It’s fairly obvious what lies at the core of president Obama’s dwindling approval ratings:  none of the things he apparently stands for are happening to the satisfaction of the electorate.  While he’s aggressively taking action on healthcare reform, immigration, and protecting us from the criminals on Wall Street, the progress he’s making is the product of huge compromises whose end products are garbled, wrong-headed garbage that wind up pleasing no one. 

Of course, the same political exigencies that create such a mess in areas like healthcare exist in Obama’s energy policy as well.  For example, it’s business as usual in continuing the billions of dollars in subsidies for oil and gas.  How sincere are we about eliminating our dependence on oil when tax-payers are spending $72 billion per year supporting this industry and artificially driving down the price of gasoline? 

Having said that, it’s clear that the current administration has been far more active than its predecessors in supporting the development of clean energy.  Yes, a lot of this support is the stimulus money handed out under ARPA-E.  But it’s clear that Team Obama is extremely bullish on renewables in ways that extend far beyond. 

The examples of this are all around us.  The Bureau of Land Management, which rubber-stamped thousands of leases of public land for the oil companies while putting a moratorium on solar thermal applications just a few years ago, is making a huge change in its position. For example, driven by the Obama Administration's desire to double clean energy capacity in two to three years, the BLM is in the early stages of rolling out a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on 24 solar energy study areas, amounting to about 700,000 acres of land.

Anyone with any sense of decency is sickened by the corruption in Washington, by the oil companies’ 7000 lobbyists extorting huge sums of cash and all manner of other support from our elected leaders.  Yet, even with all that overt criminality, it appears that advocates for clean energy are making progress.

 

Craig Shields, editor of 2GreenEnergy.com and author, Renewable Energy -- Facts and Fantasties (2010).