Grünen Kapitalismus - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

… the time for reform has arrived.
To those of you from the oil and gas industry, I pledge that you will have
a seat at the table in this Administration. I assure you that you will play
an important role in helping us meet our nation’s energy needs.
But President Obama and I believe that we need to be honest about our
energy future. A “drill only” approach – onshore or offshore – is not
enough.
We need a new, comprehensive energy plan that takes us to the new
energy frontier and secures our energy independence.
Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a prominent physicist, strikes a
similar note in tempering environmental awareness with strong optimism
about technology and private enterprise. In both cases, the changes
being introduced are within a framework that does not question the
desirability of continuous economic expansion. 198
Obama has on numerous occasions reaffirmed his basic corporate orientation,
most revealingly perhaps in his meeting of 12 March 2009
with the Business Roundtable, an organization which brings together
the country’s top business leaders. 199 Here we find Obama in a collegial
give-and-take with corporate managers, praising their public role, reaffirming
his belief in “the power of the free market,” and responding
supportively to a statement by one of his interlocutors who asserts, “it’s
very important that we don’t have a government [healthcare] plan competing
with a private plan.” With specific reference to environmental policy,
Obama says, “we need ultimately to make clean, renewable energy
the profitable kind of energy … [T]he best way to do that is through market-based
caps on carbon pollution.” He adds, “we’ll invest $15 billion a
year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power, advanced
biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks….” The deceptive
nature of the “clean coal” slogan and the problematic nature of
biofuels are not acknowledged. And he then notes, near the end of the
meeting, that even the cap-and-trade policy – the supposed incentive-basis
for green energy – is not anticipated to go into effect until 2012.
198 Official statements may be readily found at Interior and Energy Dept. websites: www.
doi.gov and www.energy.gov Insightful journalistic essays on leading environmental
policymakers of the last three decades may be found in Part Three of St. Clair 2008.
For an overview of Obama’s approach, see Davis 2009, 31 ff.
199 See Eley 2009 and, for transcript of the meeting, Obama 2009. For background on
the Business Roundtable, which was founded in 1973, see Domhoff 1979, 79 ff.
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