I cannot quite fathom this transition. Taylor Marsh complains that Obama has let slip the opportunity for a “moon shot” on energy:
But to imagine, implement and sell a nationwide building extravaganza focused on changing our energy focus Mr. Obama would have had to have had a vision. He did not. Instead he doubled down on military actions, reneged on campaign pledges to remove the stench of the Bush-Cheney legacy by doubling down on drone attacks, starting another war in Libya and continuing rendition and allowing “secret” prisons to continue.
Let me get this straight: the wars are holding back clean energy investment? Because the wars definitely are not. For example, the president included wind power in his 2010 stimulus spending:
According to Whitehouse.gov, the release of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) 4th Quarter 2009 industry assessment(PDF) indicates that stimulus spending is directly responsible for turning a potential 50% decline in growth in the wind power sector into a 39% increase in growth in the country’s fleet of wind plants in 2009 alone.
“The U.S. wind industry shattered all installation records in 2009, and this was directly attributable to the lifeline that was provided by the stimulus package,” Denise Bode, the trade association’s chief executive told The New York Times Deal Book Blog. “The second half of the year was extraordinary. But manufacturers didn’t see much growth because they had built up so much inventory.”
This is why the United States wind sector grew while the rest of the economy faltered, and a big reason why it stands to grow even faster in the next five years. It’s why one-third of new electric generation in 2010 came from wind and I have driven past brand-new wind farms on my way to Netroots Nation the last two years running.
Marsh singles out high speed rail as an Obama “vision” failure. As an infrastructure blogger, I was momentarily struck speechless. Has Marsh heard the strange story of Rick Scott and high speed rail? Has Marsh even talked to HSR advocates about Scott Walker or the teapublicans of New Hampshire? Does she realize that railroads are necessarily an outside-the-Beltway issue?
I doubt it. She’s fixated on the war-peace question, and while I understand her unstated basis of that argument — that every soldier deployed to Afghanistan costs as much as a certain number of green jobs — I’m wondering what kind of Congress she thinks she is dealing with. After all, the 111th Congress passed stimulus for high speed rail R&D as well as wind power. But we don’t have that Congress any more, do we?
Of course not. Here are other things the new Congress is less willing to do: close Guantanamo, try terror suspects in federal courts, or allow the president to otherwise deal with terrorism suspects. Nor do I recall Obama promising to ignore UN Security Council resolutions under Article 42 of the Charter during his campaign. I’m pretty sure he never said anything about drone attacks, though he promised to make the AF-PAK theatre his military focus. If Marsh wants to talk about “vision” and broken branches of government, she will have to look farther than one man.
In fact, I’m not sure what Obama Taylor Marsh is talking about, except the one she prefers to believe in. He’s the same Obama she has believed in since the early primary days, and he’s just about entirely a projection from her Clintonista-mind. And that’s where I gasp at the dissonance, because Hillary Rodham Clinton is Obama’s very successful Secretary of State.
