Climate of Our Future

Today, the Center for American Progress, a public policy think tank, released an economic blueprint that looks at the crises facing our country not as a reason for defensive hand-wringing but as an opportunity for technological innovation and social re-invention. It’s a refreshingly open-eyed assessment of the challenges before the U.S. at a time when we’re being inundated with premature election-season sound bites that try to mask our problems in red, white and blue platitudes.

At the core of CAP’s proposal is a recognition of the moral imperative to reverse our economic reliance on fossil fuels and avert the looming climate crisis their continued consumption is causing. Doing the right thing on global warming can help us to solve the other social problems hampering our national development. Transforming our economy to encourage sustainability through technological innovation will open up new export markets and create job opportunities that alleviate the growing poverty and insecurity we’re experiencing in these times of a declining manufacturing sector, rising energy costs, and a softening housing market.

It’s a creative vision that tries to optimistically utilize our resources and strengths to work for real solutions within the global economy, rather than falling back on the nationalistic, protectionist policies many current politicians lazily revive to play to a manufactured nostalgia for past industrial glory.

Here is an excerpt from the overview of their Progressive Growth proposal:

At the center of this vision is a strategy to address the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time—climate change—and turn it into our greatest opportunity. Left unchecked, the economic disruption caused by climate change will sap our resources and dampen our growth. But with low-carbon technologies and clean, renewable energy, we can capture a new global market, drive American economic growth, and create green jobs for American workers, offering new skills and new earnings opportunities up and down the economic ladder.

CAP’s economic blueprint for a new administration would also leverage our creativity, entrepreneurial culture, and a restored leadership in science and technology to create an innovation economy and spur economic growth. It would seek to enhance economic security and mobility for American workers by creating the conditions in which they could protect and improve their own health, education, incomes, and wealth. It would refocus our international economic policy on promoting decent work and higher living standards around the globe, helping to generate additional demand for American products and services, restoring American leadership, and ensuring that the rising tide produced by economic integration lifts all boats. Finally, CAP’s plan offers a responsible pro-growth fiscal policy that would value work and fairness and support necessary investments in our economic future while setting us on a course to reduce the debt as a share of GDP and ready ourselves for the additional demands of the aging baby boom generation.

You can read the specifics of their energy policy in the chapter Capturing the Energy Opportunity: Creating a Low-Carbon Economy. They’ve also produced a video clip that summarizes their new green vision.