The word "crisis" in Chinese is composed of two characters. The first represents danger, and the second represents opportunity. President Obama weathered the financial crisis. Today, the President faces his second crisis.

The BP Deepwater Oil Spill will likely be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. The President can continue on his current path — blame BP (it is BP’s fault) and deflect questions about how his offshore oil drilling policies are likely to lead to more spills — or he could free Americans of one of the main drivers of recessions, environmental disasters, and terror strikes.

What would free America from all of this, and put President Obama firmly in the history books, is merely changing the engines of cars. The President should use this crisis as the opportunity to shift America’s cars to 30% plug-in electrics and plug-in hybrids by 2020 and 90% by 2030.

Here’s why: Oil prices have been a driver behind recessions since the 1970s. Recent studies now reveal that oil price increases were a major driver behind our current recession.

The President was in an embarrassing place Copenhagen last December, when he had little to offer a world that waited for his promised leadership on climate change. His current policies cut pollution by 10% of what other countries were promising. More creative, strategic leadership is needed from the White House if the world is to have a fighting chance in saving the climate.

The President can prevent future recessions, oil spills, embarrassments at climate treaty meetings, wars for oil, and cut off funding for terror attacks by adopting the moonshot proposal put forward by companies like Cisco Systems and PG&E, who called for the electrification of cars in this ambitious, feasible blueprint.

In giving utilities the new, lucrative business of powering cars, the President should demand that all new electricity is clean or efficient (i.e. energy efficiency, offshore wind, regular wind, solar, geothermal), and that utilities accept a cap that is part of a plan to cut global warming pollution by 40% by 2020 and cuts pollution to 350 parts per million of carbon pollution by 2050. Anything less would be fiddling while Rome burns.

There are many ways to go about this:

1. Simply roll out the blueprint;

Or, if you happen to feel urgency in the time of crises and would like to guarantee success, you do this as well:

1. Require that 30% of new cars are plug-in by 2020 and 90% are by 2030 through the EPA or Congress;
2. Rewrite national building codes to include outlets for plugging in cars across the country;
3. Shift oil subsidies, conservatively estimated at10 billion per year, to making the grid "smart" so that consumers can charge their cars at home at night and power their offices (for money!) during the day;
4. Require states to implement new rules for buying and selling electricity that favor renewables (time of use metering) and plug-ins without costing consumers more. This, plus the building codes, could be tied to highway funding or other programs;
5. Providing tax incentives to plug-in buyers; and
6. Simple steps laid out in the blueprint.

Simply implementing the blueprint would cut the emissions associated with transportation by over 50% by 2030. The grid improvements needed to make the grid smart would enable solar, battery storage, wind, and other renewables to play a much more significant part in America’s energy production, moving America one more step towards Greenpeace’s Energy Revolution.

The President can remain defensive, pointing fingers at BP, while gambling the health of our communities and economies on more offshore oil drilling, or he can be one of the great leaders of our times.

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post on May 11, 2010.

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post on April 24, 2010.

I was saddened to hear the details of the climate bill soon to be released by Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman.

This bill could be a step backwards, not forward, unless the Senators fix key provisions in the upcoming weeks.

Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman have made a heroic effort to craft a bill in the face of opposition from the Chamber of Commerce, Lisa Murkowski, Koch Industries, and other representatives of dirty power. Their hard work to create a bill that would address global warming, make America more secure, and create jobs can come to fruition in the upcoming weeks. This would require the elimination of subsidies for the dying, dangerous nuclear industry, protecting women’s and children’s health by phasing out coal, supporting states’ rights to protect the health of their citizens, and leaving America’s Clean Air Act intact.

The main drivers of progress on global warming in the U.S. have been: 1) state laws, such as California’s tougher standards on global warming pollution from tailpipes or renewable energy standards, 2) the Supreme Court’s decision, brought about by a lawsuit by ICTA, Greenpeace, and other groups, to allow the EPA to regulate carbon pollution, and 3) energy policy.

These drivers have led the coal industry to slide up to the table to eliminate these avenues of regulation in return for one weak, national bill in which the industry will receive tens of billions of tax dollars and a price on carbon that is so weak that no signal will exist to shift the world from coal to clean energy. In return, the coal industry held policy makers hostage, demanding that the EPA be stripped of its authority to regulate carbon pollution in line with what is needed to protect public health. On top of that, states like California could be stripped of their states’ rights to pass appropriate air pollution safeguards to protect the public health.

This roll-back of clean air legislation would be a price too high to pay. Giving away the leverage to reduce pollution further in the future leaves our children’s future at risk.

Unfortunately, the bill does not address the biggest driver of global warming quickly enough — the burning of coal. You’ve heard the hype about "clean" coal. If "clean" means being the number one source of mercury, which threatens to cause birth defects or brain damage to the children of one in six American women, then coal is clean. If "clean" means being one of the greatest sources of pollution that triggers asthma attacks and emphysema problems, then coal is clean. In reality, coal is dirty. Burning coal is no longer moral.

