MoveOn.Org just held a straw poll on climate change, and John Edwards won by a landslide. Over 100,000 voted based on short video responses to questions asked by MoveOn members, and Edwards got 33% – more than the next two candidates (Kucinich and Obama) combined. See the press release here.
None of the candidates are where they should be on this. It’s particularly disheartening that the front-runners, Obama and Clinton, haven’t offered a plan remotely to the scale of the problem.
Dan Carol, a co-founder of the Apollo Alliance, wrote a brilliant open letter in the Huffington Post to Obama urging him to match his bold rhetoric with a bold plan:
My gut is that the answer lies in marrying a call to national service around energy efficiency and independence – getting young and old, union worker and apprentice, city and rural, black and brown and white, retrofitting a new America and busy creating the jobs and industries of tomorrow. This is hardly a new idea, but no one yet owns the idea in this campaign. To own it you need to bet big and go all in, Texas hold-em style.
People want the whole enchilada – new federal R&D and clean energy earmarks in every Congressional district, national service to weatherize the 13 million homes that remain eligible for federal assistance (many in inner cities), and I’ll even bet Americans would reach into their pockets and buy freedom bonds to invest even more if they knew the jobs created would stay at home.
This is an idea whose time has come, but the key is scale. An initiative like this could pay for itself over time with the energy savings it would generate, but it would require an upfront investment of at least $50 billion. That’s a little over 4 months in Iraq and Afganistan, according to recent estimates of the cost of those conflicts.
Any bets on which candidate will get there first? Any ideas on what we can do to help get them there?
I think it will be much easier to move political targets in areas that don’t make lots of money from dirty energy. Obama, bless his heart, comes from a coal state. The majority of Illinois lies above the Illinois Coal Basin. It’s hard to tell how much this would affect him as a national leader.
Some call this a political reality, I call it fascism…Really, I think we both mean the same thing. One of the interesting pieces of this is that energy reserves don’t align cleanly with the existing geography of political power, so there is a lot of opportunity for non-traditional players in this puzzle.