Seriously, though, I’m not going to spend much time on the rather absurd issue of whether Clint’s gritty optimism means he is channeling Obama’s gritty optimism, as the Washington Post and conservative commentators claim:

An an ad touting the resurgence of the American auto industry, Clint Eastwood declared that it’s “halftime in America and our second half’s about to begin,” which could be interpreted as a reference to Obama’s second term.

The ad’s themes seem to echo Obama’s own argument that his administration brought the auto industry back from the brink of disaster.

“They almost lost everything,” Eastwood says of Detroit. “But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again.”

Oh, no, we all pulled together to save Detroit.  And it worked.  I guess Eastwood is a socialist, too, albeit one of those socialists who is tough and successful.  I wonder if he was born in Kenya.

Obviously, anything that offends Karl Rove, “Bush’s brain,” can’t be all bad.  But the reason I’m highlighting the ad is because it is an extended metaphor — arguably the single most effective kind of advertising possible.

I’ll be publishing my book on messaging and persuasion later in the year.  It focuses on the figures of the speech.  As Aristotle said, “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” (see “How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, Part 3.”  So I’ll be focusing more on the use of rhetoric in  politics and popular culture this year.

Extended metaphor is, for me, the most important rhetorical device. This figure is at the heart of some of Lincoln’s greatest speeches and Shakespeare’s greatest plays (see “How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address“).

The Elizabethan era book The Garden of Eloquence by Henry Peacham explains the potency of this figure: It “serves most aptly to ingrain the lively images of things, and to present them under deep shadows to the contemplation of the mind, wherein wit and judgement take pleasure, and the remembrance receives a longer lasting impression.”

Using an extended metaphor himself, Peacham explains that while a simple metaphor “may be compared to a star in respect of beauty, brightness and direction,” an extended metaphor may be “fully likened to a figure compounded of many stars … which we may call a constellation.” No wonder this figure is so widely used. Who wouldn’t want to have their words achieve the impact and longevity of heavenly images like the Big Dipper or Orion?

Winning political campaigns use extended metaphors.  And this ad is certainly reminiscent of one considered to be among the most effective a political ads of all time:

This ad was a perfect metaphor for Reagan’s optimism.  As I discuss in the book, Reagan himself loved to use metaphors, and the use of metaphors make presidents appear more visionary.

One of Obama’s great failings as a speechmaker is that he doesn’t use many metaphors.  That’s one of the ways you can tell this that wasn’t put together by his dreadful and overly literal-minded messaging team.

Any candidate, indeed anyone seeking to be memorable and persuasive, would do well to learn the message from these two ads:  Extended metaphors work.

Consider King’s powerful words about the civil rights struggle, which echo today in the climate battle:

We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’

Note how King repeatedly uses key figures of speech — alliteration, metaphor — and extends the metaphor of another master of rhetoric, Shakespeare (Julius Caeser), all of which are classic oratorical strategies (see “How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, Part 1: Study the figures of speech and Shakespeare“).

Science has mostly told us what it can about the fiercely urgent need to act swiftly to avoid adding the bleached bones and jumbled residues of our civilization to the pile (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“). Our urgent need now is for much more persuasiveness (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1 and Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”).

I have a dream that progressives will some day have the winning words to match their vital ideas.  After two decades of research and writing and rewriting, I will finally be publishing my book on rhetoric this summer!

King’s most famous speech illustrates the rhetorical principle of foreshadowing, as I discuss in the book, excerpted below:

As a theatrical device, the essence of foreshadowing can be found in Anton Chekhov’s advice to a novice playwright: “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.” Create anticipation and then fulfill the listener’s desire.

Foreshadowing is related to the figure of speech ominatio (Latin for omen), which, one Renaissance rhetoric text explains is “when we do show & foretell what shall hereafter come to pass, which we gather by some likely sign, and in ill things we foretell it, to the intent that heed may be paid, and the danger of avoided; and in good things to stir up expectation and hope.”

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has a soothsayer famously and futilely warn Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March”-a foreshadowing ominatio that Caesar famously and fatally ignores: “He is a dreamer,” shrugs Caesar. “Let us leave him.”

Bob Dylan’s tragic “Like a Rolling Stone” heroine is similarly warned, and by many: “People’d call, say, ‘Beware doll, you’re bound to fall’ “-which she also unwisely pays no heed to: “You thought they were all kiddin’ you.”

Dramatic foreshadowing has an even more important rhetorical counterpart. The golden rule of speechmaking is “Tell ‘em what what you’re going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” The first part of that triptych is the rhetorical foreshadowing of the main idea of your speech, the introduction of the dominant theme of your remarks.

I HAVE A DREAM
I can think of no more remarkable combination of dramatic and rhetorical foreshadowing in a modern public address than the opening lines of Martin Luther King’s keynote address at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (video above and text here).

The speech is often presented without his introductory sentence, which is unfortunate since it is an essential element of his message. King began, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” This opening line foreshadows that the intellectual focus of the speech will be “freedom,” a word that, with its partner “free,” King repeats twenty-four times in his 1500-word oration. As we will soon see, it also anticipates his optimistic message.

King uses the word “history” twice in this simple prefatory line, foreshadowing that he will be taking a historical perspective, which he does from the start.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

Echoing Lincoln’s famous formulation, “fourscore and seven years ago,” in the literal shadow of the Lincoln monument, King here combines the verbal with the visual to turn Lincoln’s two great 1863 acts of communication-the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg address-into a symbolic foreshadowing of his own remarks 100 years later. In doubling this historical connection, he underscores what will be his main theme: Emancipation has not yet been realized:

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

We hear again King’s favorite rhetorical device in this speech, anaphora, in the repetition of “one hundred years later” to help him refine the central idea that “the Negro is still not free.” King’s speech makes the words “Emancipation Proclamation” cruelly ironic: The Negro was proclaimed free, but still is not.

The body of the speech lays out King’s nonviolent approach to fulfilling the “quest for freedom” and restates again and again both his dream and his demand for freedom. He says that “in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream “¦ a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” An essential goal of the speech is to instill hope, optimism, and faith in the listeners that the dream of freedom will be achieved, to urge with a powerful metaphor that they “not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” He describes his stirring dreams, which are themselves ominatio, foretelling a future without racism, a future of freedom for all. He builds to the climax using the phrase “Let freedom ring” a dozen times and ends with the final repetitions of the key word as he says we can “speed up that day when all of God’s children “… will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

Now we see what was powerfully foreshadowed in the opening line: “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” He is foreshadowing-prophesying-the success of this demonstration and the realization of his dreams. Through the figure of ominatio King did “show & foretell what shall hereafter come to pass ” … in good things to stir up expectation and hope.”

That King would be a master of rhetoric and foreshadowing is not unexpected since he was, after all, a Reverend, a preacher, a student of the Bible. Foreshadowing and ominatio are the foundation upon which the Bible’s scaffolding of rhetoric was built-and the power of dreams to foretell the future is a Biblical truism. For Christians, the words in the Old Testament foreshadow the coming of the Messiah in the New Testament. The gospels are clearly written to echo the prophecies and promises and proverbs in the Old Testament. If you are a believer, that is because Jesus is the Messiah, the fulfillment of the words in the Old Testament. If you are not a believer, that is because the writers of the New Testament were trying to portray Jesus as the Messiah. Either way, by God’s design or man’s, the Old Testament foreshadows the New Testament again and again.

Jesus himself makes many prophecies that show and foretell what shall hereafter come to pass. He foretells events that happen very soon, such as when he tells Peter, “Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.” He foretells events a long time off: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” And he foretells events that have not yet come to pass-his return.

Foreshadowing and ominatio are key elements of poetic justice. Consider the story of Joseph. His brothers hated him because their father loved him the most, which the gift of the coat of many colors showed only too clearly. Joseph dreamt that he and his brothers were collecting stalks of grain, and when his own grain stalk stood up, those of his brothers bowed down before him. “Shalt thou indeed reign over us?” his brothers said. The text goes on, “And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words.” Dreams are classic foreshadowing in the Bible as well as many other holy books.

One day, when Joseph’s brothers saw him in the field, “they said one to another, ‘Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit “… and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’ ” This is best labeled ironic foreshadowing, a favorite device also of Shakespeare’s and other great writers. The final line is intended as sarcasm, that the dreams will be dashed in death, but it soon becomes dramatic irony.

Instead of killing him, his brothers sold him into slavery. Joseph ended up in the Egyptian prison, but using his power to interpret dreams, he not only won his freedom but soon became Pharaoh’s right hand man, after predicting that Pharaoh’s dream of seven lean cows eating seven fat cows meant there would be seven good harvests followed by seven years of famine, and thus, during the good years, Pharaoh would need to store up the grain. Every single thing Joseph said comes true. Then, during the famine, Jacob sent his sons to Egypt for grain so the family would not starve. Joseph thus gained power over his brothers, whom he put through various trials. But instead of seeking revenge, he saved his family from starvation.

This is poetic justice, that Joseph’s dreams of having power over his brothers came true precisely because they abandoned him, making their words dramatic irony that foreshadowed the end of the story. This is irony of fate.

The enduring power and poignancy of this story can be found in the words on a plaque at the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination (with a slightly different translation than the King James): “Behold the dreamer. Let us slay him, and we will see what will become of his dream.”

King’s dream did survive him, and, some might argue, in the election of Barack Obama, witnessed its apotheosis, though not its completion.

Whereas the civil rights movement was trying to undo a terrible multi-century-long moral wrong, the challenge for climate science activists (the future-generations rights movement?) is that we are trying to prevent a terrible multi-century-long moral wrong. That mission will require even more eloquence, even more commitment.

I have a dream of clean air and clean water for my daughter and all the children of the world. I have a dream of clean energy jobs for millions of Americans and tens of millions of people around the globe. I have a dream we saved this garden of Eden for generations to come, saved it from the greed and myopia of the 1%.

Related Posts:

• How to be as persuasive as Abe Lincoln, Part 2: Use irony, the twist we can’t resist
• “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor”: How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, 3
• How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address, 4: Extended metaphor

The reason I’m bringing this old news up is that just before I went on vacation, Politico Playbook — a must read for political junkies — explained “HOW THE WHITE HOUSE POUNDED ITS MESSAGE.”

