WASHINGTON — California is planning a $9.5 billion U.S. high-speed train connection from San Francisco and Sacramento down to Los Angeles and San Diego with stops in between. It’s expected to take hundreds of thousands of commuters off the highways.
Along the coast of Rhode Island, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Management recently put 93,000 hectares of continental shelf up for lease for wind turbines that could produce up to 3,000 megawatts — enough to power upwards of a million homes.
In Arlington, Va., citizens voted to transform the five-kilometre traffic corridor through town into a pedestrian- and bike-friendly street with electric trolley cars.
Across the Potomac in Washington, D.C., buses run on natural gas, bike paths are plentiful, public transport is expanding and apartment building parking garages are half empty because many of their tenants don’t own cars.
Even the most unlikely Americans are taking up the carbon-free challenge, often viewing it as a path to energy independence. Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie, for instance, built himself a solar home and lives off the grid. He also drives an electric car. Yet at the same time he opposes government attempts to impose environmental regulations.
In the greater scope of America’s gluttonous fossil fuel appetite, these clean energy initiatives could be mistaken as insignificant. Yet they carry all the signs of a quiet revolution gradually emerging in cities and states across the nation. They are slowly reshaping the energy landscape in spite of a federal government that remains gridlocked over climate change legislation.
“What we have seen regarding energy policy is that almost all Americans regardless of their political orientation are decidedly for clean energy future for America,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University who tracks public opinion on climate change.
His data have given U.S. President Barack Obama and his closest advisers the renewed confidence to go bold on clean energy, and dismiss projects such as Keystone XL as old economics.
Maibach’s research shows that pretty well all Americans want the clean energy future to start soon.
“It’s a transition that they would like to see happening now,” he said.
He said U.S. public opinion differs only in the pace of that transition.
“Democrats and independents would like to see a rapid move towards renewables and a rapid move away from fossil fuels and Republicans would like to see a rapid move towards renewables but a much slower move away from fossil fuels,” he said.
Until recently, Obama’s policy has been to support both renewables and fossil fuels with equal vigor. Maibach’s polling, however, may have swung the pendulum over to clean energy.
“I actually think that the president is catching up with public opinion,” he said.
This grassroots, green revolution has given Obama the voter support to claim in stark terms — as he did this week — that projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline do not automatically fit into America’s vision of a greener future and job creation. It allows him to use Keystone XL as an anvil upon which he can pound out his message that jobs and economic revival are not to be found in a pipeline designed to transport “dirty oil” from Canada’s oilsands for decades to come.
In other words, attacking Keystone suddenly makes political sense, Maibach said.
Gina McCarthy, Obama’s new director of the Environmental Protection Agency, calls the state and town initiatives on carbon reduction the “leading edge” in the effort to slow climate change. “We want to build on and compliment these efforts,” she said in a speech this week in Boston.
Obama, who since February has signed no fewer than 17 disaster declarations that award federal financing to communities and states hit by floods, wildfires, tornadoes and hurricanes, is using the power of his office essentially to sidestep Congress.
Part of his sales job is that going green makes economic sense. It is integral to Obama’s so-called “grand bargain” to strengthen the middle class by promoting long-term jobs in innovative industries.
“For too long we have been focused on a false choice: between the health of our children and the health of our economy,” McCarthy said. “Today, the truth we need to embrace is that cutting carbon pollution will spark business innovation, will grow jobs, and will strengthen the economy.”
In light of Maibach’s research, Obama’s recent attack on Keystone does not appear so puzzling and off-the-cuff as it did at first blush. Rather, it appears part of a grand strategy — supported by the majority of Americans — to wean the nation off fossil fuels.
So far, slightly more than 25 states have set energy efficiency targets and 35 have renewable energy targets. The U.S. energy picture is changing faster than predicted and posing new economic and political challenges for Canada that go well beyond Keystone.
Canadian energy companies might have to seek new and more distant markets. And Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has tied his energy and climate change policies to those of the U.S., might have to think up new ones.
wmarsden@postmedia.com
