President Obama appears to be taking steps to fight climate change with and without the help of Congress. This last Friday, March 15th, Obama addressed a crowd at the Argonne National Laboratory, calling on Congress to establish the Energy Security Trust. The trust is to be funded for 10 years by government fees on offshore oil and gas drilling projects. The trust is mainly focused on developing alternative fuel sources for transportation, but renewable energy on the whole is bound to benefit from a reliable, continuous source of funding.
Obama’s speech at Argonne highlighted the need for the government to take the responsibility of funding so-called basic research. Basic research tends to be too risky and expensive, meaning the private sector tends not to invest in the groundwork research. With the government ensuring funding to basic research, the fundamentals of renewable energy that have previously not been explored will come to strengthen the overall renewable energy industry.
In addition to the Energy Security Trust, Obama is positioning to use the Nixon-era National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to give guidelines to federal agencies on how to assess the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on new construction projects. NEPA was originally designed to assess air, water, and soil pollution, but under Obama, NEPA would be expanded to cover emissions contributing to climate change along with a project’s vulnerability to extreme weather as a result of climate change.
Under the new guidelines, the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, will need to undergo a thorough lifecycle review to determine how the project will increase the effects of climate change. Judging from recent citizen action which brought about 35,000 protestors of the Keystone pipeline to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the pipeline is in the sights of the new guidelines.
The new guidelines already have oil lobbyists concerned that significant delays will be put on new oil drilling and transportation projects. If these delays do materialize, perhaps it is for the best that oil companies take greater care in planning and developing projects that have lower greenhouse gas emissions and potential for pollution.
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