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January 26, 2011

Obama touts "clean" energy, skips climate change

President Obama heartened environmentalists when he set a new national goal last night of Americans getting 80 percent of their electricity from "clean energy" by 2035, but he then dismayed some by including nuclear power and coal in his definition of what's clean. 

And interestingly, Obama didn't even mention climate change as a reason to wean the country from its addiction to fossil fuels. Instead, government incentives to develop clean energy will yield "green" jobs and help America regain its technological edge in the world economy, he argued.

"Some folks want wind and solar," he said during his State of the Union address to Congress. "Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all -- and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen."

A bevy of environmental groups praised the president's speech afterward, reiterating his argument that government incentives to develop renewable energy could generate needed jobs.  They also applauded his vow to end federal tax breaks for the oil industry.

"A true clean energy standard will foster more renewable electricity and energy efficiency and encourage us to leave behind old, dirty technologies we've proppsed up for too long already," Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote in her blog.

But others voiced their displeasure at Obama's insistence that nuclear and coal are part of the nation's energy future.

"Coal, nuclear power, biofuels and natural gas are inherently dirty," said Erich Pica, president of the Friends of the Earth. "Telling Americans anything else is misleading."

Conservatives, meanwhile, disparaged the president's pledge to promote clean energy as more government waste that'll only drive up energy prices and create jobs abroad.

Obama didn't bring up climate change this year, a switch from last year's State of the Union address.  Obama similarly emphasized clean energy then, but linked it with the need for the nation to address climate change and called for a comprehensive energy and climate bill to get passed.  The Senate failed to act, however, amid deep divisions over the issue, and intense lobbying from industry that had coal-state Democrats vowing to oppose it.

The president did defend environmental regulation last night as he spoke about plans to  eliminate burdensome government rules and red tape.  

"It's why our food is safe to eat, our water is safe to drink, and our air is safe to breathe," Obama said. 

Unmentioned again, though, is the move by his Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases as a way of combatting climate change - a move Republicans and some Democrats in Congress vow to block.  

(President Obama delivering the State of the Union to a joint session of Congress, Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 12:15 PM | | Comments (5)
        

Comments

"skips climate change"
And the word "unemployed" was left out.
He did not talk about Iraq or Afghanistan.
He did not talk about the MASSIVE debt he piled up in 2 years.
And what he DID talk about was full of lies and already broken promises.

everything "Failure of a President" states above is informative about the selective accuracy of the supposedly high intellect Harvard-trained lawyer we hired as our CEO. I would add that he and his apologists like Elijah Cummings, Sen. Cardin and Rep. Sarbanes also never use the words underemployed, U6 index, or part-time. Millions of Americans are not in the unemployment figures. The MD and US figures grossly understate those who used to work fulltime, want work fulltime, can't find it, and live on subsistence by part-time and temporary jobs.

Extension of unemployment benefits isn'tt theanswer- removal of inefficient spending by the feds of hundreds of billions and replacing it with private investment, foreign and domestic is the answer.

Obama simply lied when he claimed federal "investment" fueled the prosperity of the Sixties.

We were at war with Communism, so we had to spend on NASA and DOD. I doubt Obama would have supported the successful fifty year war against Communism, which Ronald Reagan, who Obama can't stand, successfully concluded.

