchdog named Earl Devaney unearthed proof of oil regulators having sex with oil executives, smoking pot with oil executives, and generally doing whatever oil executives asked. Congress approved new loan programs for clean-energy projects and fuel-efficient carmakers, but the administration failed to make a single loan.

So we were still hooked on oil for transportation and coal for electricity. Nearly three decades after Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof—and two decades after Reagan tore them down—solar energy produced just 0.1 percent of our power. Wind, our fastest-growing source of renewable electricity, also generated less than 1 percent of our juice. We were the world’s worst energy hogs by far; the average U.S. home had over two dozen plug-in devices slurping electricity, while the average U.S. commuter spent nearly an hour a day behind the wheel burning gas. And the energy forecasts all predicted more demand, more carbon-spewing coal plants, and more oil imports from countries that hated us.

In an October speech in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Obama unveiled his plan for a real clean-energy push.
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Like all his Democratic rivals, Obama proposed to cap carbon emissions and set up a market-based trading system that would reduce emissions by the necessary 80 percent by 2050. (Republican John McCain had a cap-and-trade plan, too, with a 60 percent emissions reduction.) Obama also vowed to invest $150 billion in clean energy over a decade, about five times the Bush status quo. Establishment pundits dismissed this as a brazen overpromise, “standard goody-bag politics.”
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But the Recovery Act would get three fifths of the way there in Obama’s first month.

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n the trail, Obama often touted a renewable energy resource that’s perfectly clean, instantly available, and almost infinitely abundant.
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It doesn’t depend on future technological breakthroughs, and we don’t
need to import it. Unlike coal or petroleum, it’s zero-emissions. Unlike solar or wind, it works in any weather. Unlike nuclear, it doesn’t produce radioactive waste, risk a calamitous meltdown, or take a decade to build. And it’s the cheapest energy resource we’ve got.

This magic potion is called energy efficiency. It’s a boring name for a boring concept: wasting less energy—more precisely, using less energy to get our showers just as hot and our drinks just as cold. It’s mostly generated by boring products like energy-saving boilers, refrigerators, air conditioners, and light bulbs. But energy wonks love it, because subtracting demand through efficiency is much less expensive, eco-destructive, and time-intensive than adding new supply through drilling or power plants. It doesn’t even require us to unplug our electronic picture frames or power down our PlayStations; that’s conservation, doing less with less energy. Efficiency is doing the same or more with less energy. It doesn’t require behavioral change. And efficiency upgrades usually pay for themselves within a few years through lower energy costs, which is why experts always call them “low-hanging fruit.” A McKinsey & Co. study found that efficiency could cut our energy demand 20 percent by 2020, which could cut our coal use in half.
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To Obama, efficiency wasn’t boring at all. It was “by far the cheapest, cleanest, fastest energy source.” In Detroit, he proposed major increases in fuel efficiency standards, which hadn’t budged since the Reagan era. (U.S. automakers had always argued that tougher rules would ruin their businesses, which they apparently preferred to do themselves.) In Portsmouth, he extended the push beyond vehicles, calling for stricter green building codes and appliance efficiency standards, pledging to phase out incandescent light bulbs. He also vowed that his administration would “weatherize” one million low-income homes per year—by upgrading furnaces, caulking windows, and adding insulation—which could save families money on their bills while reducing energy demand.

Efficiency wasn’t as emotionally satisfying as “drill-baby-drill,” but it appealed to Obama’s Vulcan sense of logic; the cheapest fuel is the fuel we don’t need to buy, and the cheapest power plant is the plant we don’t need to build. Obama even called on states to revamp regulations
that rewarded utilities for selling as much power and building as many plants as possible, a holy grail for hard-core efficiency geeks. In California and other states that encouraged utilities to promote efficiency instead, per-capita electricity use had been flat for three decades; in the rest of the country, it had climbed 50 percent.