I’m excerpting the Friday, December 23 piece below so you can see how the White House uses the bully pulpit when it actually cares a great deal about an issue, which it obviously — and nonsensically — doesn’t about climate change:

“–Monday: WH Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer did an hour of satellite TV time into the following markets: Palm Beach, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland and Seattle. … The regional communications team did a press call with their top regional reporters with Josh Earnest and Brian Deese … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio throughout the day … Administration Officials held a call with Hispanic media … Administration Officials were on African American and Hispanic radio and TV …

“–Tuesday: Office of Digital Strategy launched What 40 Dollars Means to You, an online effort to get the American people to lend their voice to this debate. We launched #40dollars on twitter, the webpage www.whitehouse.gov/40dollars and sent an email from David Plouffe to the White House list … Deese and Earnest convened a conference call with regional political reporters. … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio [and] African American and Hispanic radio and TV …

“–Wednesday: The White House featured responses that we received from Americans who’ve written to the White House to say what $40 means for them. These responses will be featured on whitehouse.gov , White House Twitter and Facebook accounts … [Council of Economic Advisers] Chair Alan Krueger delivered a speech on the economy and economic certainty in Charlotte, NC, in which he made … economic case for the payroll tax cut. … Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, [Labor] Secretary [Hilda] Solis and [Domestic Policy Council] Director Melody Barnes participated in interviews on African American radio to amplify our payroll tax cut message. Senior Admin officials also did Hispanic media outlets including radio … Barnes hosted a roundtable with African American reporters. … Gene Sperling and Secretary Solis hosted a conference call on the importance of extending UI benefits for regional and specialty outlets … The President tweeted on [@WhiteHouse] Twitter feed … Deese convened a conference call with Americans who Tweeted on #40dollars … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio [and] African American and Hispanic radio and TV …

“Thursday: The President delivered a statement payroll tax cut … joined on-stage and in the audience by people who [would] be impacted by the tax increase … The White House released a map on WhiteHouse.gov … with over 10,000 points throughout the U.S. of citizens responding to the question: ‘What does $40 dollars mean to you?’ … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio [and] African American and Hispanic radio and TV.”

Impressive.

Contrast that with climate change, where the administration won’t even use the word (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

Back in June 2010, Eric Pooley, former managing editor of Fortune, emailed me about his book on the story of the climate bill, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth:

When it comes to a cap on carbon, the White House’s strategy for 18 months has been to speak softly and … nothing more. Now the oil spill has forced Obama to ramp up his rhetoric. Does he mean it this time? Either he starts fighting or he doesn’t. The “stealth strategy” is inoperative. The White House can’t fake it any more.

We all know what happened.  They faked it, and they failed.

The notion that you win major political battles like these behind-the-scenes is laughable.  Silence equals surrender.

What’s particularly sad about all this is that the polling and public opinion analysis makes crystal clear that both global warming and clean energy are wedge issues — aggressive messaging on either divides the Tea Party from pretty much everyone else in the entire country:

• Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?“
• Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent
• Polling Reveals That Being Anti-Clean Energy is Bad Politics
• Independents Support Federal Investment in “Green Jobs” 2-to-1 Despite Solyndra Media Storm (9/29/11):

“In dozens of focus groups we have conducted this month across the country on a wide variety of subjects, when voters are asked where they would like new jobs in their state to come from, the first words out of their mouths are almost always the same – clean energy and related technology.  Voters believe that the clean energy economy is here and is growing, and they want their state to have a part of it.“

Some day some smart politician will figure all this out.

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

So just as he did with his infamous 2003 global warming warming memo –  which taught conservatives how to sound like they care about the issue while opposing all action — Luntz has some key advice for Republicans on how to pretend to care about regular people while continuing to screw them over.

Amazingly, “Yahoo News sat in on the session,” where Luntz went through his spin at the Republican Governor’s Association on “How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?”

Here are key do’s and don’ts from Luntz:

• Don’t say ‘capitalism.’
• Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’
• Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.’
• Don’t say ‘government spending.’ Call it ‘waste.’
• Don’t ever say you’re willing to ‘compromise.’
• The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: ‘I get it.’
• Out: ‘Entrepreneur.’ In: ‘Job creator.’
• “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”
• Don’t ever ask anyone you want them to ‘sacrifice.’
• Always blame Washington.

Yes, and some in the media still try to apportion blame equally between Democrats and Republicans for the toxic state  of American politics.

George Orwell, in his famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” wrote that

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.  Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Democrats do sometimes misuse the language and create euphemisms.  All politicians do.  But it is Luntz and his legion of conservative followers who have twisted the English language beyond recognition.  They are the true Orwellians.  The GOP parrot him as if they were reciting lessons in grammar school (see, for instance, Luntz’s memo, “The Language of Healthcare 2009,” which became the GOP playbook for attacking reform).

Is there any nonsense phrase that has been repeated to death this year more than “job creator” — in spite of the fact that for all of the wealth GOP policies have showered on the wealthy they didn’t actually create any net jobs under President Bush?

And yes, I put “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming” into the list above even though it is from Luntz’s 2003 climate memo.  I included it because conservatives continue trying to blame “the left” for supposedly changing the name from “global warming” to “climate change” (see Debunking the dumbest denier myth: ‘Climate Change’ vs. ‘Global Warming’).  For the record, while I would normally be inclined to recommend progressives say the exact opposite of whatever Luntz recommends for conservatives, there is way too much conflicting analysis to suggest that one of those terms is somehow more effective than the other. Feel free to use both.

How powerful are Luntz’s memos in the energy/climate debate (he wrote one on energy in 2005)?  Just think how many people who want to sound like they care about the issue follow his advice and talk about breakthrough technology as the only answer — see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah.” As Business Week noted at the time “what’s most striking about Bush’s Apr. 27 speech is how closely it follows the script written by Luntz earlier this year.”

Returning to Luntz’s Occupy Wall Street advice, his comments on capitalism are the most revealing and important for progressives.

The fact that Luntz  doesn’t like the word “capitalism” isn’t new.  It has long been on his “Republican Playbook” list of “words never to use” along with things like “drilling for oil.” Yes, GOP parrots are instructed to say “Exploring for energy” because “drilling for oil” paints a bad picture in people’s minds of “an old-fashioned oilrig that gushes up black goop.”  Go figure!

And so Luntz wrote back in 2005:

Capitalism reminds people of harsh economic competition that yields losers as well as winners. Conversely, the free market economy provides opportunity to all and allows everyone to succeed.

See how easy it is.  Simply change the words you use, and everybody wins.  Except, of course, 99% of the people have figured out that everybody doesn’t win when the game is rigged.

But I was certainly surprised Luntz admitted the following with the media present Wednesday:

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism”….

1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’

“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

Wow!

So the public thinks capitalism is immoral.  The thing to understand about Luntz is he never makes such pronouncements without having done extensive polling and focus groups.

Capitalism is, in theory, amoral, but it has become immoral in practice because many of its most successful practitioners are immoral (like the Kochs) and because the 1% can buy influence with governments to rig the rules in their favor.

I certainly believe that our current form of capitalism will be humanity’s ruin if conservatives keep blocking any serious carbon price and carbon-mitigation effort (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?” and “The Other 99% of Us Can’t Buy Our Way Out of the Impending Global Ponzi Scheme Collapse“).

The fact that Luntz says the public thinks capitalism is immoral suggests that message is a powerful one, which is no doubt why Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent are striking a chord with so many people.

How more blatant could Luntz be about his crass manipulation: “I’m trying to get that word removed.” Luntz is the embodiment of Orwell’s thought police.

In this case, I don’t think he can get conservatives to stop saying “capitalism,” since that is the altar many of them worship at.  In any case, progressives must not let Luntz win on this one.

Luntz’s manipulation knows no bounds:

7. The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: ‘I get it.’

“First off, here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ . . . ‘I get that you’re….  I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.”

Then, he instructed, offer Republican solutions to the problem.

Seriously.

What Luntz and the conservatives figured out is that since the media are not acting as referees anymore, but mostly as play-by-play commentators or simply stenographers, politicians can say whatever they want and then do whatever they want.  So, sure, say you “get it” to the Occupy crowd and then keep pushing “solutions” like tax cuts for the rich job creators, that will only worsen income inequality.

Rather than decrying these tactics, it remains critical for progressives to learn that words matter.  I have written a great deal about rhetoric over the years — see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive” — and do intend to publish my book on that subject next year.  So I’ll end with some old advice of Luntz’s:

There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

Capitalism.  Capitalism. Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism. Capitalism.  Capitalism.

I think people are finally hearing it.

President Obama used some of the harshest rhetoric of his term today in denouncing the Republican jobs plan, saying the GOP’s emphasis on less regulations would harm the environment, undercut health care and fail to produce necessary jobs in the short term.

“You got their plan, which is let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, (and) less people with health insurance,” Obama said in kicking off a three-day bus tour at the airport in Asheville, N.C.

So he has the simple language and some repetition (“dirty”) here — though “less people with health insurance” doesn’t flow.  I might have said, “dirtier air, dirtier water, sicker people — and just when people need health insurance the most, the GOP wants to cut 30 million of them off.”

But let’s give him the props.  Now he just needs to repeat this a hundred times or so.

Here’s the video:

Related Posts:

• Relax, climate hawks, it’s not about the science. The White House is just lousy at messaging in general
• Is Obama’s call for more drilling bad messaging masquerading as cynical policy — or vice versa?

Stanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick and his colleagues analyzed the 2008 presidential election and the 2010 congressional election.  They found:

“Democrats who took ‘green’ positions on climate change won much more often than did Democrats who remained silent,” Krosnick said. “Republicans who took ‘not-green’ positions won less often than Republicans who remained silent.”

I asked Krosnick by email about the implications of his research for the President who has all but dropped “climate change” from his vocabulary.  Krosnick answered:

Our research suggests that it would be wise for the President and for all other elected officials who believe that climate change is a problem and merits government attention to say this publicly and vigorously, because most Americans share these views.  Expressing and pursuing green goals on climate change will gain votes on election day and seem likely to increase the President’s and the Congress’s approval ratings.

I’ve talked to senior officials from the Administration as well as journalists who cover them — and both groups report that team Obama has bought into the nonsensical and ultimately self-destructive view that climate change is not a winning issue politically (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

And it is nonsense.  Prof. Edward Maibach, Director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, made the exact same point in a Climate Progress guest post last month: “Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?”

At the end, I repost yet again the umpteen polls that support this painfully obvious conclusion.  This new election analysis supports earlier polling analysis by Krosnick, which found:

“Political candidates get more votes by taking a “green” position on climate change – acknowledging that global warming is occurring, recognizing that human activities are at least partially to blame and advocating the need for action – according to a June 2011 study by researchers at Stanford University.”

Krosnick’s new study, “The Impact of Candidates’ Statements about Climate Change on Electoral Success in 2008 and 2010: Evidence Using Three Methodologies” here.  Let’s look at some more of its findings,  particularly at the presidential level:

A political candidate’s electoral victory or defeat is influenced by his or her stance on climate change policy, according to new Stanford University studies of the most recent presidential and congressional elections.

“These studies are a coordinated effort looking at whether candidates’ statements on climate change translated into real votes,” said Jon Krosnick, professor of communication and of political science at Stanford, who led two new studies – one of the 2008 presidential election and one of the 2010 congressional elections. “All this suggests that votes can be gained by taking ‘green’ positions on climate change and votes will be lost by taking ‘not-green’ positions.”

The findings are consistent with Krosnick’s previous research on voters’ preferences in a hypothetical election. Taken together, the studies make a strong case that for candidates of any party, saying climate change is real and supporting policies aimed at tackling the issue is a good way to woo voters, said Krosnick, a senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

“Recently, we’ve seen many politicians choose to say nothing about climate change or to take aggressive skeptical stances,” Krosnick said. “If the public is perceived as being increasingly skeptical about climate change, these strategies would be understandable, but our surveys have suggested something different.”

