Obama’s Chunky Energy-Climate Plan

In a new Rolling Stone interview, President Obama has offered a replacement for the now-defunct notion of comprehensive climate and energy legislation: a policy rolled out in “chunks.” Given the inability of Congress, after seven years of struggling, to pass “comprehensive” climate legislation, it’s good to see a shift to the approach pushed by, among others, Stephen H. Schneider, the veteran climate science and policy expert at Stanford University who long stressed the need for a sequence of steps to build public support before the heavier lifting comes. Of course the question is, what are Obama’s “chunks”? Over at Grist, reacting to the idea, Glenn Hurowitz has pitched his four favored “chunks” (let’s call them “steps” from here on in; chunk is just a little, well, gross): - Permanent tax credits for projects protecting or restoring forests or shifting to carbon-storing farming methods; - Programs cutting emissions of black carbon from sources as variegated as inefficient cook stoves and dirty diesel engines; - Intensified efforts to curb the use of HFC’s and other compounds that replaced now-banned refrigerants that were a threat to the ozone layer but are powerful heat-trapping substances; - Developing new international financial instruments to raise the tens of billions of dollars rich countries pledged to help poor ones adapt to climate change, develop non-polluting energy systems and restore forests. One option Hurowitz highlights is a proposal by the investor George Soros to build the green fund by drawing on a small portion of a kind of virtual currency at the International Monetary Fund, called Special Drawing Rights...more