In the State of the Union address tonight, President Obama will highlight the administration’s fossil and renewable energy achievements, touting that the U.S. now produces more than half of its oil domestically and has expanded natural gas, solar, and wind development. The United States is on its way to becoming a global clean-energy leader, Center for American Progress Chairman John Podesta and Tom Steyer of Farallon Capital Management write in the Wall Street Journal:

In the hubbub around the president’s decision not to approve the proposed Keystone XL pipeline between Canada and the United States, Americans missed the big picture. While conservatives have been fighting to build a pipeline to import more foreign oil and deepen U.S. dependence, the U.S. is poised to transform its energy portfolio by developing domestic resources — renewable and mineral — that will let it become a net exporter of clean energy and energy technology in this decade.

Podesta and Steyer — who was a leader in the fight to protect California’s climate laws — are bullish on the domestic natural gas boom, though they note the “critical environmental questions associated with developing these resources.” They believe that “as long as we ensure high regulatory standards and stay away from the riskiest and most polluting of these activities, we can safely assemble a collection of lower-carbon, affordable and abundant domestic-energy assets that will dramatically improve our economy and our environment.”

Importantly, the United States has regained the title of the world’s top investor in clean energy. “Our companies make over 75% of all venture investments in clean technologies world-wide,” and “the clean economy grew by 8.3% from 2008 to 2009, even during the depths of the recession.” A commitment to clean energy isn’t just about generating good jobs:

Such jobs provide a strong middle-class income to workers who have technical skills beyond high school but who lack a four-year college degree. What’s more, U.S. clean-energy investment shows moral leadership, as we combine our advanced energy strategies with strong safeguards to protect our citizens and our planet from polluters and the worst impacts of global warming.

“Our economy can go from being weighed down by oil imports to soaring ahead, powered increasingly by domestically produced clean energy, and energy services and technology,” Podesta and Steyer conclude. “The Obama administration has taken a smart approach, but Congress must now work with the president to secure our leadership position going forward.”

The nation’s public lands are a central part of our national heritage, imagination, and spirit. Millions of Americans visit our public lands each year to experience history firsthand and wonder at some of the nation’s most beautiful natural spaces. That’s why one of my proudest accomplishments from the Clinton administration is working with Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt to protect these national treasures. Together, we helped President Clinton protect more land in the lower 48 states than any president since Teddy Roosevelt, from the north rim of the Grand Canyon to President Lincoln’s Cottage to Pompeys Pillar in Montana to the California Coastal National Monument that includes 20,000 islands, rocks, and reefs. Because of President Clinton and Secretary Babbitt’s dedication, these and thousands more acres will be preserved and protected for future generations.

Today, Secretary Babbitt is back in the spotlight with an important speech about defending these lands from attack and carrying our preservation legacy forward. On this 105th anniversary of the Antiquities Act, signed by Teddy Roosevelt to protect America’s most special natural places, I hope that the President will thoughtfully consider the Secretary’s recommendations.

A first stop should be Fort Monroe. Virginia Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner, as well as Governor Bob McDonnell, have asked to designate Fort Monroe, an important Civil War landmark once referred to as the “Gibraltar of Chesapeake Bay,” as a national monument. The Fort will be decommissioned in the fall, and designating the post as a National Monument will ensure that the post is preserved for public use for many years to come.

But that’s just the first step. Public lands are about far more than stewardship; they also help revitalize and strengthen local communities. In Utah, the counties surrounding Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument have seen strong economic growth since the designation in 1996: 38 percent growth in jobs and 30 percent growth in per-capita income. Fort Monroe would similarly benefit, as would many other sites around the country. For the sake of communities like these, and the sake of our national heritage, it is critical that we continue to make preservation a priority going forward.

Full text of Secretary Babbitt’s speech: Read more

Center for American Progress president John Podesta brought a dose of reality to a tar sands public relations session organized by Canada for Washington policymakers. At the Canada 2020 conference “Greening the Oil Sands,” Podesta responded to Canadian ambassador Gary Doer, who accused Americans of a “holier than thou” hypocrisy about Canada’s high-pollution synthetic petroleum production from Alberta’s bituminic deposits. Podesta also debunked the rosy picture painted by a cavalcade of industry officials, who spoke of their progress in “greening” tar sands production:

Oil extraction from tar sands is polluting, destructive, expensive, and energy-intensive. These things are facts. I think suggesting this process can come close to approximating being “greened” is largely misleading, or far too optimistic, or perhaps both. It stands alongside clean coal and error-free deepwater drilling as more PR than reality.

“Unconventional sources of fossil fuels cannot be our energy future,” Podesta explained bluntly. “There are no leapfrogging technologies on the horizon that suggest with any plausibility that this could be otherwise. There are no silver bullets waiting to be fired.” The BP Gulf of Mexico disaster is “one in a long line of wake-up calls, and we ignore it at our peril.”

“Beyond Petroleum is an ironic slogan, but not a real strategy,” Podesta noted. He criticized the oil industry for using clean energy for public relations instead of investment, citing research by the Center for American Progress that the big five oil companies invested only 1.7 percent of profits in clean-energy R&D, “because the corporate culture and core competence of oil companies favor large, centralized investment opportunities, like the unconventional resources in Canada and or deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The U.S., Canada, and the rest of the world are “absurdly trying to ride two horses galloping in opposite directions,” as “we have to keep global temperatures under 2 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic climate change” but continue to pump investment and planning into a fossil-fuel future. “The oil industry is extracting oil from sources that are harder and riskier to access, and where a one-in-a-million failure, even if that is an accurate risk assessment, nevertheless has huge, unaffordable consequences.”

During the Q&A that followed, Gary Mar, Alberta’s representative in Washington, thanked Podesta for his talk which was “valuable,” Mar said, because it “compels the Alberta government to sharpen its case for the oil sands.”