I have just spent a few days Stateside, my first visit this year and therefore since Barack Obama took over as president. A lot has changed for the better, and nowhere more so than in the energy policy arena.
Actually, I always thought that George W. Bush got a worse press than he deserved, in this context at least. When he was governor of Texas, Bush was in the forefront of promoting renewable energy, and particularly wind power. And there was a lot going on under his presidency to move America away from dependency on imported oil.
But Bush wrote his own headlines for the next eight years when, early in his presidency, he chose not to sign the Kyoto Treaty on the belligerent grounds that nobody was going to tell America how to run its domestic energy policy.
That cast him in the role of villain in the pocket of Big Oil, which is how he continued to be perceived internationally.
Obama’s reputation could not be more different. He has been scrupulous in following through his campaign commitment to transform US energy policy.
His speeches on the subject are thoughtful, lucid and ambitious. The emphasis is not just environmental, but economic, since Obama clearly understands that, in energy policy at least, the two can go hand in hand.
“We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy,” he declared recently.
“The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy.”
Clarion calls don’t come much clearer than that.
On energy efficiency – usually regarded as an oxymoron when coupled with the name of the US – Obama and his team cite the example of California which, he said, has maintained flat-rate demand for electricity over the past three decades in spite of having similar growth patterns to the rest of the country, where consumption grew by 50% in the same period. California was first to take energy efficiency seriously.
When this still-new president announced his package of measures to fend off the effect of recession, an eye-watering $60billion was committed to clean energy investments. The biggest-ticket item was $11billion to create “a bigger, better and smarter grid” which will allow renewable energy to be carried from the places where it can be produced to the cities that will consume it.
Obama has risked criticism from environmentalists by including clean coal technology in his programme for reducing the US’s carbon emissions. Yet this is no more than a recognition of reality – that America (like the world as a whole) needs, for at least a few more decades, to utilise vast coal resources, and the only question is whether it will be the worst polluter or a contributor to reduced emissions.
Another area in which Obama has acted is by introducing a scheme, similar to those in Europe, to encourage the transition from gas-guzzling vehicles to newer, more fuel-efficient ones.
Yet it is a measure of how far America has to travel due to its past profligacy that the scheme will apply only to older vehicles which do less than 18mpg.
In its current condition, the US car industry – which has fought efficiency reforms tooth and nail in the past – is prepared to accept any help that is going, and also to get serious about fuel efficiency and alternative technologies.
But there is a limit to what Obama can deliver through edict and eloquence. He also needs legislation, and that is where things get trickier.
The House of Representatives passed his set-piece energy and carbon-reduction bill by 219 votes to 212, but with 44 Democrats opposing it. Deep-set resistance to radical measures that run contrary to the oil industry’s interests is not just the preserve of the Republicans.
Obama now faces a much tougher fight to get the bill – which includes the concept of carbon trading – through the Senate. And already comparisons are being drawn with 1993, when the incoming Bill Clinton tried to impose a modest tax hike to encourage energy efficiency only to see his whole package shot down in the Senate, so that there have been another 16 years of delay in America doing anything very much to meet its carbon-reduction responsibilities.
It remains to be seen whether Obama’s bill will fare better.
But even if it doesn’t, it is hard to imagine that he will abandon his commitment to really make a difference on energy policy and to press ahead with massive expenditure on alternative technologies and the infrastructure that they require.
That will have a global impact since, once America gets serious – for instance on clean coal and marine renewables – it will surely accelerate the pace of global progress on these technologies.
Passing through Miami Airport on the day the US played Brazil in the final of the Confederation Cup, I was really surprised to see large crowds gathered round television sets cheering on their side. Soccer doesn’t usually get that kind of treatment in the US.
Maybe, I thought, it was a tipping point – which would surely mean the Americans becoming unstoppable in world soccer, having virtually ignored it for the past century or so.
There is a parallel with what is happening in energy policy.
When the US, with all its intellect and wealth, gets serious about something, it aims to win and really to make a difference. Then the world follows.
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