The clean energy provisions of the House bill require less clean energy than we will already have; state policies are simply ahead of federal energy policy. We expect the provisions in the Senate bill to be business as usual as well. The price on carbon in both bills will generate a lot of cash but won’t be high enough for at least a decade to drive a shift from coal to cleaner energy sources.

The international efforts to address global warming in Copenhagen crumbled in part because, while European heads of state were offering to cut pollution by 30% below 1990 levels, the U.S. commitment is merely 4% below 1990. President Obama’s hands were tied there by the very polluters that are now driving loopholes and environmental rollbacks into this bill.

Senator Graham argues that this bill is not an environmental bill; it is a national security bill. The bill, which is ironically scheduled to be released on the anniversary of Chernobyl, includes up to 12 new nuclear power plants. As someone who was in D.C. on 9/11, I dread the thought of new nuclear plants after the 9/11 Commission Report stated that "Atta also … considered targeting a nuclear facility he had seen during familiarization flights near New York."

Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman should be commended for stepping out as leaders on this issue. The way to address global warming, make America more secure, and create jobs is to update the bill to eliminate subsidies for the dying, dangerous nuclear industry; protect women’s and children’s health by phasing out coal; support states’ rights to protect the health of their citizens; and leave America’s Clean Air Act intact.

Follow Philip Radford on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GP_Phil

On the heels of his victory on healthcare and student aid reform, President Obama announced today that he would kowtow to the oil industry and allow exploration and drilling in 167 million acres of coastal waters that have been protected for decades.

Obama’s proposal would allow oil and gas exploration in the coastal waters of the southern Atlantic states and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, threatening fishing and tourism industries in

A Greenpeace activist holds an oiled bird found on a beach severely affected by an oil spill. © Greenpeace / Egor Timofeev

those regions. But the news is even worse for Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, which are especially sensitive to oil drilling because they provide critical habitat for polar bears, whales, seals and other distinctive Arctic species.

Incredibly, despite dire warnings from the scientific community that we are approaching a tipping point in Earth’s climate system, Mr. Obama has set us on a course toward more dependence on fossil fuels.

You can take action now to tell President Obama that it’s time to break our addiction to oil. We put this video together back in 2008 to call on then-candidates Obama and McCain to restore the ban on offshore drilling that had just been repealed, and now seems like a good time to dust it off:

In his announcement, Obama insisted that this move will decrease our dependence on foreign oil and create jobs. But these claims don’t hold up to scrutiny. Investing in conservation and renewable energy would go much farther on both fronts.

The United States consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil, but has only three percent of the world’s reserves. In fact, the total oil reserves along our coast represent just a fraction of current U. S. demand, meaning we’ll still have to import plenty of oil from overseas.

Meanwhile, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that onshore U.S. wind resources could generate nearly 37 million gigawatt-hours (GWh) of clean energy every year. That’s more than nine times the amount of energy Americans currently consume annually.

Investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency has the potential to create 14.5 million more jobs by 2050 versus continued reliance on fossil fuels, and would simultaneously reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and cut our emissions of global warming pollution in the process. China and Germany are winning the clean energy race, while Obama has just staked our future and our economy on an outdated fossil fuel that will take years to extract and will cause far more harm than good.

As Albert Einstein said, we can not solve the world’s problems with the same thinking that created them. We certainly can’t solve global warming or meet this country’s energy needs by drilling for more oil. The science is clear: We have to reduce global warming pollution in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Ramping up oil drilling off America’s coasts does exactly the opposite.

It’s time to tell President Obama that we need to move forward into a clean energy future and away from ocean and climate destruction.

Was Copenhagen historic or a failure (or both)? To discern the value of the Copenhagen deal through the din of spin, look no further than the 9% drop in the European carbon market on Monday, where confidence vanished following President Obama’s "historic accord."

Last week, President Obama made an audacious effort to save what was a floundering process in Copenhagen. Unfortunately, his administration’s claim of "historic accord" is little but spin. What the world was waiting for — the sinking island nations, the 300,000 that the World Health Organization says die each year from global warming, and the carbon markets — were binding agreements to cut carbon pollution, end tropical deforestation by 2015, and provide financing to assist developing countries in leap-frogging dirty development with clean energy.

What they got was business as usual. Earlier this year the House passed a deeply flawed climate bill that falls short of what the science says is needed to roll back climate change. The bill’s contents were what the president promised in Copenhagen, and his words were met with disappointment the world over.

There is spin from all sides about just what happened in Denmark. Let me share my observations from someone with a global, not just U.S., perspective. The European Union, already actively engaged in the Kyoto Protocol, offered to cut its pollution by 20% and said they would go up to 30% if the U.S. put more ambitious goals on the table. The EU also pledged 30 billion euro per year for financing clean technology and other initiatives in the developing world. China, already outpacing the U.S. in the development and deployment of renewable energy technologies, offered to decrease the energy intensity of its emerging economy. India pledged the same.