Obama referred to a "Sputnik moment" for America due an educational challenge from China and India. But hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Indians make a beeline to American universities every year for higher education and India's education minister has been trying hard to bring American universities to India and was stopped only by me. India may produce more than half a million engineering graduates a year versus seventy thousand for the United States but four hundred thousand of these Indian engineering graduates will be hired just this year to work as software coolies for the United States. This is the problem with having a person of color as president; white Americans know Indians and Chinese are their slaves but not this president; a person of color cannot be the Americans' legitimate president.
The Indian government has sought "diplomatic immunity" from the United States for minister Kamal Nath from court summons in a case filed in the United States for his participation in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India. This means the Indian government is conceding that other Indians who do not have diplomatic immunity can be summoned by United States courts for alleged crimes committed by them in India and thus is giving the United States imperial authority over India and surrendering India's sovereignty to the United States. Indian government officials take an oath to uphold India's sovereignty and, by thus surrendering India's sovereignty to the United States, are guilty of treason and must be dismissed from office and prosecuted for treason. The Indian officials guilty of this treason include Manmohan Singh.
I am India's expert in strategic defence and the father of India's strategic program including the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program and in my blog titled 'Nuclear Supremacy for India Over U.S.', which can be found by a Yahoo search with the title, I have said force is the foundation of sovereignty and justice. Around 1989, when the United States invaded Panama and brought its head of state Manuel Noriega in chains to the United States for alleged drug crimes committed by him in Panama, I recounted in a letter which appeared in News India, New York saying in a telephone conversation with Mrs. Imelda Marcos of the Philippines when she and her husband, the president, were being prosecuted in a U.S. district court in New York for alleged corruption in the Philippines that 'These are Europeans who have usurped the land of other people and committed genocide on them. ... Each time we buy anything from the United States, we pay taxes that are being used to commit crimes all over the world by the C.I.A.; we have the right to arrest president Bush and the entire American government and try them under Indian law' and said ' It is not the law, the problem is enforcement -- who has got the guns. There is an American saying that 'If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns'; these (the Americans) are the biggest outlaws in the world and they've got the guns -- nuclear weapons -- and they would like to keep it that way'. Recently there was much to do about the Indian ambassador to the U.S. having been searched at a U.S. airport but, as I have described in my blog, when George W. Bush came to India as president, U.S. security men searched Manmohan Singh who was waiting to receive him at the New Delhi airport, as an Indian TV channel reported and Vajpayee tried to excuse that by saying 'Atithi Devo Bhav' (a guest is God); this invader of Afghanistan, that is Indian subcontinent -- that is India -- is God to India's traitor prime ministers and Manmohan Singh told him Indians "deeply love" him; see my blog for "Source of Manmohan Singh's 'deep love' for Bush" in the genocide the British committed on Indians, killing over ten million in the ten years after 1857.
I said in my Press Release dated August 14, 2008, included in my blog, that "The criminals of the Supreme Court, loyal as they are to the firangis (above), could not give a hoot for India’s sovereignty and they show it in their behaviour. India’s Parliament, from the Speaker to individual MPs, has also shown its indifference to India’s sovereignty. The surrender of India’s sovereignty by the Executive is known to everyone. India’s sovereignty rests only in me. I am India’s sovereign." India's sovereign lives in poverty in the United States and treated as a slave by Americans (while the Indians, including Indian courts, treat a white woman as their empress who lives and travels in royal splendor at public expense and is above the law, as I showed in a press release dated January 9, 2011 and cannot even be probed for her role in a crime unless she invites a probe): "In my blog titled 'Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.', which can be found by a Yahoo search with the title, I have described how the C.I.A. keeps India poor, weak and enslaved. "India's greatest scientist and greatest living Indian publicly tortured in Harvard seminar, systematically and totally starved for up to 3 weeks at a time, made semi-starved and homeless and even blind for years, kept under 24-hour audio and video surveillance as well as surveillance of communications and electrical typewriter and computer use, document creation and photocopying, etc., by satellite for more than past 3 decades, systematically harassed and in poverty and neutralised and robbed of his work at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, robbed of crores in his money and property in India by C.I.A.-RAW, forced back into exile in the U.S., all with full cooperation and participation of India's RAW and India's C.I.A.-RAW-controlled prime ministers, politicians and media -- to keep India poor, weak and enslaved" and how this means the nuclear destruction of New Delhi and then the coast-to-coast destruction of the United States."
After I wrote above that "I am India's sovereign", the above white woman gave "Republic Day celebrations a miss" on the pretext that she is "running a fever since Tuesday" because of fear that, like the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, she might be killed by the soldiers taking part in the parade; a request that the soldiers in the parade march with the firing pins removed from their firearms was rejected by the armed forces.

Satish Chandra

Here here @Failure of a President. Employment and climate change were the biggest gaps that I noticed. Meanwhile, they're completely interrelated. The only way we can get out of this financial mess is to invest, and investing in combating climate change is the perfect way to do it. Check out the ideas from Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, smart stuff: http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/01/28/investment-is-a-win-win-for-the-global-economy-and-climate-change-34211/

Climate Change ? What happened to Global Warming ? I thought Al Gore won a prize for his rhetoric on Global Warming. Why did the name need changed ? Maybe GMC will bring back the Chevy Vega and call it the Chevy Volt ?

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About the bloggers
Tim WheelerTim Wheeler reports on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, he has focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, he's crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. He loves seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. He hopes to share some here.

Contributor Christy Zuccarini has been blogging about the local DIY craft scene for a year for Baltimoresun.com. She brings her pespective on all things handmade to B'More Green, where she will highlight projects you can do yourself as well as crafters who are integrating sustainable methods and materials.
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