Hard Questions – My Hard Answers: Energy, the Economy, and Global Warming
In my continuing attempt to answer the questions Anderson Cooper posed to Fareed Zakaria and David Gergen in his “Extreme Challenges, The Next Four Years”, today I would like to focus on the economy, energy, and global warming. Big topic? Actually they are all interrelated and you could throw in health care also but I already hit that one. Here is what Fareed and David said on each topic:
Economy
Gergen: “The big movement of our time is that the center of gravity in the world, geopolitically and to a large extent economically, is moving from the west to Asia.”
Zakaria: “….can you take short-term pain for long-term gain? Can we figure out where, if you look at all our problems, whether it’s dealing with health-care expenditures, dealing with fixing Social Security, dealing with energy, all of these are going to involve some kind of short term pain.”
Gergen: “And the next president has got to sort of either take us up and get us to change what we’re doing or the country is in serious danger of going into a downhill slide.”
Energy/Global Warming
Gergen: “This is another transcendent issue that—and it’s very hard to do, because it involves both having a comprehensive energy plan and program and also having something which helps to solve the environment at the same time.”
Zakaria: “I think we can do a lot to put our house in order. The problem is the planet doesn’t care where the carbon emissions come from. And so we’ve got to figure out how to get other people’s houses in order, as well.” “So whatever we do out here in the west, it doesn’t make any difference as long as India and China keep growing the way they are.”
Bottom line here is that they are tremendous challenges for the future President and no easy answers. Sound a little different from what you are hearing from the candidates right now? And a Zareed cautioned, “ We can’t keep getting dragged back into every small crisis and hell hole because a bomb goes off somewhere. We’ve got to look ahead and ask how do we reshape this world and how do we help America thrive and succeed in it?”
My answer is very simple. It will be the implementation that will be complex. We need massive investment from our government in alternate energy. We can’t close the door to anything, but the rule has to be that it not only gets us off our dependence on oil, but it is also carbon neutral. Our economy will benefit if we become the leader in the world in providing alternate energy solutions. It won’t happen by waiting on the marketplace and we will have to sacrifice under some taxes to pay for it. We will have to look at every program we invest our tax dollars in and say what is the long-term gain. How does this help our economy for the future? Investing in alternative energy may develop a whole new industry that just might be the spark that lights a fire under our economy again. Alternate energy gets us off imported oil and helps our balance of payments not to mention our security. And it begins to address our global warming problem. As an aside I think the Olympics in China will produce one positive outcome. People will be appalled at the level of pollution and unhealthy air they have wrought burning carbon based fuels.
If you look at my earlier blog on health care you would see that it could be evaluated in the same light. As Fareed pointed out, “… If you have a job in Michigan, it cost them, the company, $6500 in health care costs. You move that job to Canada, because of Canada”s health care system, they only have to pay $800.” My point is simply this. They are all interrelated and you can’t fix one with fixing the other and they all have to be fixed. The next President will have to lead the country in an entirely new direction and be willing to take big political risks to deal with these intractable problems. What we need in this election cycle is to really pin the candidates down on these questions and not let the sound bite suffice. Will our press do that? Haven’t yet and we really need to know these answers about where they are going to take us.