Voters preferred “greener” President

In the presidential election study, Krosnick and his colleagues asked voters for their opinions about climate and politics before and after the 2008 election. The research team conducted online surveys to reach a nationwide sample of voters.

Before the election, the researchers asked voters whether they supported or opposed government policies to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions. The survey also asked what voters thought of Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s positions on climate change. After the election, the voters reported if and for whom they had voted.

Not surprisingly, more people who said their own views on climate change were closer to Obama’s position than to McCain’s voted for Obama. This tendency was especially true among voters who cared a lot about climate change and persisted regardless of the voter’s ideology, party affiliation, preferred size of government and opinion about President Bush’s job performance.

Of course, since the election, Obama’s messaging has become truly dreadful.  And in a world where you turn the triumph on healthcare reform into a political liability, where you buy into and repeat the pernicious right-wing frame on issues from the debt ceiling to clean air for kids (!), then perhaps whatever you talk about will turn out to be a political loser.

But the fact remains that the public strongly supports climate action and aggressive clean energy policies even during the depths of the recession, even in the face of an unprecedented fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign during the climate bill debate — even without the White House using its bully pulpit to tip the scales further (see “Memo to policymakers: Public STILL favors the transition to clean energy” and links below):

Related Posts:

• Public support for action on global warming has grown since January (6/09)
• Opinion polls underestimate Americans’ concern about the environment and global warming (5/09)

• Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1 (9/09)
• New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade (10/09)
• Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming (11/09)
• Overwhelming US Public Support for Global Warming Action (12/09)
• Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks (12/09)
• It’s all about Independents — and Independence (1/10)
• Yale:  When asked whether they “support or oppose regulation carbon dioxide” as a pollutant, 73 percent said yes, with only 27 percent opposed, including 61 percent of Republicans (2/10)
• Washington Post Labels Global Warming a ‘Wedge Issue’ — But Doesn’t Seem to Know What That Term Means

Economic Stagnation. Recession. According to Paul Krugman and George Soros, we face now perhaps even Depression.

Hard Times is the American story, now and for the next several years at least. How we find the way back to jobs and growth is the only question. And we have the answer, because changing the energy system is the way back to economic growth. According to some economists, it’s perhaps the ONLY way back. The only new engine of growth, as there is no great new wave of technology, pharmaceuticals, housing, consumer spending and certainly no credit bubble on the horizon.

Saving the climate is the path out of the economic mess. The great waves of growth set off by the intercontinental railroads, the interstate highways, the internet, production for WWII — energy transformation is the next wave.

This should be our message for these hard times.

Here are some examples of how to talk about this.

As Bill Clinton so eloquently explains, deploying armies of workers to insulate every building in America will bring immediate and guaranteed cash flow at high rates of return from the energy savings. Better returns for bank and other capital than the stock market by far. It will put 1.5 million Americans back to work right away. And it will keep saving money for decades. Why aren’t we doing this? Who is in the way?

In California today, solar energy is now beating — that’s right, beating — the price of new natural gas power plants. It’s far cheaper than new nuclear, and now competitive with filthy coal. Solar’s price has dropped 70% in only three years, and like cell phones and dvd players, will drop more as demand soars till in just a few years it will be competitive in the rest of the nation.

Like with cell phones, you can now get solar on your roof even in New Jersey and Maryland for free when you sign a contract. No cost to you. With immediate utility bill reductions, and a guaranteed level price for 20 years. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s a fact. Believe me people are attracted to prices that can never go up and power that can’t run out. Shouldn’t we tell people?

Solar creates 7 times the jobs per dollar as fossil fuel investments. Building a smart grid with fuel-free renewable power sources will mean more affordable electric bills, with zero price volatility. Isn’t it time we told people, and seized the economic high ground?

Driving an electric car already costs no more than the equivalent of 75 cents a gallon or less. Now there’s a great bumper sticker — I PAY 75 CENTS A GALLON. In time, car batteries will also get cheaper and store power from the grid.

Energy transformation — and along the way preserving civilization from burning up — is the way back to sound growth. Not only to jobs, but to prosperity.

This is a winning message, and it’s the truth. It is also a message that will cross the political divide we face, where so many Republicans oppose climate action. It will attract business and split Republicans, which is essential. How will they look standing in the way of economic growth as the recession or worse continues to smolder?

Meanwhile, to continue the narrative, energy business as usual will cause accelerating economic decline as we keep sending ever greater sums out of the country for oil rather than using the money to employ our own people. Energy business as usual will guarantee higher fuel prices as world demand grows — why don’t we tell people? Instead the environmentalists are branded as the folks who will raise energy costs. This is truly upside down.

Storms, fires, floods and droughts will also get increasingly costly, along with the price of food, not to mention the vast sums that will be needed for insurance losses, or to build sea walls and levies in Miami, New York and along the Potomac and the Mississippi as water levels rise. Or the massive cost of trying to save irrigation for agriculture in California’s Central Valley as San Francisco Bay rises to saltify the Sacramento and San Joaquin river deltas, making crops ungrowable. Are sea walls productive investments? What rate of return do they create?

We need to stop allowing ourselves to be depicted as the forces that will hurt the economy by the greedy and ignorant few who will cripple it. Enough.

We know from cognitive science that people learn best from moral metaphors and stories. Meanwhile, everything in human affairs can be found in the stories of Shakespeare. Talk about a dramatic moral narrative! Here’s today’s production. The greedy CEOs of less than a dozen unpopular oil and coal companies — and their agents in Washington and the media — are blocking America’s recovery to jobs and a prosperous future. So greedy — like one of Shakespeare’s tragic characters — that they would literally bring down the Kingdom and everyone else along with them. Only this time the Kingdom is the whole planet.

For those of us in this room, who know the urgent and harrowing science of what the climate will soon bring, the story is literally Peabody Coal, Exxon, Koch Industries, Halliburton, Chevron, BP, Massie coal and a few others versus the survival of civilization. It’s a tiny few, paralyzing democracy and polluting the media with propaganda. This is a dramatic story indeed, accurate, and hopefully not the final act.

What great Shakespearean characters are the oil and coal CEOs who would be Shylock while the world burns? It is time to feature them — by name — as the villains in the story. Every story needs heroes and villains. We have both. CEO Rex Tillerson of Exxon is pulling the strings for John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, in order to protect the biggest profits ever made by any company in history. He is as un-American as Rush Limbaugh, standing in the way of recovery and American jobs. They are in the way of restoring the American Dream.

So our message should be prosperity, jobs and economic recovery from energy modernization. Our target audience should be business and those honest Republicans not on oil and coal’s payroll. Our narrative is that both the economy and the climate can be saved but for the corruption of a tiny few. Will they get away with it? Stay tuned.

– David Fenton is the CEO of FENTON, the public-interest communications firm in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and soon London. This post is based on remarks by the author at EcoAmerica’s “Change of Atmosphere” conference, October 4, 2011.

Related Post:

• William Shakespeare special: Why deniers out-debate smart talkers

And as we’ve pointed out again and again on Climate Progress, federal and state programs have created and saved hundreds of thousands of good jobs. In some cases, however, jobs haven’t been created as quickly as hoped — opening the entire concept of clean energy investments to political criticism.

But these criticisms ignore all the other value that clean energy projects bring to communities.

John Williams, an expert on sustainable communities and clean energy with HDR, believes we need to get back to the basics on messaging. Speaking to Climate Progress at the Greenbuild Conference in Toronto, Williams argues that we need to get beyond the “campaign” stage of promoting green jobs, and back into the “transformational” stage of talking about the immense economic, environmental and societal value through a business lens.

Here’s the video interview:

Williams: We really need to be asking a lot of questions, and certainly the jobs question is an important one. How does one project provide greater benefit than another project from a jobs point of view. But I’m for asking even more questions: Tell me about the jobs, tell me about the social benefits, the environmental benefits, the economic benefits. Tell me about resiliency benefits, and tell me about how that investment will enhance competition….  The more questions we answer, the better off we’ll all be.

CP: So if folks can better communicate the economic, social and environmental value rather than talk about specific job numbers necessarily, do you think you neutralize much of the political debate around this sector?

Williams: The reality is, we need jobs now. There’s no doubt about it. So we can’t overlook that conversation. But if you can translate the value of those jobs along with the other benefits, I think you’ve got to win.

Williams has certainly walked the walk. In order to give a better framework for evaluating all these benefits, he created a “Sustainable Return on Investment” model, which has helped leverage billions of dollars in capital from financial institutions for clean energy projects.

This is something I’ve argued for a lot in the past. Obviously, the high-level messaging on green jobs is important. But by talking about clean energy investments from a business perspective — clearly articulating how specific technologies and projects can create different types of value along with job creation — the political “argument” against green jobs becomes moot.

A recent EPA study estimated that just one law — the Clean Air Act — prevented 230,000 deaths, 3.2 million lost school days, and 13 million lost work days a year in 2010. The benefits of this act, including savings in medical expenses and increased worker productivity, are 30 times greater than its cost of implementation, and the benefits of regulation, more generally, also have been shown to exceed costs [PDF].

The right-wing noise machine has mastered the art of repeating a few key nonsensical messages over and over again until some people actually believe them.  It has much in common with the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who repeat the pigs’ perversion of the original principles:  “Four legs good, two legs better!” or “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And so in the Orwellian world of the right-wing, the word “rich” is out and “job creators” is in.  There simply are no more rich people in the Tea Party fantasyland.  Of course, no jobs are being created, and the rich are simply sitting on their billions, accumulating a staggeringly disproportionate amount of the wealth to shame the Gilded Age — the richest “400 people have more wealth than half of the more than 100 million U.S. households,” Politifact was grudgingly forced to agree that Michael Moore’s statement was correct.  So one would have to be a sheep to keep calling them job creators.

Oh, but wait, say the sheep,  the reason the job creators aren’t creating jobs is because of the “job-destroying EPA,” a phrase repeated as often as “job creator” is.  In a sane world — I know, I know, another counterfactual, but bear with me — everyone would call it the “life-saving EPA.”  But that would require a president with coherent principles and messaging skills to lead the way, as opposed to one who caved on the life-saving ozone rule — even though a National Bureau of Economic Research study found “robust evidence that ozone levels well below federal air quality standards have a significant impact on productivity:  a 10 ppb decrease in ozone concentrations increases worker productivity by 4.2 percent.”

In the interest of continuing to set the record straight, what follows is a post by Elizabeth A. Stanton, a senior economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute-U.S. Center, via TripleCrisis (and Grist).

Don’t buy the job-killing hype: Regulations create jobs, save lives

Elizabeth A Stanton

What’s good for job growth, good for the environment, and good for public health? No, it’s not a trick question, but it is a reassessment of what passes for conventional wisdom in Washington these days. The answer is the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other enormously popular environmental regulations enacted in the 1960s, 70s and 80s with strong bipartisan support.

