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USA loses out in renewable energy initiatives

Even more stunning, a renewable-electricity standard, long considered the centerpiece of any compromise excluding cap-and-trade, has also been scrapped.

What We Lost Along With the Energy Bill., TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect, 24 July 2010, Yesterday evening, climate and energy reform died in the Senate. All that remains is a skeletal package that responds to the BP oil spill and provides a few minor incentives for conservation, energy-efficiency retrofits, and the development of natural-gas trucks. Neither an economy-wide cap-and-trade system nor a utilities-only compromise will be part of the legislation Reid plans to introduce. Even more stunning, a renewable-electricity standard, long considered the centerpiece of any compromise excluding cap-and-trade, has also been scrapped……

As if cued to the collapse of the Senate’s legislative effort, China announced on Wednesday its own cap-and-trade system will be implemented from 2011 to 2015. It also already has its own equivalent of the renewable-electricity standard and energy-efficiency goals an earlier Senate package included. This should surprise no one. China is a signatory to the Kyoto protocol, and China’s meteoric development, based on the use of traditional fossil fuels, has left the country with levels of pollution unimaginable by American standards…….
China is positioning itself to ride that coming wave — capital will flow into the country, long-term infrastructure will be laid down, jobs will be created, pollution will be reduced, and the country’s standard of living will continue to rise.
This is where the magnitude of our political and civic failure to pass meaningful reform hits home. The technology we need to shift to a greener future will not simply arise out of the free-market ether the moment it’s needed. For example, the low cost of oil within the American economy has been an outlier for a while now. And though coal remains cheap and abundant, China’s pollution points to the practical limits of that fuel source as well. The reliance on cheap energy will last as long as the energy remains cheap……

Americans and their political leadership have a choice: Get out ahead of of the global shift to clean energy, or get dragged haphazardly behind it and lose out on opportunities for economic cooperation and expansion and the chance to take advantage of America’s natural strengths. (And, of course, continuing to fall down on the job of not wrecking the global ecology.) For the moment, we seem to have chosen the latter course

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect

July 24, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general | climate change, energy efficiency, global warming, renewable energy, renewables