Will Obama's Revolution Deliver Energy Independence? (Wa Po)

[jpak]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/03/AR2009040302794.html

Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is President Obama's energy secretary, recently gave a speech in which two key words never passed his lips. He talked about energy efficiency, electricity transmission lines and renewable energy sources. He waxed eloquent about technology and the need to fund energy research. But afterward, Chevron vice chairman Peter Robertson noted disconsolately that "it would be nice to hear a bit about oil and gas."

Oil and natural gas, however, are not what's lighting up the Obama energy agenda. The new president is setting out to change the very nature of American energy, from the way we use it to the way we generate it. It's a goal that drives his policy on automakers, whom he wants to push to manufacture more fuel-efficient cars. And it's why he inserted a "down payment" of mammoth proportions into the stimulus bill, roughly $70 billion or more in grants, loans and loan guarantees for Chu to hand out for high-tech research and commercial projects for renewable energy such as biofuels and wind, solar and geothermal power. That's nearly three times as much as the baseline Energy Department budget and more than the annual budgets of the Labor and Interior departments combined.

Obama has decided to do it all. Need help weatherizing your home? He'll pay for that. Smart meters? He'll help pay for them, too. Industry wants to determine whether you can economically capture and store carbon emissions at coal plants? Obama has set aside a few billion federal dollars for that as well.

This isn't the first time a president has set an ambitious energy policy agenda. Almost every chief executive since Nixon has vowed to promote oil independence. Jimmy Carter went farthest in the late 1970s, declaring the "moral equivalent of war" on energy use. Then Ronald Reagan became president, eliminated tax breaks for solar power and removed the solar panels Carter had installed on the White House roof. The war was declared over before it had really begun.

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[msongs]

1. time to kill internal combustion engines - 1800's technology strangling society nt