On the eve of a new year and a new presidential administration, I asked, “Can we be saved by the green team?”. At the time, there was a lot of buzz about President Obama’s commitment to a new national energy policy that would include clean energy technology, a smart grid, a reduction of dependence on fossil fuels, a reduction of GHG emissions, and—of course—plenty of new jobs to jumpstart the economy. That’s quite a laundry list of promises, and it’s fair to ask, a year later and at the start of a new decade, what—if any—of these promises had come to pass.
While it’s true that cap-and-trade is still being debated and the President’s much lauded comprehensive clean energy air, clean energy jobs bill is stalled in the senate, the Federal Government is taking action. Earlier this week, the President announced that the Federal Government has pledged to cut its emissions by 28% by 2020.
Executive Order 13514 on Federal Sustainability will, according the President's announcement “ensure that the Federal Government leads by example in building the clean energy economy. Actions taken under this Executive Order will spur clean energy investments that create new private-sector jobs, drive long-term savings, build local market capacity, and foster innovation and entrepreneurship in clean energy industries”.
So what does this mean? As guest blogger Sean Pool (Special Assistant for the Energy Policy team at American Progress), points out at news.gather.com, “there is more significance to this than meets the eye, and the benefits of EO 13514”. Shaw lists some of those benefits, including:
1) Lowering costs and reducing pollution (The White House projects that savings could be between $8 to $11 billion annually.)
2) Creating a quantifiable metric by which the federal government can “accurately measure, report, and reduce greenhouse gasses”
3) Encouraging a shift away from oil and towards local—i.e. distributed—energy which could “spark new demand for energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies”
4) Promoting clean energy investment by example
So what do you think? Is this the kind of real action we so desperately need? Is this the best way to transition to the clean energy economy while simultaneous creating new jobs and ensuring that there’s—as Pool puts it, “a stable source of demand for clean energy technologies, workers, and services for the next decade”?
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