Let’s start with the conventional wisdom. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recently called for the repeal of ten “job-destroying” regulations, calling them “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business people who want to create jobs.” On the list are regulations that limit air pollution, maintain the ozone layer, curtail greenhouse gas emissions, and prevent contaminants from entering ground water. (Also on the chopping block: labor standards and health benefits.) The rationale behind the proposed repeal of these important environmental regulations is somewhat baffling, but here’s an example to try to sort it out.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new regulation of space-heating boilers would, according to Cantor, impose, “billions of dollars in capital and compliance costs.” The question is, where do those billions of dollars go? If we are to believe the Majority Leader, this money is flushed down the proverbial toilet. Its only impacts are to raise the costs of goods and services, and to put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk (presumably, employers – cash strapped after flushing all that money – would have to fire workers to make ends meet). Environmental regulation, we are told, is nothing but a burden both to business and labor.

This strange and clearly disingenuous characterization of the impacts of environmental regulation has taken center stage in today’s national policy debate. A few fuzzy points in this logic, however, could benefit from some closer examination. Three questions come to mind.

What happens to the billions spent in capital and compliance costs? Far from being thrown away, this money supports jobs in sectors that manufacture capital goods and provide support services for compliance. Often called “green jobs,” the employment generated spans from the blue-color assembly line to white-color scientific research. Installing new equipment to prevent pollutants from leaching into our air and water also brings work to electricians, plumbers, and other more specialized technicians. Money spent for environmental regulation is spent productively, and the result is job creation.

When facing these new costs, will employers cut their workforce? This old supply-side war horse gets dragged out every time regulations need to be cast in a negative light. When the cost of doing business goes up – and especially when those cost increases are just a small share of revenues, as they are with almost every environmental regulation – firms don’t start cutting production and, consequentially, their workforce. Instead, they pass the costs on to their costumers and keep production and employment steady. (At present, with profits relatively high and demand low, it’s not even clear that prices would increase – it could be a pure Keynesian stimulus, forcing a small share of profits to be spent on goods and services, without any price changes.) Whether higher costs will dampen customers’ demand, and producers will respond by cutting back, is a separate, more complicated question. For many of the goods and services most affected by environmental regulations – electricity generation, for example – demand is extremely insensitive to small changes in the price. Studies have shown that environmental regulations very often create more jobs than are lost from reduced demand for the regulated, and therefore more expensive, goods and services.

What about the benefits of environmental policy, and the cost of allowing pollution to continue? Missing from the call to repeal key regulations is any mention of these policies’ benefits for environmental and public health. A recent EPA study estimated that just one law– the Clean Air Act – was preventing 230,000 deaths, 3,200,000 lost school days, and 13,000,000 lost work days a year in 2010. The benefits of this act, including savings in medical expenses and increased worker productivity, are 30 times greater than its cost of implementation, and the benefits of regulation, more generally, also have been shown to exceed costs. Not inconsequentially, clean air (and other) regulations also provide us with a cleaner, healthier natural environment.

It may be hard to believe after watching a little too much cable news but environmental regulations prevent senseless deaths and improve our standard of living, often while creating new jobs. Yes, they make the goods and services that pollute our neighbors’ air and water more costly – and any economist should be willing to admit that correcting these sorts of “market failures” is all for the good – but their job-killing powers have been greatly exaggerated. The jobs-environment trade-off is a scary story, but it’s not based in fact. When we are asked to choose between jobs or clean air, the answer should be, “Both.”

– Elizabeth A. Stanton is a senior economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute-U.S. Center, and is a member of the Climate Task Force of Economics for Equity and the Environment, a project of Ecotrust.

I’ve talked to senior officials from the Administration as well as journalists who cover them — and both groups report that team Obama has bought into the nonsensical and ultimately self-destructive view that talking about climate is not a political winner (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

Now I suppose it is perversely true that if your messaging is as dreadful as the Administration’s — where you turn the triumph on healthcare reform into a political liability, where you buy into and repeat the pernicious right-wing frame on issues from the debt ceiling to clean air for kids (!) — then whatever you talk about will turn out to be a political loser.

But the fact remains that the public strongly supports climate action and aggressive clean energy policies even during the deep recession, even in the face of an unprecedented fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign during the climate bill debate — even without the White House using its bully pulpit to tip the scales further (see “Memo to policymakers: Public STILL favors the transition to clean energy” and links below):

This confusion about public opinion and messaging extends far beyond politicians to many in the progressive community and media.  So I’ll be doing a series of posts in the coming weeks to set the record straight.

I’m fortunate to be able to start with a previously unpublished memo from one of the leading experts on public opinion and climate communications, Prof. Edward Maibach of George Mason University.  He is Director of their Center for Climate Change Communication and a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Communication.

Maibach has been involved in some of the most in-depth, multi-year polling on this subject, the widely cited “Climate Change in the American Mind Series.”  He discusses his findings, and why they are at odds with Obama’s silence on climate change, below:

Is President Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?

Ed Maibach

In a recent story by Juliet Eilperin about actions under consideration by the administration to raise vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, Jonathan Lash of the World Resources Institute gave voice to his concerns that the President has gone silent on the issue of climate change:

“I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change,” [Lash] said. “By excising ‘climate change’ from his vocabulary, the president has surrendered the power that only he has to explain challenging issues and advance complex solutions for our country.”

The President’s near-total silence on this issue throughout 2011 is perplexing given the clarity of his past statements about the need to deal with the threat.  Perhaps he has concluded that the issue has evolved into such a political loser that even speaking the words will jeopardize his plans.   If that is indeed the reason for his silence, findings contained in two research reports released last month – one by me and my colleagues at George Mason and Yale, and the other by a team at Stanford – indicate that the President would be wise to reassess his assumptions.

The Yale/George Mason study – Public Support for Climate & Energy Policies in May 2011 – shows that despite political polarization in Washington D.C., public support for a variety of climate change and energy policies remains high, across party lines:

Issue Priority & Support for Action

• 71 percent of Americans say global warming should be a very high (13%), high (27%), or medium (31%) priority for the president and Congress, including 50 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Independents and 88 percent of Democrats.

• 91 percent of Americans say developing sources of clean energy should be a very high (32%), high (35%), or medium (24%) priority for the president and Congress, including 85 percent of Republicans, 89 percent of Independents, and 97 percent of Democrats.

• Majorities of Americans want more action to address global warming from corporations (65%), citizens themselves (63%), the U.S. Congress (57%), President Obama (54%), as well as their own state and local officials.

• Despite ongoing concerns about the economy, 67 percent of Americans say the U.S. should undertake a large (29%) or medium-scale effort (38%) to reduce global warming, even if it has large or moderate economic costs.

• 82 percent of Americans (including 76% of Republicans, 74% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats) say that protecting the environment either improves economic growth and provides new jobs (56%), or has no effect (26%). Only 18 percent say environmental protection reduces economic growth and costs jobs.

Support for Specific Policies

• 84 percent of Americans support funding more research into renewable energy sources, including 81 percent of Republicans, 81 percent of Independents, and 90 percent of Democrats.

• 68 percent of Americans support requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if it costs the average household an extra $100 a year, including 58 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of Independents, and 82 percent of Democrats.

• Majorities support local policies, including installing bike lanes on city streets (77%), more public transportation (80%), requiring all new homes to be more energy efficient (71%), changing zoning to promote mixed development (57%), decreasing sprawl (56%), and promoting more energy efficient apartments instead of single family homes (52%).

The Stanford study – The Impact of Candidates’ Statements about Climate Change on Electoral Success in 2010: Experimental Evidences – provides even more direct evidence that climate change is not a political loser, but rather is a political winner for both Democrats and Republicans.  Specifically, the study shows that “endorsing the existence of warming, human causation, and the need for ameliorative action” wins votes among both Democrats and Independents, and does not lose votes among Republicans. “These results suggest that by taking a green position on climate, candidates of either party can gain the votes of some citizens while not alienating others.”

– Ed Maibach

Related Posts:

• Public support for action on global warming has grown since January (6/09)
• Opinion polls underestimate Americans’ concern about the environment and global warming (5/09)

• Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1 (9/09)
• New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade (10/09)
• Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming (11/09)
• Overwhelming US Public Support for Global Warming Action (12/09)
• Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks (12/09)
• It’s all about Independents — and Independence (1/10)
• Yale:  When asked whether they “support or oppose regulation carbon dioxide” as a pollutant, 73 percent said yes, with only 27 percent opposed, including 61 percent of Republicans (2/10)
• Washington Post Labels Global Warming a ‘Wedge Issue’ — But Doesn’t Seem to Know What That Term Means –   Stanford professor Jon Krosnick, which found:

“Political candidates get more votes by taking a “green” position on climate change – acknowledging that global warming is occurring, recognizing that human activities are at least partially to blame and advocating the need for action – according to a June 2011 study by researchers at Stanford University.”

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action — a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I did not want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way. My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation under 10,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid poorly, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay several times as much. My mother pursued freelance writing for many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this? Orwell, who shares far, far more in his many brilliant essays, argues in “Why I write“:

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

And no, I’m not operating under the misimpression that my writing can be compared with Orwell’s. I know of no essayist today who comes close to matching his skill in writing. On top of that, bloggers simply lack the time necessary for consistently first-rate efforts. I’ve written more than 3 million words since launching my blog in 2006. Perfection isn’t an option.

Orwell does, however, have the soul of a blogger. He has a brutal honesty that puts even the best modern memoirists to shame. And he confronts the toughest of truths, which I think is perhaps the primary quality I aspire to at ClimateProgress.org, a quality captured in the label that Rolling Stone gave me, “America’s fiercest climate-change activist-blogger.” Orwell asserts, “Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose.”

I see more than four great motives to blog, at least for me. But let’s start with Orwell’s:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death….

Inarguable. At least Orwell notes that “Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists.” I make no pretensions to be a serious writer. I’m not certain that bloggers are journalists. I think we are, however, journal-ists. What is a (web) log if not a journal?

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement….

I dictate all of my blog posts directly onto the PC using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. For me the sound of a good phrase, the pleasure of a headline that works, is immense.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Even more so with a blog. In the event we don’t avert catastrophic global warming, I do hope that the reporting and analysis in this blog, which evolves over time, will be of use to those trying to understand just how it is that, as Elizabeth Kolbert put it, “a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself.” It will be a great source of bafflement to future generations, and I suspect that as they suffer through the misery and grief caused by our myopia and greed, a literature will emerge aimed at trying to understand what went wrong, how we did this to ourselves. Perhaps ClimateProgress.org will help.

(iv) Political purpose.… Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Orwell goes on to say of himself (emphasis added):

By nature — taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.

His always careful word choice is telling. The Wikipedia entry on “pamphleteer” asserts, “Today a pamphleteer might communicate his missives by way of weblog.”

Orwell explains the source of his evoluton:

I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience…. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

I couldn’t dream of saying it better than that.

And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

I also blog for at least two other reasons.

Peace of mind: I would be unimaginably frustrated and depressed if I didn’t have a way of contributing to the task of saving a livable climate, a way of responding in real time to the general humbug and sentences without meaning and purple passages of those who wittingly or unwittingly spreading disinformation aimed at delaying action on climate change. I hope the comments section on the blog serves as a similar outlet for readers.

