Obama’s big speech yesterday about the economy was…..fine. I don’t think he addressed our banking problems quite as forthrightly as a lot of people seem to think, but he didn’t do too badly either. I was more pleased, however, that he said this about transforming the economy to be less carbon intensive:
The only way to truly spark this transformation is through a gradual, market-based cap on carbon pollution, so that clean energy is the profitable kind of energy….We can no longer delay putting a framework for a clean energy economy in place. If businesses and entrepreneurs know today that we are closing this carbon pollution loophole, they will start investing in clean energy now. And pretty soon, we’ll see more companies constructing solar panels, and workers building wind turbines, and car companies manufacturing fuel-efficient cars.
OK, it’s not much. But one of my complaints about Obama during the primary was that he didn’t take the chance to actually sell the country on carbon caps. Sure, cap-and-trade was always part of his plan, but on the stump it was all windmills and green jobs and other happy talk. What would happen, I wondered, when the time came and suddenly Joe Sixpack realized that Obama was planning to raise energy costs via a cap-and-trade program? 
That’s still going to be a huge fight, but at least he’s beginning to mention it in public now. It’s a start.
And as long as I’m writing about yesterday’s speech, what’s the deal with the White House website? The speech is blared across the entire front page of the site, but if you click on “Read the Remarks” you cannot, in fact, read the remarks. You can read a blog post excerpting a few of the remarks, but the blog post doesn’t link to the full remarks. If you click on “Speeches” instead, the most recent entry is from February. Maybe the full speech is somewhere on the site, but I couldn’t find it.
What gives? Bush’s website wasn’t as pretty, but at least it was usually pretty complete and easy to navigate. I never had trouble finding his speeches.
