- Deploying Clean Energy
President Obama has several improvements he wishes that could speed up the process of utilizing clean energy in Americans’ everyday life, which mainly consist of budget boost and setting up standards on the federal level to encourage state-level cooperation. I think deploying clean energy is a long-term commitment and cannot be achieved in a rush. Clean energy, like any other new technology, needs time and research effort to cut its cost to acceptable level that is suitable for massive production and to eventually replace our traditional way of generating electricity. Speaking from a practical point of view, no one is willing to spend more than what we are already paying for the electricity bill each month just to benefit the Earth and our next generation. Clean and renewable energy will only fully replace traditional environment unfriendly power plant when its prices are right, and its performance is reliable. Therefore I believe the key to next generation power plant is affordable and reliable technology that will allow us to harvest renewable energy. For instance, solar panel has received much attention in the recent years, but it also has many flaws. Panels can only operate at day time, and its efficiency is very bad. To generate enough electricity, each household would have to install numerous panels just so they can power basic electronics need such as lighting. Disadvantage like this has been interrupting our transitions to clean energy, because people still value the thickness of their wallet more than the future of the Earth. At this stage the budget boost to clear energy related research projects and institutes are the correct and perhaps only answer to generate the right push for the transition. I believe U.S. will have the potential to lead the clean energy industry in the following decade.
- Building 21st century transportation sector
In this section President Obama focuses on raising the fuel economy standard and modernizing the public transportation system in the states. These two are perhaps the two systems that the United States is definitely falling behind the global trend. EU has been raising the standards years ago and that’s why most European car-makers stopped making large displacement engines and replaced them with turbo-charged small displacement engines in an attempt to reduce green house gas emission from their cars. The U.S. is also falling behind on public transportation technology. Most countries in Europe in Asia have extensive high speed rail system cover across regions and metropolitan areas, with extensive underground metro system in most major cities. The U.S. is still a place that relies too much on cars. Some people might argue that car culture is a U.S. thing, but that is just an excuse for not actually caring the environment.
- Leading at the Federal Level
In this part President Obama raises his concern over current building standards and citizens’ awareness towards global climate change. These are more like mending the fold after losing number of sheep. The Americans was once given a chance to put some effort into protecting the environment when the Kyoto Protocol was presented to them in 1997. But the senate would never pass any sort of international agreement that could “hurt the U.S. economy”. They also claimed, at that time, that there wasn’t enough scientific proof to justify that global warming was primarily caused by green house gas emission. Now that more than a decade has passed, and even normal people with normal eyes can see that climate change is a real thing, the U.S. has finally realized its role in “reducing CO2 emission”. Perhaps its never too late to fix what we’ve done wrong.
http://www.harbortaxgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/REN21_GSR_2010_full_revised-Sept2010.pdf
http://www.ren21.net/Portals/0/documents/Resources/GSR/2014/GSR2014_full%20report_low%20res.pdf
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ETP2012SUM.pdf
http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/status_of_ratification/items/2613.php
http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership