The freedoms that we celebrate on July 4th have taken on a new meaning for me this year, as we also celebrate the election of the first black president in American history. A friend of mine knew someone from Europe who said during the campaign that Americans would never elect a black man as president. Well, we did it! It is not an exaggeration to say that Barack Obama – and perhaps more importantly the American people – have renewed my faith in American freedoms and in America’s unique place in the world as a beacon of inspiration and renewal. For the July 4th celebration, I have put a new soundtrack into my last video about Obama’s campaign for president. Lyrics by Bob Dylan, music by Bruce Springsteen. You can see the video with the original soundtrack here.
It is hard to see the recovery coming from this chart (see below). Will the Stimulus funds have an effect this summer?
Update:Paul Krugman calls for a second round of stimulus, warning that we could still be headed for another Depression. The states are about to swing the axe and make enormous budget cuts, which will mean even more job losses and less money flowing through the economy. A lost decade due to deflation is a real possibility. Krugman thinks it’s time for decisive action by President Obama:
All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.
So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.
On energy, a disturbing factlet. (And obviously not the only disturbing observation on the energy-and-climate front.) I heard three people separately observe that when it comes to future sources of “clean” energy, there is not a single field in which U.S. companies are the technical or market leaders. One person gave an informal ranking of the leaders this way:
Solar-powered electricity (ie, photo-voltaic systems): Norway, Japan, China Solar-thermal systems (for heating water or buildings) Spain the leader in getting systems deployed Wind power: Holland, Denmark, China Geothermal power: nobody Nuclear power (“clean” in the carbon-footprint sense): France, Japan CCS, “Carbon capture and sequestration” (stripping out CO2 and burying it): Norway, Australia, Canada.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced this week that public lands in several Western states are under consideration as sites for major solar power projects.
Mr. Salazar, appearing in Las Vegas with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, said that 670,000 acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (an agency within the Department of the Interior) would be studied to determine whether they could support large solar power arrays.
Twenty-four tracts of land in six states — Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah — are under review. Maps of the land will be published shortly in the Federal Register.
The Climate Change bill passed yesterday in the House of Representatives, 219 to 212:
At the heart of the legislation is a cap-and-trade system that sets a limit on overall emissions of heat-trapping gases while allowing utilities, manufacturers and other emitters to trade pollution permits, or allowances, among themselves. The cap would grow tighter over the years, pushing up the price of emissions and presumably driving industry to find cleaner ways of making energy.
It might not be a perfect bill, but it is an important starting point, as Matt Steinglass notes:
This is the bill we have. The question is whether it will go through or not. That’s the only question. If the bill fails, it will mean victory has gone to those forces who are quite literally working to destroy Planet Earth. That is all that is happening here. There is no room here for skeptics and doubters and cavillers and doomsday-morning quarterbacks. This is it. The bill is on the table. You pass it or you don’t. And if it’s not tough enough to save the world, you come back again next year and the year after and the year after that and fight to make it tougher.
In this deeply moving video we see the Iranian people protesting and marching to free themselves from tyranny. Our hearts are with them. We hope that they are as successful as we were in the American Revolution. Music by the Waterboys, words by W.B. Yeats. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.
A new report on the impact climate change is already having on the United States was recently released by the Global Change Research Program. The key finding is that climate change is already affecting the United States, and the impact of climate change is projected to grow over time:
Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow.
The impact of climate change on water resources in the U.S. will become increasingly apparent:
Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage.