The U.S. pressed China to allow its efforts to cut global warming pollution to be independently measured. China resisted the U.S. proposal to allow the U.S. to come in and inspect its industry, but felt that the negotiations with the U.S. were making progress on this point when it accepted an EU proposal on reporting and occasional checks. Meanwhile, the U.S. was punching loopholes into the pact.

The deal could possibly be sealed if the U.S. offered financing for developing countries and resolved the issue of transparency with China.

Enter Hillary Clinton, offering to somehow figure out how to give an unstated contribution of money from an unknown source to a $100 billion fund. In the process, she offended the Chinese premier, who was in such a fury that his negotiating staff was in a panic.

Enter President Obama. His speech, clearly written for one audience — the U.S. Senate — said three things to the Heads of State in the room: hey foreign leaders, we don’t want foreign oil; hey China, even though we’ve been building trust and negotiating all year, I’m going to scold you for the benefit of domestic politics; and hey world: even though these are negotiations, I have nothing to offer. It’s my way or the highway.

The President laid out what the U.S. had offered the world for the last eight months, budging on nearly nothing. He put forward a goal of cutting pollution by 4% below 1990 levels — about one tenth of what the EU offered. In fairness, he had little to offer. The combination of the President’s hesitance to lead to overcome special interests to achieve his own stated objectives — whether on a public option in health care or pollution reductions of any respectable size — and the power of the coal and oil lobbies put the his negotiators in the awkward positoin of negotiating without very much to give.

The Chinese premier stormed out of the room and refused to meet with the President. Finally, the President secured a meeting and hammered out a deal that has the value of the carbon markets today: very little.

So few people had a clue about the "deal" that when President Obama later announced it the EU negotiators were still forging a deal and G77 delegates were talking in the halls about the perilous state of the Summit. Ultimately, most signed on, because if they did not, then their countries would not get a cut of a $30 billion package for clean energy and adapting to current global warming. A few brave countries, not wanting to be bought, said "no" to the deal. The historic accord was "noted" by the process, a nod to its existence.

The world still expects great things of President Obama and the US, but we cannot expect him to save the world on his own. We can expect — and must demand — that the president leads in recommitting the U.S. to the democratic UN process, doubles his efforts through the EPA and other methods to cut global warming pollution without the loopholes, clean air act rollbacks, impending nuclear disasters, and green light for coal that we see in current legislation, and approaches the negotiations as what they are — negotiations to save millions of lives, dozens of countries, 70% of the world’s species, and a future that is worth passing on to our children.

This article was cross-posted on the Huffington Post.

President Obama is due in Copenhagen this week for the UN Climate Summit, where he’ll join over 100 other Heads of State to hopefully hammer out an effective, fair, and binding climate pact. But there is another delegation here from the US, and although they have no official capacity, they are leaving their mark. We could call them the "Flat-Earthers," but they are really a collection of Congressional Republicans bent on preventing the US from committing to a global treaty and from having the US change its energy infrastructure from one that’s fueled by dirty fuels to one powered by clean and green technologies.

About a half-dozen climate deniers are here in Denmark, according to Politico "to oppose plans for cap-and-trade legislation, express their discontent with the scientific community that researches climate change and call for the United Nations to halt any negotiations until the academic scandal known as "Climate-gate" is resolved."

They’re lead by House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence of Indiana who said:

In the worst recession in 26 years, in the midst of an academic scandal and questionable science revealed in ‘Climategate’ and in the absence of a national consensus about policies that would bear upon the category known as climate change, we gather here to say, Mr. President, don’t make promises in Copenhagen that we cant keep.

Rep. Pence would do well to read the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), which finds that a pathway to a low carbon economy can lead to big economic benefits.

According to the report:

There is no inevitable trade-off between climate change mitigation and development. On the contrary, climate change mitigation is a process of global structural change which offers huge economic opportunities for developing countries.

Pence and his allies could also listen to their party’s 2008 vice presidential candidate, who, when she was governor of Alaska, wrote her to constituents:

Alaska’s climate is warming. While there have been warming and cooling trends before, climatologists tell us that the current rate of warming is unprecedented within the time of human civilization. Many experts predict that Alaska, along with our northern latitude neighbors, will warm at a faster pace than any other areas, and the warming will continue for decades.

The stakes here are too high for deniers to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that they can’t see what’s really happening to our planet. By committing to strong emissions reduction targets and by creating the cleaner technologies to power our world, the US can again lead the world. The US, traditionally the world leader in innovation because of our unmatched university and research institutions, is poised to show the way, but without Congressional leadership progress will be almost impossible. There’s still time for the Flat-Earthers to listen to reason. Congress will again take up climate in 2010, and Pence and his allies can get on the right side of history.