Obama's Climate Plans Face Long Fight

An anonymous reader writes "He hasn't even given his Tuesday speech yet but Obama's plans to tackle climate change are already raising objections in Washington. From the article: 'When President Barack Obama lays out plans to tackle climate change in a speech Tuesday, including the first effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, he will unleash a years-long battle that has little assurance of being resolved during his time in office. The president has called climate change a "legacy issue," and his speech may head off a backlash from environmentalists should his administration approve the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada. But the address is unlikely to blunt criticism of Mr. Obama's approach from the left or the right.'"

Comments

Dearest Public

[argStyopa]

Since everything else seems to have gone in the shitter, I come back to you with a message that seemed to sell well in both campaigns: the environment.

I look forward to again gaining your broad support with a campaign of platitudes, anthemic one-word slogans, and statements that make me appear sympathetic to your issues, while actually resulting in policies that either ossify the current corporation-based lobbyist-driven structure, or expand the pervasive control of the Federal government ostensibly for good reasons but which will in fact be used to incrementally decrease your rights vis a vis that "Constitution" thingy, which I will continue to re-interpret as really not relevant to today's realities anyway.

Signed,
Your President.

Re:Dogs and Ponies, Center Stage

[taiwanjohn]

Not just futile, most "useful" measures would require legislative action, which is practically impossible these days.

That said, if I could choose one single bill to have signed into law, it would be the "Open Fuel Standards Act" which was brought up a few years ago, but didn't get a vote. This would require all new cars sold in the USA to be fully flex-fuel capable. (There are already a lot of "flex-fuel" cars on the market, but many are only able to use ethanol. The OFSA would mandate compatibility with methanol and butanol as well.) This would add about $100 to the price of each car, which is much less than an after-market retrofit would cost.

The point of all this is to break the effective monopoly on transportation fuel held by petroleum and bring true competition to the market. Methanol may be only 80% as energy dense as gasoline, but last I checked it was only about $1.50/gal. And unlike ethanol, methanol can easily be made from any kind of biomass, so this would also decouple the alternative fuel supply from food crops like corn. Best of all, it would stem the tide of cash that currently flows out from the USA's collective pocket, which is around $400 billion annually. That kind of economic "stimulus" would be a nice bonus too.