Personal growth: The act of trying to explain the science and the solutions and the politics to a broader audience forces me think hard about what I’m really saying, about what I really know and don’t know. The rapid feedback and global nature of the blogosphere mean that I get to test my ideas against people who are exceedingly knowledgeable and articulate. Through this blog I have interacted with people from every walk of life, with widely different worldviews, from many continents, whom I never would have otherwise known. And all from the basement of my home, occasionally with my daughter by my side.

It boggles the mind that I have a profession that did not exist even a decade ago, but that is, in many respects, precisely what my father did, precisely what I never expected to do.

I first became interested in global warming in the mid-1980s, studying for my physics Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and researching my thesis on oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. I was privileged to work with Walter Munk, one of the world’s top ocean scientists, on advanced acoustic techniques for monitoring temperature changes in the Greenland Sea.

A few years later, as Special Assistant for International Security to Peter Goldmark, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, I found myself listening to some of the nation’s top experts on these issues. Even a generation ago, they knew the gravest threats that would face us today. They convinced me that global warming was the most serious long-term, preventable threat to the health and well-being of this nation and the world.

In the mid-1990s, I served for five years in the U.S. Department of Energy. As an acting assistant secretary, I helped develop a climate technology strategy for the nation. Working with leading scientists and engineers at our national laboratories, I came to understand that the technology for reducing our emissions was already at hand and at a far lower cost than was widely understood — if we had smart government policies to drive those technologies into the marketplace, policies which included putting a price on carbon dioxide pollution. Then I worked with some of the nation’s leading corporations, helping them to make greenhouse gas reductions and commitment plans that also handsomely boost their profits.

After my brother lost his Mississippi home in the Hurricane Katrina storm surge and asked me for advice on whether or not he should rebuild there, I started interviewing climate experts for what turned into my previous book, Hell and High Water. Our top climate scientists impressed upon me the fact that the climate situation is far more dire than I had realized, far more dire than 98 percent of opinion makers and politicians understand — a situation that, sadly, remains true today.

I made a decision I would not pull any punches — I would get “political” as Orwell defined the term. I joined the Center for American Progress in 2006 because it had become the cutting edge think tank for both policy and communications on progressive issues. I began part time, posting on this blog once a day. As readership grew and ClimateProgress.org became a leading voice on energy and climate issues, I began posting more. Now I’m a full-time blogger, writing several times a day and also featuring guest posts from some of the best writers and thinkers on the subject.  CP also has a terrific clean energy blogger, Stephen Lacey.

A key goal of this blog today is to save you time. There is far too much information on climate science, clean energy solutions, and global warming politics for anyone to keep up with. And the status quo media simply puts out too much analysis, most of it quite bad. And yet everyone needs to follow this issue, needs to have an an informed opinion on the most important issue of the decade and the century.

The terrific commenters on this blog bring facts, links, nuance — and even reasoned push-back — to what gets written here. You often direct me to a breaking story or study I haven’t seen, giving me the jump on others in the blogosphere. You are a key reason Time magazine named Climate Progress one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010.” And that’s why I worked to bring back the old comments system.

The ultimate reason that I blog is because it’s not too late. Just because the catastrophic climate changes we are headed toward will probably be irreversible for hundreds of years or longer, that doesn’t mean they are unstoppable.

We are going to adopt the clean energy strategies described on this blog. That is a certainty. But the question of our time is, will we do it fast enough?

Humanity has only two paths forward at this point.  “The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline,” as President Obama (!) said in April 2009. Either we voluntarily switch to a low-carbon, low-oil, low-net water use, low-net-material use economy over the next two decades or the post-Ponzi-scheme-collapse forces us to do so circa 2030. The only difference between the two paths is that the first one spares our children and grandchildren and countless future generations untold misery.

As I wrote above, if I have learned anything from the blog, it is that there is in fact a great hunger out there to face unpleasant facts head on.   And that is possibly the most reassuring thing I have learned in the past five years.  Thank you all for that!

This post is a (slight) revision.

Related Post:

• Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010

Obama has hit an all-time low in unpopularity in Gallup tracking.  No surprise, really:

1. The economy is still doing poorly
2. He spent months talking about the debt ceiling rather than the economic issue the voters care most about — and the voters weren’t fooled into thinking cutting the debt would stimulate either jobs or the recovery.
3. His messaging is still lame.  As NY Times biz reporter Joe Nocera wrote last week, “When did President Obama become such a lousy speech-maker? His remarks on Monday afternoon, aimed at calming the markets, were flat and uninspired–as they have consistently been throughout the debt ceiling crisis.”
4. He looked weak by the end of the debt ceiling deal — he had been insisting on  a balanced approach that included revenues and  ultimately agreed to sign one that did not include them.

In short, while Americans suffer, Obama focused on the wrong issue, he didn’t talk about it effectively, and he was rolled.

Given how poorly he is doing,  I do think it worthwhile to point out one recent rhetorical flourish.  He embraced the term “Obamacare” and turned it back on his critics in an Iowa event (video via Think Progress):

“I have no problem with folks saying ‘Obama Cares.’ I do care. If the other side wants to be the folks who don’t care, that’s fine with me.”

When you can’t kill a meme or attack phrase, the best rhetorical strategy is to reframe it to your advantage, if you can.  Here he uses short words and folksy repetition.  This is actually classic rhetoric — see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1” — which is, sadly, something the president hardly ever uses, even though he’s known for speechmaking.

Obama also isn’t known for his compassion, for “feeling your pain,” the way Bill Clinton was.  So if he were to actually repeat this formulation enough, then when people heard the phrase Obamacare, they would  in fact be hearing his spin on it, “Obama Cares.”

I would have said this is all rather obvious, and he should have done this (and a million other such things) over a year ago.  Indeed, rhetoric was developed 25 centuries ago  precisely to help people express emotion effectively.  And this instance does show that he can do it if he tries.

The key, of course, would be repetition — the cornerstone of effective messaging — something Obama  has not been known for at all in his presidency (in marked contrast to his campaign where, admittedly, repetition is considerably easier if not inescapable).  If he were to repeat this formulation enough, along with his surrogates, it could stick.  Otherwise it will dry out and die in the hot summer sun like so much drought-stricken corn.

On Friday, I wrote that Perry is Obama’s dream opponent (see “Rick Perry Thinks America Desires Another Rigid, Anti-Science, Idealogue Governor From The Great State of Big Oil“).  Perry makes it easy for even a lame communications team like Obama’s to make this campaign about the past versus the future.

The only thing weaker than Obama’s brand is the GOP’s, and especially anyone with links to the Tea Party or Bush.  Why do you think Jeb Bush isn’t running??

Perry is a two-fer.  He is hard-core Tea Party — and another pro-pollution, extremist Texas governor.  Remember, even Bush shrewdly decided to disguise some of that in the 2000 “compassionate conservative” campaign, which is the only reason he eked out a loss win.

The WashPost asks “Is Rick Perry too George W. Bush-y?”  The Atlantic asks, “Is America Ready for ‘George W. Bush on Steroids?‘ ”  TP’s Faiz Shakir notes that Karl Rove just said that distancing himself from the still wildly unpopular Bush “Is Not Smart Politics Strategically Or Tactically” for Perry.  [No wonder they call Rove Bush's brain.]

Artist Mario Piperni's rendering of Bush and Perry photos.

But how precisely do you distance yourself from Bush when you served as his lieutenant Governor?  In theory  you do it with a well-crafted communications strategy.  But it turns out so far that Perry is dreadful at messaging.  He’s an undisciplined blurter, a guy who “shoots from the lip,” somebody who  just says whatever nonsense comes into his head.  The classic example of that is Newt Gingrich.

You’d think that with Perry  building up to this announcement for months he would have had a carefully crafted message and specific talking points he would repeat again and again.  But instead, in a widely criticized move, he questioned Obama’s patriotism and specifically his “love” of this country — when Perry himself has repeatedly raised the possibility of Texas seceding!

Worse, Perry threatened violence against the mild-mannered Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.” Treason is a capital crime.  Averting the economic harship of a double dip recession (caused first by Bush policies and then by Tea Party extremism) is the job of the Fed.  Tony Fratto, Bush’s former Deputy Press Secretary, tweeted that Perry’s remarks were “inappropriate and unpresidential.”

On Monday, Perry suggested a policy that would harm the health of our children and endanger hard-won victories that keep the air and water clean.  As TP Green reported, Perry called for “A Moratorium On All Regulations“:

We’re calling today on the president of the United States to put a moratorium on regulations across this country, because his regulations, his EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America.

“We’re sending out a request today asking President Obama to put a moratorium on all regulations,” Perry said on WHO radio in Iowa, recorded live by ThinkProgress.

Under such a moratorium, the Food and Drug Administration would stop approving new drugs and preventing human experimentation; the USDA would stop checking for food safety; the EPA would stop monitoring for poisons in drinking water; the Library of Congress would stop loaning materials to blind people; the NTSB would stop investigating airplane accidents; HHS would end Medicare payments; no more patents, copyrights, or trademarks would be issued; DHS would stop protecting chemical facilities from terrorist attacks; the Treasury would stop printing currency; financial sanctions on hostile nations like North Korea and Iran would end; and the Federal Reserve System would shut down.

Perry’s “moratorium on regulations” would mean a literal end to the rules of law in the United States. At least it would also mean that all of President George W. Bush’s midnight regulations favoring polluters and industry abuses would also be lifted.

The defining characteristic of Tea Party extremists like Perry is their anarchical disdain for government.  As Climate Progress has noted many times, however, failure to act on climate change ensures the biggest government possible this century.

Salon has a piece on “Rick Perry’s dangerously overheated campaign rollout.”  Unless Perry gets some message discipline to pass himself off as a more rational, temperate candidate, he may end up as parched as Texas.

Below are old comments from the earlier Facebook commenting system:

• Bart Laws · Top Commenter · Assistant Professor at Brown University

Since when is anarchism “conservative”? This guy’s ideal state is obviously Somalia.

4 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 1:58pm

Mandy Henk · Top Commenter · Access Services Librarian at DePuaw University

As an actual anarchist, I appreciate your comment. Anarchism is about freeing people from oppressive control structures–including the state, but also including other power hierarchies. It has nothing to do with this crazy idea that corporations should be allowed to do what they please to people. That is the antithesis of anarchism.

Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:02pm

Bart Laws · Top Commenter · Assistant Professor at Brown University

Good luck with that. Without the power of the state, who’s gonna protect you from corporations? There seems to be a logical problem there.

4 · Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:23pm

• taylorbarke (signed in using Yahoo)

No the question is: Who is going to protect the corporations from us?

4 · Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:37pm

View 3 more

Wesley Rolley · Top Commenter · Northwestern University

This is what I get from Perry. He led the prayer for rain. It appears that God, if there is one, parried that with a big “not yet… I still have to deliver 40 days and 40 nights on the North East.”

