 Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
Cellulosic ethanol research: $1 billion. Twenty percent of electric from renewables by 2020. Auto fuel efficiency standards to 55 mpg by 2030. Adding 100,000 plug-in hybrid vehicles to the federal government fleet by 2015.
More numbers anyone?
If Hillary Clinton’s energy plan, rolled out this week in speeches and events, proved one thing it’s that the Democratic presidential frontrunner doesn’t have the wisdom to recognize that a simple, honest, direct solution is often better than a complicated one.
You could probably go down the incredibly long list of detailed policies (you can find that list at zfacts and, comparing them with the other Democratic candidates, find that she one-ups everybody—except Chris Dodd’s call for a corporate carbon tax (won’t touch that). This one-upmanship is little more than emissions envy: Clinton wants her energy plan to be bigger, longer, thicker, better.
Hillary and the entire Democratic field are trying to distinguish themselves one from another. Now there are areas where that’s valid and necessary. The Iraq War, for example. Healthcare, for example.
But global warming isn’t one. No one except professional environmentalists knows or cares whether Edwards wants 50 mpg auto fuel efficiency standards, while Obama wants 53 and Clinton 55. It’s all just numbers anyway.
In last week’s Democratic debate, Tim Russert went down the line of candidates and asked each one if s/he would “pledge” to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons. “Questions” like that turn debate into cartoon, as Bill Clinton rightly said. However, global warming is one issue where a simple pledge would be better than any complicated energy plan: “If I am elected president of the United States, I pledge to negotiate, sign and have the Congress ratify a global treaty including China, India and other developing economies to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to avoid the risk of runaway climate change.”
Period.
That should be a strong plank in the Democratic Party platform. All candidates should take that pledge. Here’s one case where unity is more important than competition.
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