Overall, President Obama’s State of the Union speech was received positively by both the public and the pundits; it was a sober speech outlining the economic challenges we face and the ways government investment can bring long-term prosperity.
I was pleased to hear the President use some of the language and framing that I too have been advocating in recent talks regarding environmental policy (long version; short version). Obama couched the race to develop green energy technology, in which the U.S. is currently falling behind, as less an environmental imperative and more an economic and security imperative. He played to economic nationalism by challenging Americans to rise to a new “Sputnik moment”.
This is exactly the way to talk about the green tech revolution. While I was disappointed that Obama failed to even mention climate change, the fact is that appealing to economic competitiveness could well be more effective—especially in a depressed economy, in which environmental goals have slipped way down in the public consciousness. Americans like being No. 1—or least thinking of themselves as No. 1—and in green tech, we’re losing.
It is always slightly dangerous to invoke nationalistic sentiment, but it’s better to use it to support renewable energy and economic dynamism than most anything else. (And with the Right stirring xenophobic nationalism, it is imperative to have an alternative that appeals to the best of America and not the worst).
Obama did a very good job of telling America the stark facts about our global position in the green tech arena; he also made clear that the race isn’t over, and that we can still win by making the proper investments. This was a way to propose more stimulus, especially infrastructure spending, which has considerable bipartisan support and is generally favored by the public.
But Obama did even more: he cleverly alluded to the perverse subsidies that government doles out to fossil fuel companies. After making the case for more investment in clean tech, he said that any new proposals wouldn’t add to the deficit because they would be paid for by eliminating breaks to oil companies. This is not only excellent economic policy—ending subsidies to polluting industries and using those monies to support clean technologies—but it puts Republicans in a bind. The GOP is supposed to believe in free market principles, and nothing violates those principles more than government handouts to extremely profitable industries. Obama was in effect daring Republicans to once again support corporate welfare for big oil, and violate the conservative principles that they champion only in the abstract.
This was my favorite part of the speech. As I’ve been saying in this blog, today’s Republican Party is anything but conservative. It favors a form of crony capitalism in which “limited government” means limited to their friends. Ironically, it is Obama and the Democrats who on energy policy have been proposing conservative solutions: cap and trade is the quintessential, market-based conservative policy option.
I hope Obama builds on his State of the Union narrative, and also includes more on the national security implications of a better energy policy. And I hope he keeps forcing the GOP to either stand up for conservative principles, or risk being exposed for the frauds they truly are.
Jason Scorse