Why Obama should go to Rio + 20

This June, the 20-year anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit will be held in Rio de Janeiro. The first summit was the world's largest meeting of world leaders and came up with Agenda 21--an international framework for sustainable development--the Convention on Biodiversity, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. In a nutshell, decision-makers from around the world realized how issues of poverty, environmental degradation, and consumption are interrelated and sought to begin a process to solve them.

President Obama is entering the 2012 campaign season with messages of economic equity, environmental quality, and social welfare. That is the essence of sustainable development, which could help him tie together the disparate threads of his campaign into a meaningful message that resonates with voters and sets an ambitious agenda for his second term that clears away the missteps and disappointments of his administration thus far.

How would sustainable development look as a campaign message?

1. The economy: Sustainability sees the current economic system, which is based on debt-financed growth that flows primarily to the world's wealthiest, as destructive and unable to make the majority of Americans happier. Instead of pursuing a reckless growth agenda, which was at the root of the recent financial crisis, we should focus on improving the quality of our lives. Sustainability can put us on the road to long-term economic prosperity.
2. Social equity: The worst part of the current recession and the economic trends in the past decades is how one sector of the U.S. population has enriched itself as the majority has become more financially insecure. Obama's calls for a "Buffett Rule" and a tax system fairer to the middle and working class play into sustainability's call for social equity. His health care plan is also compatible with this theme.
3. The national debt: This is perhaps the political issue that is easiest to tie explicitly to sustainability, but which hasn't yet. It is not sustainable to ask future generations to pay for the excesses of a government that can't pay for itself. A sustainability agenda would call for major structural budgetary changes to guarantee long-term fiscal balance.
4. Gas prices: Gas prices are rising because global demand for oil is rising precisely as the easiest reserves run dry. Americans are unique in the developed world in our lack of transportation freedom: the overwhelming majority have to drive to their desired destinations. This is tyranny of the worst sort, and makes us slaves to gas prices set on the world market. A sensible gas policy would call for a larger diversity of transportation, coupled with land-use planning that made it possible to walk or bike to work, school, or the grocery store; take a bus to the library; and ride the train to grandma's. Only in that way would gas prices--which will only get higher in coming decades--lose their harmful grip over us.

What politicians should say about gas prices

I just started reading Sustainability by design, which opens with a discussion of how we tend to solve the wrong problems by using short-term technological fixes that treat the symptoms rather than treating the cause. Just about every U.S. policy decision made related to gas prices fits this model. So, my idea for a better solution and how Obama (and other sensible takers) could message it.

• The perceived problem: Gas prices are too high
• The quick fixes: Drill more; release the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; increase fuel efficiency
• The real problem: Our lives are too dependent on gas prices
• The long-term solution: Get oil out of the economy, by increasing alternate modes of transportation; stressing "accessibility" (ability to get to our destination) over "mobility" (ability to move over great distances); living in more compact developments

How could this be messaged? "Gas prices are increasing. Same old story. This has been a campaign issue for the last 40 years. Don't you want to move on? I want gas prices not to be an issue in the next presidential campaign not because they're high or low, but because a 25-cent increase in the price of gas doesn't upend our lifestyles. I want Americans to live lives that are less beholden to the price of gas. I don't want to take away your car. But I want to give you the choice--the freedom--to leave it at home if you want. I want you to be able to walk to the grocery store, for your children to bike to school, for your spouse to take the bus to work. Because being able to choose how to get to where you're going represents real freedom. Freedom from high gas prices, from an unstable oil market. The freedom to live how you want."

How exactly is Obama's Keystone XL decision a victory?

So President Obama just ruled on the Keystone XL pipeline, effectively kicking the can down the road, probably until after the election. For the record, this decision has become the symbolic environmental/climate change issue of the season, because it pits developers and oil consumers against landowners and climate activists. It's also unique because, as Bill McKibben points out, because Obama and his defenders keep pointing at Republicans to excuse inaction and backpedaling on climate issues, Keystone represented a unique opportunity where Obama's sole political jurisdiction precludes Republican obstructionism. If Obama really cared about the climate, the argument goes, he could unilaterally kill the project.

Instead, his latest decision was a response to Congressionally imposed fast-tracking. It did not kill the pipeline, but just the current proposal, on a technicality (treatment of environmentally sensitive land in Nebraska). This makes the call another example of Obama's utter lack of leadership when it comes to environmental matters. The only upside would be a serious national discussion about the pipeline's true costs and benefits, but that seems unlikely in a political climate where half of the political combatants deny basic facts about the issue.

What about nuclear energy?