Then again, maybe God is just upset that someone has decide to bail on thinking for themselves and testing God by asking him to bail him out. What I was always told was the God helps those who help themselves.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:34pm

Peter S. Mizla · Top Commenter · Vernon, Connecticut

Give Perry & the republicans enough rope and they will hang themselves- trouble is in the process they will take allot of us with them before they are kicked out of power.

The C02 will have a bigger voice in the end then BO.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 4:12pm

Leif Erik Knutsen · Top Commenter · Friends with Joseph Romm

“Government can easily exist without law but law cannot exist without Government.” Bertrand Russell.

Take your pick and vote.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 1:27pm

Jeffrey Davis · Top Commenter

All regulations? What about those against murder?

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:07pm

Prokaryotes – · Top Commenter (signed in using Hotmail)

Rick Perry the perfect Bush impersonator.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 3:46pm

Julia Kuglen · Top Commenter · University of Texas School of Law

Worse than Bush.

1 · Like · Reply · August 16 at 9:19pm

John Tucker · Top Commenter · Tulane University

Perry isn’t rally “anti government” and neither is most of the tea party. That type advocates a seamless, uniform religion, law enforcement, military/ corporate facilitating, invisible hand type government.

The populist tea party is more closely a populist, anti intellectual, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism ) fascist movement. I’m not deriding them, that’s by actual definitions and the way they framed themselves ( http://teapartyreveal.blogspot.com/2011/08/defintiions-symbols-and-early.html ). They don’t even bother to keep up with the most basic issues of government affecting them; at present or historically.

Also lets face it – someone with a legitimate “anarchical disdain for government,” doesn’t suggest a surveillance and police state as a solution, and also has the sense to know and worry, when it partially already exists. ( http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2011/08/ponzis-and-predators-perry-outlines-policies/GocJEtJGv5iKloBLrLTbmK/index.html ).

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 17 at 12:19am

sasparillafizz (signed in using Yahoo)

Joe, he’s certainly living up to the shoot from the lip angle so far (just a couple of days in for him). Of course all this shooting from the lip comments, so far, are things most of the hard right would love – playing to the audience he’s staking out.

I hope he flames out, as I still consider him the most dangerous of the GOP candidates at this point (the one who could realistically win the primaries and have a chance of being elected, given an economy that wilts further, and who would do the most damage to the country if in office). It also appears he’s the guy with the money in the GOP race, at this point, already.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 1:39pm

Paul Magnus · Top Commenter

This is funny… are u a bigot?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/16/kathy-griffin-talks-michele-bachmann-bigot-conan_n_927900.html

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:25pm

Paul Magnus · Top Commenter

adult warning on the rest of it though…

Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:34pm

catman306 (signed in using Yahoo)

Now here’s a low hanging fruit.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:57pm

minority.report56 (signed in using Yahoo)

Here are a few categories of regulations that come immediately to mind.

Nuclear Safety Regulations.
Drug Safety Regulations.
Food Safety Regulations.
…See More

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 17 at 8:43am

Chris Mattingly · Environmental Consultant at Environmental Resources Management

WATCH THE VIDEO. He says “…a moratorium ON regulations…” Post a correction. Propaganda has no place in liberalism.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 5:11pm

Chris Mattingly · Environmental Consultant at Environmental Resources Management

The article stands as legit… the “ALL” quote is from the radio piece, whereas he left out the “all” in the street interview. “…calling today…on regulations…” vs. “…sending out a request…(mumbling)…on ALL regulations…”

Thank you for clarifying…

Like · Reply · August 16 at 7:17pm

Bart Ginsburg · Fresno, California

Oh brother where art thou’s brain.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 4:27pm

If true, this isn’t really news (see “Aussie PM Gillard gives climate speech Obama won’t” and links below).

What is news is that one of the giants of the environmental movement, Jonathan Lash, slams Obama in the piece for lack of leadership on climate.  I’ve known Lash for almost as long as he has headed the World Resources Institute.  WRI is in many ways a reflection of Lash’s temperament — rock-solid in substance and soft-spoken in rhetoric.

When Lash speaks out, people should listen.  Here’s what he said:

“I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change,” he said. “By excising ‘climate change’ from his vocabulary, the president has surrendered the power that only he has to explain challenging issues and advance complex solutions for our country.”

Lash answers the question that I and others have repeatedly posed about the administration’s lame messaging, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

Perhaps Lash is speaking out more bluntly because he announced in May he was resigning as WRI’s president after more than 18 years at the helm to become the president of Hampshire College, in Amherst,  Massachusetts.

He will be missed in DC.

Related Posts:

• Brulle: “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”
• Downplaying or remaining silent about climate change was and is a blunder for progressives
• The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2

So here’s a dedicated thread for people to post ideas — and to vote on and repost the ones you like the best.

Note that as this compendium from an earlier post makes clear, “What would make a good climate bumper sticker” is not the same as what would make a good energy slogan.

If there are enough good ideas, I’ll do a separate post for a runoff election.

NOTE:  Memorable slogans tend to use simple words [Just do it] and/or one or more figures of speech — like repetition [drill, baby, drill], alliteration [compassionate conservative], rhyme [It takes a licking and keeps on ticking] or metaphor [Like a rock, Morning in America].

This is clearly not a topic that will be resolved in a blog post, but as an adherent of a Rortian view I think the best way to get there is to start with Tarski, who offered the disquotational account of the truth condition:

“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.

That seems utterly trivial. But it can be made somewhat less trivial:

“La neige est blanche” is true if and only if snow is white.

Add the element of translation and it looks a little bit less trivial. And what you’re seeing here more clearly is that truth is a property of sentences, of linguistic elements. You have the language inside the quotation marks and the language outside the marks. You’re saying things and you’re talking about things that are being said. And while people can (and do) devise formal languages on their own and by stipulation, ordinary language doesn’t work this way. English is a set of social conventions and so is French and so are all the rest. Note that this doesn’t commit you to any kind of outlandish propositions about the nature of the world, it’s an account of the nature of descriptions of the world. It says that there will always be some margins at which the distinctions between advancing false claims and misusing words breaks down. When Jonah Goldberg says that liberalism is a species of fascism, for example, he largely seems to me to be abusing English rather than abusing the facts. But there’s no definitive adjudicator of what does and doesn’t constitute an acceptable way to use English words, there’s merely a very large and diffuse community of people who use the language.

Despite our 24/7 media coverage of the president, what he really feels about many key issues — notably climate and energy — remains opaque even to those who follow him closely.  Does he “get it” on global warming?  His actions — and lack of words — obviously suggest that he does not.  But who knows?  He clearly doesn’t get it enough to break out of the box that his handlers and the David Axelrod have put him into.

We have, however, been given a possible window into how he looks at energy and climate — and speechmaking.  The big speech that Obama gave last week on energy security was released in two forms:  “As Prepared for Delivery” and “As Actually Delivered.”

Let’s make what I think is a fairly reasonable assumption that the overwhelming majority of the changes in the speech were by Obama himself.

Here then is the speech with additions in boldface and the few deletions in strike through, plus some running commentary:

We meet here at a tumultuous time for the world.  In a matter of months, we’ve seen regimes toppled.  We’ve seen democracy take root in North Africa and in the Middle East.  We’ve witnessed a terrible earthquake, a catastrophic tsunami, a nuclear emergency that has battered one of our strongest allies and closest friends in the world’s third-largest economy.  We’ve led an international effort in Libya to prevent a massacre and maintain stability throughout the broader region.  (Applause.)

And as Americans, we’re heartbroken by the lives that have been lost as a result of these events.  We’re deeply moved by the thirst for freedom in so many nations, and we’re moved by the strength and the perseverance of the Japanese people.  And it’s natural, I think, to feel anxious about what all of this means for us.

And one big area of concern has been the cost and security of our energy.  Obviously, the situation in the Middle East implicates our energy security.  The situation in Japan leads us to ask questions about our energy sources.

In an economy that relies so heavily on oil, rising prices at the pump affect everybody — workers, farmers, truck drivers, restaurant owners, students who are lucky enough to have a car. (Laughter.)  Businesses see it rising prices at the pump hurt their bottom line.  Families feel the pinch when they fill up their tank.  And for Americans that are already struggling to get by, a hike in gas prices really makes their lives that much harder.  It hurts.

If you’re somebody who works in a relatively low-wage job and you’ve got to commute to work, it takes up a big chunk of your income.  You may not be able to buy as many groceries.  You may have to cut back on medicines in order to fill up the gas tank.  So this is something that everybody is affected by.

Probably the biggest changes Obama makes in this speech are to personalize things for the listener and to repeat his key points — two important strategy for any good speechmaker.

Also, for all the criticism of him as “Mr. Spock,” he is making (Bill) Clinton-esque “I feel your pain” additions that seem quite genuine.  That would be doubly true if these changes were made on the fly — while actually giving the speech — which seems likely.

Now, here’s the thing — we have been down this road before. Remember, it was just three years ago that gas prices topped $4 a gallon.  I remember because I was in the middle of a presidential campaign.  Working folks haven’t forgotten that. Working folks certainly remember because it hit a lot of people pretty hard.  And because we were at the height of political season, you had all kinds of slogans and gimmicks and outraged politicians — they were waving their three-point plans for $2 a gallon gas.  You remember that — “drill, baby, drill” — and we were going through all that. (Laughter.)  And none of it was really going to do anything to solve the problem.  There was a lot of hue and cry, a lot of fulminating and hand-wringing, but nothing actually happened.  Imagine that in Washington.  (Laughter.)

This mention of the campaign and “drill, baby, drill” is closest he ever gets in this entire speech to explaining to the public why our energy policy is so inane.

The truth is, none of these gimmicks, none of these slogans made a bit of difference.  When gas prices finally did fall, it was mostly because the global recession had led to less demand for oil.  Companies were producing less; the demand for petroleum went down; prices went down.  Now that the economy is recovering, demand is back up.  Add the turmoil in the Middle East, and it’s not surprising that oil prices are higher.  And every time the price of a barrel of oil on the world market rises by $10, a gallon of gas goes up by about 25 cents.

The point is the ups and downs in gas prices historically have tended to be temporary.  But when you look at the long-term trends, there are going to be more ups in gas prices than downs in gas prices.  And that’s because you’ve got countries like India and China that are growing at a rapid clip, and as 2 billion more people start consuming more goods and driving more cars — they want cars just like we’ve got cars; and using more energy they want to use energy to make their lives a little easier just like we’ve got — it is absolutely certain that demand will go up a lot faster than supply.  It’s just a fact.

Obama repeats the denigration of slogans.  Perhaps it’s not a big deal, but for someone who campaigned and won with a pretty good slogan, “Change we can believe in” but who has subsequently eschewed them, at least until the lame “Winning the future,” it is a tiny window into one reason why speechmaking has not been terribly impressive or memorable since becoming president.

So here’s the bottom line:  There are no quick fixes.  Anybody who tells you otherwise isn’t telling you the truth.  And we will keep on being a victim to shifts in the oil market until we finally get serious about a long-term policy for a secure, affordable energy future.

We’re going to have to think long term, which is why I came here, to talk to young people here at Georgetown, because you have more of a stake in us getting our energy policy right than just about anybody.

