By Nathan Johnson
Last November, voters elected Barack Obama as US president. With many environmentalists and green groups cheering the result, the new administration faces difficult challenges ahead in trying to press ahead with green initiatives and investment while trying to revive a slumping economy. On June 23, the Regional Environmental Center (REC) in Szentendre, Hungary welcomed Mark Hopkins, director of the UN Foundation's energy policy programme. Hopkins, an energy efficiency expert with 35 years of experience in policy and programme development, spoke at the REC Conference Center about what to expect from the new Obama administration in terms of environment and energy-related policy and development.
Hopkins began with an observation that Hungary has changed over the years, and that there are a lot more cars, McDonald's restaurants and shopping centres. "The best of the US," he quipped. Joking aside, Hopkins added that there are actually huge efforts underway in the United States to develop clean energy infrastructure at state, local and federal levels, while admitting that there is "serious lack of capacity to do everything that needs to be done."
Prior to discussing specific details about Obama's USD 30 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Hopkins illustrated the difficulty of making climate and environment-related issues a top US political priority. First of all, there is the recently emergent and ongoing global economic crisis to contend with. The timing and scale of the economic crisis was such that the incoming administration needed to take immediate action. The second major, possibly "defining" issue for the Obama presidency, according to Hopkins, is healthcare. The UN Foundation director argued that American voters will need to see progress in both of these areas before granting full support for costly efforts to build clean-energy infrastructure.
Hopkins also mentioned that United States infrastructure was developed in a fashion consistent with historical demand for "the most energy possible, as cheaply as possible." With an energy grid developed in the 1950s and '60s, Hopkins described current energy-saving devices energy-saving devices as "analogue technology", and that it will take five to six years to become digitized. Hopkins added that the US is a "very pragmatic" country, and that the business community in particular is traditionally sceptical about meeting or being obliged to fulfil binding targets, but at the same time can be persuaded to carry out long-term green investments with proper incentives.
Hopkins then provided details of Obama's clean energy stimulus package, which especially targets the building sector (all figures are in USD): 11 bln for a smart electric grid; 6 bln for a renewable energy loan guarantee to leverage 60 bln in private sector financing; 10 bln for school energy retrofits; 8.5 bln for federal building retrofits; 5 bln to weatherise a million low-income homes; 6.3 bln for state and municipal energy programmes; 8.2 bln for research, advanced batteries and carbon capture and storage (CCS); and 500 mln for a Green Jobs Retraining Program.
A little more than a week after Hopkins' visit to the REC, at the recently concluded G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, President Obama conceded that with its "much larger carbon footprint per capita" that the United States now means to lead by example. "The United States has sometimes fallen short of meeting our responsibilities," he continued. "Le me be clear, those days are over."
Despite criticism that the summit agreements are a case of too little and too late, or that too much a burden is being shifted to poor and/or developing nations, the results do at least provide something of a "pivotal marker of what could happen in talks in December in Copenhagen, when the United Nations tries to conclude a new worldwide climate deal," wrote the Associated Press.