As I live in Germany, which is both a leader in climate policy and intensely against nuclear energy, I'm often asked my opinion on nuclear energy. I'm a rare nuclear agnostic, as I think that its climate balance is far better than coal or oil, but that its price tag and catastrophic risk make it less well-suited as a long-term solution than renewables. So herewith, my energy ranking, given with the caveat that I'm not an energy expert, but more of a hobbyist:

1. Negawatt: The best energy is that which you don't use. This includes turning off lights when you leave a room, not buying things you don't need, and in general living with a lighter footprint.
2. Energy efficiency: The energy that is used should be as efficient as possible. In this category would be reduced packaging, energy-efficient technology, and
3. Small-scale renewables: Here I'm a big proponent of Amory Lovins's argument that we need to make energy production more local and democratic. If you generate your own electricity, you're taking advantage of local resources, reducing energy loss through the grid, and cutting down on infrastructure. Small-scale renewables also increase the resilience and security of the energy supply.
4. Large-scale renewables: When small-scale can't do it alone, go for wind farms and solar campuses.
5. Nuclear: Cost-benefit-wise, it doesn't make sense to build new plants. But keeping existing plants running during the transition isn't totally bad. I don't know the full costs of extraction, though.
6. Natural gas: Burns cleaner than oil and coal, but has major extraction issues.
7. Oil: Incredibly risky to extract, comes from an oligopoly that shuttles money to much of the world's worst terrorists and extremist regimes, and very, very dirty.
8. Coal: Also risky to extract, especially to miners, and exacts a horrific toll on the environment, both at the mining site and where it is burned. Even if CCS technology became viable, the environmental costs are simply too high.

An answer to the sustainability v. growth debate?

Could it be that there was an answer to the sustainability v. economic growth as early as the 1990s? Witness the second goal of the President's Council on Sustainable Development's Sustainable America, published in 1996:

Sustain a healthy U.S. economy that grows sufficiently to create meaningful jobs, reduce poverty, and provide the opportunity for a high quality of life for all in an increasingly competitive world (p. 12).

Beautifully written and with a clear normative framework. This statement sees growth necessary that improves quality of life: a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This statement could help get the current economic debate back on track.

Obama again frames the debate as "jobs v. environment"

Pres. Obama chose perhaps the worst time to announce that he was rescinding EPA's new smog rules, right in the middle of a huge sit-in at the White House against the Keystone XL oil pipeline. It's as if he's handing us the nails to put in the coffin of his environmental record.

My biggest problem with this is how he allows the issue to be framed: we have to choose between a clean environment and good jobs. Since we're in a recession, it's OK to let more people die from air pollution for years to come. This is a false paradigm, but let's take it on its face: would we rather have jobs that make people sick, or be healthy and have higher unemployment?

Again, I don't think this is the choice. Renewable energy is huge growth sector and it reduces air pollution. But I'm just laying out the argument as it stands in the national debate. Notice that I didn't use the word "environment": the purpose of the new EPA regulation is not to protect the environment. It is to save lives.

So, human health or dirty jobs? I know what I'd choose first.

Sustainability and budgeting

My understanding of the debt ceiling debacle in the U.S. Congress this summer was colored by an excellent piece by Robert Reich on the budget debate back in 1992 and recently reposted by the New Republic. The crux of his argument is that we need to understand the budget in terms of time: are we paying for past excesses, keeping the party going, or investing in the future?

Although Reich's argument is based in economic sanity, it fits well with the concept of sustainability. A dollar of spending on early education, repairing roads, or R&D is an investment that will increase future revenue and/or decrease future expenditures. So it's far more productive than a dollar spent to service the debt or pay for Medicare (not that we shouldn't do those things).

The U.S. budget since this article was written has moved in the wrong direction, however. Since 1992, the deficit has grown exponentially, the country's population has gotten older, and we've started two expensive foreign wars on credit. Obama and Congressional Democrats obviously didn't understand Reich's categorization of spending in the debt fight. (Sorry, it was neither a discussion nor a debate.) Ezra Klein of the Washigton Post makes a similar point, tying the current situation to Reich's piece. He quotes the Economic Policy Institute's Ethan Pollack, who gets to the heart of the issue:

“What we’re doing here is transferring financial debt to investment debt,” says Pollack. “Cutting a dollar from the deficit by not repairing a road keeps you from passing one dollar of debt on to a future generation. But you are passing on a crumbling road. If you look at that using an accounting perspective that includes assets and liabilities, then by making a cut in the budget by not repairing a road, you’re not necessarily saving that money.”

That sounds anything but sustainable to me.