President Barack Obama delivered his most important national security and jobs speech last week. I think he also mentioned something about climate change.
The headline from Obama's speech was his decision to cut America's carbon emissions by bypassing a dysfunctional Congress and directing the Environmental Protection Agency to implement cleaner air-quality standards. If the rules are enacted — they will face many legal challenges — it would hasten our switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation. Natural gas emits about half the global-warming carbon dioxide of coal, and it is in growing supply in our own country.
But I would not get caught up in the anti-carbon pollution details of the president's speech. I'd focus on the larger messages. The first is that we need to reorder our priorities and start talking about the things that are most consequential for our families, communities, nation and world. That starts with how we're going to power the global economy at a time when the planet is on track to grow from 7 billion to 9 billion people in 40 years, and most of them will want to live like Americans, with American-style cars, homes and consumption patterns. If we don't find a cleaner way for them to grow, that traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway in 2010 that stretched for 60 miles, involved 10,000 vehicles and took 10 days to unlock is a harbinger of what will come.
Sadly, many Republican "leaders" rejected Obama's initiative, claiming it would cost jobs.
Really? Marvin Odum, the president of the Shell Oil Co., told me that phasing out coal for cleaner natural gas — and shifting more transport, such as big trucks and ships, to natural gas instead of diesel — "is a no-brainer, no-lose, net-win that you can't fight with a straight face."
But, remember, natural gas is a fine gift to our country if, and only if, we extract it in a way that does not leak methane into the atmosphere (methane being worse than carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming) and if, and only if, we extract it in ways that don't despoil land, air or water.
There is one more huge caveat: We also have to ensure that cheap natural gas displaces coal but doesn't also displace energy efficiency and renewables, like solar or wind, so that natural gas becomes a bridge to a clean energy future, not a ditch.
It would be ideal to do this through legislation and not EPA fiat, but Republicans have blocked that route, which is pathetic because the best way to do it is with a Republican idea from the last Bush administration: a national clean energy standard for electricity generation.
Such a standard would say to every utility: "Your power plants can use any fuel and technology you want to generate electricity as long as the total amount of air pollutants and greenhouse gases they emit (in both fuel handling and its electricity conversion) meet steadily increasing standards for cleaner air and fewer greenhouse gases. If you want to meet that standard with natural gas, sequestered coal, biomass, hydro, solar, wind or nuclear, be our guest. Let the most cost-effective clean technology win."
By raising the standard a small amount every year, we'd ensure continuous innovation in clean power technologies — and jobs that are a lot better than coal mining. Nothing would do more to ensure America's national security, stimulate more good jobs and global exports than a national clean energy standard.
"The Germans and the Chinese are already in this clean energy race, and we're still just talking about it," said Hal Harvey, the chief executive of Energy Innovation. "The question is: Do we want to control our energy future, or continue to rent it from other countries?"
Thomas Friedman writes for The New York Times.