More empathizing here with the student audience — and with good reason.

Now, here’s a source of concern, though. We’ve known about the dangers of our oil dependence for decades.  Richard Nixon talked about freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil.  And every President since that time has talked about freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. Presidents and Politicians of every stripe have promised energy independence, but that promise has so far gone unmet.

He expands on the failure of previous presidents.

I’ve pledged to reduce America’s dependence on oil too, I talked about reducing America’s dependence on oil when I was running for President, and I’m proud of the historic progress that we’ve made over the last two years towards that goal, and we’ll talk about that a little bit.  But I’ve got to be honest. We’ve run into the same political gridlock, the same inertia that has held us back for decades.

Interesting that he drops the “pledge.”

That has to change.  That has to change.

We cannot keep going from shock when gas prices go up to trance when they go back down — we go back to doing the same things we’ve been doing until the next time there’s a price spike, and then we’re shocked again.  We can’t rush to propose action when gas prices are high and then hit the snooze button when they fall again.  We can’t keep on doing that.

This is naturalistic rhetoric of a kind the president doesn’t seem to use in his really big speeches anymore.  Simple language, repetition, and even a metaphor!

The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity, and our long-term security on a resource that will eventually run out, and even before it runs out will get more and more expensive to extract from the ground.  Not anymore.  Not We can’t afford it when the costs to our economy, our country, and our planet are so high.  Not when your generation needs us to get this right.  It’s time to do what we can to secure our energy future.

And today, I’m setting I want to announce a new goal, one that is reasonable, one that is achievable, and one that is necessary.

When I was elected to this office, America imported 11 million barrels of oil a day.  By a little more than a decade from now, we will have cut that by one-third.  That is something that we can achieve. (Applause.)  We can cut our oil dependence — we can cut our oil dependence by a third.

I set this goal knowing that imported oil we’re still going to have to import some oil.  It will remain an important part of our energy portfolio for quite some time, until we’ve gotten alternative energy strategies fully in force.  And when it comes to the oil we import from other nations, we can partner with obviously we’ve got to look at neighbors like Canada and Mexico that are stable and steady and reliable sources.  We also have to look at other countries like and Brazil.  Part of the reason I went down there is to talk about energy with the Brazilians.  They recently discovered significant new oil reserves, and we can share American technology and know-how with them as they develop these resources.

More personalization — and defending his recent trip.

But our best opportunities to enhance our energy security can be found in our own backyard — because we boast one critical, renewable resource that the rest of the world can’t match:  American ingenuity.  American ingenuity, American know-how.

To make ourselves more secure, to control our energy future, we’re going to have to harness all of that ingenuity.  It’s a task we won’t be finished with by the end of my presidency, or even by the end of the next presidency.  But if we continue the work that we’ve already begun over the last two years, we won’t just spark new jobs, industries and innovations — we will leave your generation and future generations with a country that is safer, that is healthier, and that’s more prosperous.

So today, my administration is releasing a Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future that outlines the a comprehensive national energy policy, one that we’ve been pursuing since the day I took office.  And cutting our oil dependence by a third is part of that plan.

Here at Georgetown, I’d like to talk in broad strokes about how we can achieve these goals.

Now, meeting the goal of cutting our oil dependence depends largely on two things:  first, finding and producing more oil at home; second, reducing our overall dependence on oil with cleaner alternative fuels and greater efficiency.

This begins by continuing to increase America’s oil supply. Even for those of you who are interested in seeing a reduction in our dependence on fossil fuels — and I know how passionate young people are about issues like climate change — the fact of the matter is, is that for quite some time, America is going to be still dependent on oil in making its economy work.

Yet another direct appeal to young people, though in an odd way, since 1) he makes it look like the passion about climate change is somehow unique to young people and 2) he is using it to segue into more drilling for fossil fuels.

Now, last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003.  And for the first time in more than a decade, oil we imported accounted for less than half of the liquid fuel we consumed.  So that was a good trend. To keep reducing that reliance on imports, my administration is encouraging offshore oil exploration and production — as long as it’s safe and responsible.

I don’t think anybody here has forgotten what happened last year, that we’re not even a year removed from where we had to deal with the largest oil spill in [our] history. I know the people of some of the fishermen down in the Gulf Coast haven’t forgotten it.  And what we learned from that disaster helped us put in place smarter standards of safety and responsibility.  For example, if you’re going to drill in deepwater, you’ve got to prove before you start drilling that you can actually contain an underwater spill.  That’s just common sense.

And lately, we’ve been hearing folks saying, well, the Obama administration, they put restrictions on how oil companies operate offshore.  Well, yes, because we just spent all that time, energy and money trying to clean up a big mess.  And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have amnesia.  I remember these things.  (Laughter.)  And I think it was important for us to make sure that we prevent something like that from happening again.  (Applause.)

Now, today, we’re working to expedite new drilling permits for companies that meet these higher standards.  Since they were put in, we’ve approved 39 new shallow-water permits; we’ve approved seven deepwater permits in recent weeks.  When it comes to drilling offshore, my administration approved more than two permits last year for every new well that the industry started to drill.  So any claim that my administration is responsible for gas prices because we’ve “shut down” oil production, any claim like that is simply untrue.  It might make for a useful sound bite, but it doesn’t track with reality.

What is true is we’ve said if you’re going to drill offshore you’ve got to have a plan to make sure that we don’t have the kind of catastrophe that we had last year.  And I don’t think that there’s anybody who should dispute that that’s the right strategy to pursue.

Moreover, we’re actually pushing the oil industry to take advantage of the opportunities that they’ve already got.  Right now the industry holds tens of millions of acres of leases where they’re not producing a single drop.  They’re just sitting on supplies of American energy that are ready to be tapped.  That’s why part of our plan is to provide new and better incentives that promote rapid, responsible development of these resources.

We’re also exploring and assessing new frontiers for oil and gas development from Alaska to the Mid- and South Atlantic states, because producing more oil in America can help lower oil prices, can help create jobs, and can enhance our energy security, but we’ve got to do it in the right way.

But let’s be honest Now, even if we increase domestic oil production, that is not going to be the long-term solution to our energy challenge.  I give out this statistic all the time, and forgive me for repeating it again: America holds about 2 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.  What that means is, is that even if we drilled every drop of oil out of every single one of the reserves that we possess — offshore and onshore — it still wouldn’t be enough to meet our long-term needs.  We consume about 25 percent of the world’s oil.  We only have 2 percent of the reserves.  Even if we doubled U.S. oil production, we’re still really short.

The President emphasizes how pointless the drilling is — making clear for anybody who’s paying attention that it’s done for purely political reasons.

All of this means one thing: So the only way for America’s energy supply to be truly secure is by permanently reducing our dependence on oil.  We’re going to have to find ways to boost our efficiency so we use less oil.  We’ve got to discover and produce cleaner, renewable sources of energy that also produce less carbon pollution, which is threatening our climate.  And we’ve got to do it quickly.

Now, in terms of new sources of energy, we have a few different options.  The first is natural gas.  Recent innovations have given us the opportunity to tap large reserves — perhaps a century’s worth of reserves, a hundred years worth of reserves — in the shale under our feet.  But just as is true in terms of us extracting oil from the ground, we’ve got to make sure that we’re extracting natural gas safely, without polluting our water supply.

That’s why I’ve asked Secretary Chu, my Energy Secretary, to work with other agencies, the natural gas industry, states, and environmental experts to improve the safety of this process.  And Chu is the right guy to do this. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but He’s got a Nobel Prize in physics.  He actually deserved his Nobel Prize. (Laughter and applause.)  And this is the kind of thing that he likes to do for fun on the weekend. (Laughter.)  He goes into his garage and he tinkers around and figures out how to extract natural gas.  (Laughter.)

I’m going to embarrass him further.  (Laughter.)  Last year, when we were trying to fill — figure out how to close the cap, I sent Chu down to sit in the BP offices, and he essentially designed the cap that ultimately worked, and he drew up the specs for it and had BP build it, construct it.  So this is somebody who knows what he’s doing.  (Applause.)  So for those of you who are studying physics, it may actually pay off someday.  (Laughter.)

Wow.  President Obama actually taking credit for something big — helping to plug the BP well.  Too bad that he refuses to make a habit of this so that nobody knows any of this.  God forbid that he actually explain that he saved General Motors and that seems to be working out.

But the potential for natural gas is enormous.  And this is an area where there’s actually been some broad bipartisan agreement.  Last year, more than 150 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle produced legislation providing incentives to use clean-burning natural gas in our vehicles instead of oil. And that’s a big deal.  Getting 150 members of Congress to agree on anything is a big deal. And they were even joined by T. Boone Pickens, a businessman who made his fortune on oil, but who is out there making the simple point that we can’t simply drill our way out of our energy problems.

So I ask members of Congress and all the interested parties involved to keep at it, pass a bill that helps us achieve the goal of extracting natural gas in a safe, environmentally sound way.

Now, another substitute for oil that holds tremendous promise is renewable biofuels — not just ethanol, but biofuels made from things like switchgrass and wood chips and biomass.

If anybody doubts the potential of these fuels, consider Brazil.  As I said, I was just there last week. Half of Brazil’s vehicles can run on biofuels – half of their fleet of automobiles can run on biofuels instead of petroleum. Just last week, our Air Force — our own Air Force — used an advanced biofuel blend to fly a Raptor 22 — an F-22 Raptor faster than the speed of sound.  Think about that. I mean, if an F-22 Raptor can fly at the speed of – faster than the speed of sound on biomass, then I know the old beater that you’ve got, that you’re driving around in — (laughter) — can probably do so, too.  There’s no reason why we can’t have our cars do the same.

More personalization of all kinds.

In fact, the Air Force is aiming to get half of its domestic jet fuel from alternative sources by 2016.  And I’m directing the Navy and the Department of Energy and Agriculture to work with the private sector to create advanced biofuels that can power not just fighter jets, but also trucks and commercial airliners.

So there’s no reason we shouldn’t be using these renewable fuels throughout America.  And that’s why we’re investing in things like fueling stations and research into the next generation of biofuels.  One of the biggest problems we have with alternative energy is not just producing the energy, but also distributing it.  We’ve got gas stations all around the country, so whenever you need gas you know you can fill up — it doesn’t matter where you are.  Well, we’ve got to have that same kind of distribution network when it comes to our renewable energy sources so that when you are converting to a different kind of car that runs on a different kind of energy, you’re going to be able to have that same convenience.  Otherwise, the market won’t work; it won’t grow.

The President understands the alternative fuel subject and can explain it simply.

Over the next two years, we’ll help entrepreneurs break ground for four next-generation biorefineries — each with a capacity of more than 20 million gallons per year.  And going forward, we should look for ways to reform biofuels incentives to make sure that they’re meeting today’s challenges and that they’re also saving taxpayers money.

So as we replace oil with fuels like natural gas and biofuels, we can also reduce our dependence by making cars and trucks that use less oil in the first place.  Seventy percent of our petroleum consumption goes to transportation — 70 percent.  And by the way, so does the second biggest chunk of most families’ budgets goes into transportation. And that’s why one of the best ways to make our economy less dependent on oil and save folks more money is to make our transportation sector more efficient.