Obama wanted to clean up our supply as well as reduce our demand, so he also promised to double renewable electricity during his first term. The green revolution was finally underway in Germany, Spain, and even California, which was on track to generate one third of its power from renewables by 2020. Obama thought the rest of the United States just needed a stronger push. Wind power was racing down the cost curve associated with emerging technologies, and solar, while still expensive, had similar potential to shed costs as it added scale. Obama also promised to double U.S. manufacturing of wind turbines, solar panels, and other green components during his first term, which would help create a domestic supply chain and further drive down the cost of clean power. By imposing a price on carbon pollution, cap-and-trade would help level the playing field as well.

Since our windiest plains and sunniest deserts lacked transmission lines to carry power to cities—and our antiquated electrical networks couldn’t handle too much intermittent power that vanished whenever the wind died down or clouds blocked the sun—Obama also talked about modernizing the grid. It was analog in a digital world, relying on switches that still had to be switched by hand and transformers that hadn’t been transformed in a century; Alexander Graham Bell would have been flabbergasted by modern telecommunications, but Thomas Edison would have recognized most of the gizmos in a modern substation.
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Obama wanted to build a smart grid that would self-monitor and self-heal, integrate renewables while keeping the lights on, and enable homeowners with solar roofs and even electric cars to sell power back to their utilities. He touted digital smart meters that could give us real-time feedback and control over our electricity, so we could monitor how much our individual appliances use and cost, manage them from our iPhones—no more wondering if we left the oven on—and even program
them to communicate with the grid to save us energy and money automatically.

“It’s safe to say this is the most a presidential candidate has ever talked about the grid,” the environmental writer David Roberts gushed after one Obama riff.
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“Sigh. He talks so purty.”

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bama’s rhetoric often made enviros swoon. He pledged that all new federal buildings would be carbon-neutral by 2025, and that the United States would have one million plug-in electric vehicles by 2015. At the time, no federal buildings were carbon-neutral, and Tesla Motors hadn’t delivered its first Roadster. He also bashed Bush over climate change, noting in Portsmouth that wildfires were already getting worse, polar ice caps were melting, and New Hampshire’s ski industry faced shorter seasons. “Global warming is not a someday problem,” he said. “It is now.”

But Obama was no tree hugger. Nature wasn’t something he felt in his gut, and while he rejected the GOP’s drill-baby-drill mantra, he echoed its “all-of-the-above” rhetoric. He supported emissions-free nuclear power, even though it was anathema to most of the Birkenstocks-and-granola crowd; his top corporate contributor in Illinois was a nuclear utility. Representing a state that produced coal and corn, he had stumbled into alternative energy through his advocacy of “clean coal,” which most environmentalists consider an oxymoron, and corn ethanol, which many scientists believe is even dirtier than gasoline. The ethanol boom has actually accelerated climate change, because rain forests and wetlands that store vast amounts of carbon have been bulldozed into agricultural land to replace the food production lost when we pump corn into our SUVs.
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As a presidential candidate, Obama pledged to build five commercial-scale clean-coal facilities that would capture and store carbon—five more than America had built to date. And he continued to flack for the ethanol industry, which was displacing just 3 percent of our gasoline, while diverting nearly one fourth of our grain crops into fuel tanks, jacking up global food prices and fueling bread riots in countries
like Yemen and Pakistan that really didn’t need the extra instability. But he did start to talk about shutting down dirty coal plants, and he did promise to nurture the next generation of eco-friendlier “advanced biofuels” brewed from switchgrass, wood chips, and algae.

“The struggling paper mills in New Hampshire would be back in business if they could use wood to produce biofuels,” he said in Portsmouth.

This was Obama’s favorite argument for alternative energy investments: They would spur economic activity, not just at New Hampshire ski resorts and paper mills, but in new domestic industries on the leading edge of innovation. They were long-term investments in U.S. competitiveness, and they would repatriate cash we were sending the Chávezes of the world. Obama envisioned a future with five million “green jobs,” for caulkers and electricians weatherizing homes; factory workers making energy-efficient windows and electric vehicles; scientists and engineers experimenting with better biofuels and batteries.