Al Gore delivered a major
speech on Climate Change today in Washington, DC detailing his challenge for America to generate “100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.” Said Gore:
We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.
As Al Gore issues this extremely aggressive challenge that states compellingly the reasons to combat climate change, he prioritizes American leadership on climate and energy. This strategy contrasts strongly with the one discussed by Sen. Richard Lugar and Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson in an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.
As our vigorous domestic debate shows, there is disagreement within America about whether we should take strong steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions if fast-growing emitters in the developing world do not make similar commitments. Yet nations such as China and India say that fossil fuels are essential to power their economies, raise living standards and pull millions of their people out of poverty. Expanding the use of clean technologies is one way to address the common challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while transcending the differences here at home and between developed and developing countries.
That is why we support a new multilateral initiative to help finance the deployment of commercially available clean technology to the developing world. This Clean Technology Fund, proposed by President Bush last September, is an important opportunity for which American leadership is vital.
This bridge, of promoting voluntary action on climate change, has already been crossed, and this Clean Technology Fund, contrary to what Lugar and Paulson argue, runs away from actual leadership on this issue. Instead of leading a clean technology revolution, they recommend deploying existing technologies to the developing world and unfairly placing the onus on economies that are attempting to lift millions out of poverty every year.
Instead, as Gore argues, putting a price on carbon (domestically and internationally) is crucial to combating climate change:
Of course, we could and should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.
NDN Globalization Initiative Chair Dr. Robert J. Shapiro’s proposal, which he discussed yesterday at NDN, is in line with Gore’s, and, earlier this month, we heard from Sen. Bingaman on his ten principles for cap and trade legislation.
Moving forward, NDN’s Green Project hopes to hear more about meaningful solutions to climate change. For more on the Green Project’s work on energy and climate, check out our blog.
Over the next four years, we are going to face many difficult challenges -- including bringing our troops home from Iraq, fixing our economy, and solving the climate crisis. Barack Obama is clearly the candidate best able to solve these problems and bring change to America.
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