Obama's Number One Priority - Revamping the Energy System  

Posted by Big Gav

Obama seems to understand part of the nature of the energy problem (unlike the morons in the "drill, baby, drill" crowd), with a recent interview with Time touching on some of the problems with industrial agriculture - Swampland.

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that's going to be my number one priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to just stabilize the immediate economic situation.

2 comments

Excuse me for being going out on a limb but isn't our current economic situation somewhat related to the energy situation described in the rest of the article? How is it possible to fix our current economic problems without dealing with the energy part of it in a meaningful way?

Yes - the current economic situation is partly a result of rising energy prices in the past 8 years.

Converting the economy to clean energy would create an economic boom that helps dispel the current downturn.

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