Now, we went through 30 years where we didn’t raise fuel efficiency standards on cars.  And part of what happened in the U.S. auto industry was because oil appeared relatively cheap, the U.S. auto industry decided we’re just going to make our money on SUVs, and we’re not going to worry about fuel efficiency.  Thirty years of lost time when it comes to technology that could improve the efficiency of cars.

As I wrote at the time, Obama went off of his prepared remarks to point out that we haven’t increased fuel economy standards in 30 years “” but the President never bothers to explain to the public that’s because Republicans opposed such increases!  And so it looks like he is saying both parties are equally culpable and equally incompetent.  Is it any wonder so much of the public agrees?

So last year, we established a groundbreaking national fuel efficiency standard for cars and trucks.  We did this last year without legislation.  We just got all the parties together and we got them to agree — automakers, autoworkers, environmental groups, industry.

So that means our cars will be getting better gas mileage, saving 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the life of the program — 1.8 billion.  Our consumers will save money from fewer trips to the pump — $3,000 on average over time you will save because of these higher fuel efficiency standards.  And our automakers will build more innovative products.  Right now, there are even cars rolling off the assembly lines in Detroit with combustion engines — I’m not talking about hybrids – combustion engines that get more than 50 miles per gallon.  So we know how to do it.  We know how to make our cars more efficient.

But going forward, we’re going to continue to work with the automakers, with the autoworkers, with states, to ensure the high-quality, fuel-efficient cars and trucks of tomorrow are built right here in the United States of America.  That’s going to be a top priority for us. (Applause.)

This summer, we’re going to propose the first-ever fuel efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks.  And this fall, we’ll announce the next round of fuel standards for cars that builds on what we’ve already done.

To achieve our oil goal, And by the way, the federal government is going to need to lead by example.  The fleet of cars and trucks we use in the federal government is one of the largest in the country.  We’ve got a lot of cars. And that’s why we’ve already doubled the number of alternative vehicles in the federal fleet.  And that’s why today I am directing agencies to purchase 100 percent alternative fuel, hybrid, or electric vehicles by 2015.  All of them should be alternative fuel.  (Applause.)

Going forward, we’ll partner with private companies that want to upgrade their large fleets.  And this means, by the way, that you students, as consumers or future consumers of cars, you’ve got to make sure that you are boosting demand for alternative vehicles.  You’re going to have a responsibility as well, because if alternative-fuel vehicles are manufactured but you guys aren’t buying them, then folks will keep on making cars that don’t have the same fuel efficiency.  So you’ve got power in this process, and the decisions you make individually in your lives will say something about how serious we are when it comes to energy independence.

Well, students aren’t really the big purchasers of expensive new alternative fuel vehicles, so let’s call that call that an air ball.

We’ve also made historic investments in high-speed rail and mass transit, because part of making our transportation sector cleaner and more efficient involves offering all Americans, whether they are urban, suburban, or rural, the choice to be mobile without having to get in a car and pay for gas.

Still, there are few breakthroughs as promising for increasing fuel efficiency and reducing our dependence on oil as electric vehicles.  Soon after I took office, I set a goal of having one million electric vehicles on our roads by 2015.  We’ve created incentives for American companies to develop these vehicles, and for Americans who want them to buy them.

So new manufacturing plants are opening over the next few years. And a modest $2 billion investment in competitive grants for companies to develop the next generation of batteries for these cars has jumpstarted a big new American industry.  Pretty soon, America will be home to 40 percent of global manufacturing capacity for these advanced batteries.

And for those of you who are wondering what that means, the thing that’s been holding back electric vehicles is the battery that stores that electricity, that energy.  And the more efficient, the more lightweight we can make those batteries, the easier it is to manufacture those cars at a competitive price.

And if we can have that industry here in the United States of America, that means jobs.  If those batteries are made here, the cars are made here.  Those cars are made here, we’re putting Americans back to work.

Now, to make sure we stay on this goal we’re going to need to do more — by offering more powerful incentives to consumers, and by rewarding the communities that pave the way for the adoption of these vehicles.

Now, one other thing about electric cars — and you don’t need to talk to Chu about this — it turns out electric cars run on electricity.  (Laughter.)  And so even if we reduce our oil dependency, and we’re producing all these great electric cars, a smart, comprehensive energy policy requires that we’re going to have to have a plan to change the way we generate electricity in America so that it’s cleaner and safer and healthier.  We know that ushering in a clean energy economy has the potential of creating untold numbers of new jobs and new businesses right here in the United States.  But we’re going to have to think about how do we produce electricity more efficiently.

Now, in addition to producing it, we actually also have to think about making sure we’re not wasting energy.  I don’t know how we’re doing on the Georgetown campus, Mr. President, but every institution and every household has to start thinking about how are we reducing the amount of energy that we’re using and doing it in more efficient ways.

Today, our homes and businesses consume 40 percent of the energy that we use, and it costs us billions of dollars in energy bills.  Manufacturers that require large amounts of energy to make their products, they’re challenged by rising energy costs.  And so you can’t separate the issue of oil dependence from the issue of how we are producing generally — more energy generally.

And that’s why we’ve proposed new programs to help Americans upgrade their homes and businesses and plants with new, energy-efficient building materials — new lighting, new windows, new heating and cooling systems — investments that will save consumers and business owners tens of billions of dollars a year, and free up money for investment and hiring and creating new jobs and hiring more workers and putting contractors to work as well.

The nice thing about energy efficiency is we already have the technology.  We don’t have to create something new.  We just have to help businesses and homeowners put in place the installation, the energy-efficient windows, the energy-efficient lighting.  They’ll get their money back.  You will save money on your electricity bill that pays for those improvements that you made, but a lot of people may not have the money up front, and so we’ve got to give them some incentives to do that.

Good to see the President add this straight out pitch for efficiency

And just like the fuels we use in our cars, we’re going to have to find cleaner renewable sources of electricity.  Today, about two-fifths of our electricity come from clean energy sources.  But we can do better than that.  I think that with the right incentives in place, we can double our use of clean energy. And that’s why, in my State of the Union address back in January, I called for a new Clean Energy Standard for America:  By 2035, 80 percent of our electricity needs to come from a wide range of clean energy sources — renewables like wind and solar, efficient natural gas. to clean coal and nuclear power. And, yes, we’re going to have to examine how do we make clean coal and nuclear power work.

Now, in light of the ongoing events in Japan, I want to just take a minute to talk about nuclear power.  Right now, America gets about one-fifth of our electricity from nuclear energy.  And it’s important to recognize that nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  So those of us who are concerned about climate change, we’ve got to recognize that nuclear power, if it’s safe, can make a significant contribution to the climate change question.

The President adds “climate change” twice.  He scores big points for repetition, but it’s kind of lame in this context of pushing nuclear power with no mention of cost, and the phrase “the climate change question” is devoid of any visceral connectionto what we are doing to the climate now.

And I’m determined to ensure that it’s safe.  So in light of what’s happened in Japan, I’ve requested a comprehensive safety review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make sure that all of our existing nuclear energy facilities are safe.  And we’re going incorporate those conclusions and lessons from Japan in design and the building of the next generation of plants.  But we can’t simply take it off the table.

My administration is leading global discussions towards a new international framework in which all countries who are operating nuclear plants are making sure that they’re not spreading dangerous nuclear materials and technology.

But more broadly, a clean energy standard can expand the scope of clean energy investments because what it does is it gives cutting-edge companies the certainty that they need to invest.  Essentially what it does is it says to companies, you know what, you will have a customer if you’re producing clean energy.  Utilities, they need to buy a certain amount of clean energy in their overall portfolio, and that means that innovators are willing to make those big capital investments.

And we’ve got to start now because — think about this – in the 1980s, America was home to more than 80 percent of the world’s wind capacity, 90 percent of the world’s solar capacity. We were the leaders in wind.  We were the leaders in solar. We owned the clean energy economy in the ’80s.  Guess what. Today, China has the most wind capacity.  Germany has the most solar capacity.  Both invest more in clean energy than we do, even though we are a larger economy and a substantially larger user of energy.  We’ve fallen behind on what is going to be the key to our future.

Other countries are now exporting technology we pioneered and they’re going after the jobs that come with it because they know that the countries that lead the 21st century clean energy economy will be the countries that lead the 21st century global economy.

I want America to be that nation.  I want America to win the future.  (Applause.)

So a clean energy standard will help drive private investment in innovation.  But I want to make this point: Government funding will still be critical.  Over the past two years, the historic investments my administration has made in clean and renewable energy research and technology have helped private sector companies grow and hire hundreds of thousands of new workers.

I’ve visited gleaming new solar arrays that are among the largest in the world.  I’ve tested an electric vehicle fresh off the assembly line.  I mean, I didn’t really test it — I was able to drive like five feet before Secret Service said to stop.  (Laughter.) I’ve toured factories that used to be shuttered, where they’re now building advanced wind blades that are as long as 747s, and they’re building the towers that support them.  And I’ve seen the scientists that are searching for the next big breakthrough in energy.  None of this would have happened without government support.

Now, in light of our I understand we’ve got a tight fiscal situation, so it’s fair to ask how do we pay for government’s investment in energy. And as we debate our national priorities and our budget in Congress, we’re going to have to make some tough choices.  We’re going to have to cut what we don’t need to invest in what we do need.

Unfortunately, some folks want to cut critical investments in clean energy.  They want to cut our research and development into new technologies.  They’re shortchanging the resources necessary even to promptly issue new permits for offshore drilling.  These cuts would eliminate thousands of private sector jobs; it would terminate scientists and engineers; it would end fellowships for researchers, some who may be here at Georgetown, graduate students and other talent that we desperately need to get into this area in the 21st century.  That doesn’t make sense.

Sadly, this was in the original text.  Obama and his entire communications team never says who these self-destructive budget cutters are.  It’s like he’s playing college basketball and the GOP are in the NBA.

We’re already paying a price for our inaction.  Every time we fill up at the pump, every time we lose a job or a business to countries that are investing more than we do in clean energy, when it comes to our air, our water, and the climate change that threatens the planet that you will inherit — we’re already paying a price.  These are costs that we are already bearing.  And if we do nothing, the price will only go up.

So at moments like these, sacrificing these investments in research and development, in supporting clean energy technologies, that would weaken our energy economy and make us more dependent on oil.  That’s not a game plan to win the future. That’s a vision to keep us mired in the past.  I will not accept that outcome for the United States of America.  We are not going to do that.  (Applause.)

Obama’s speechwriter quietly repeats his current (lame) slogan, “win the future,” but Obama would not seem to think it is rhetorically strong enough to merit repeating.  Duh.

Let me close by speaking directly to the students here — the next generation who are going to be writing the next great chapter in the American story.  The issue of energy independence is one that America has been talking about since before your parents were your age, since before you were born.  And you also happen to go to a school [in a town] that for a long time has suffered from a chronic unwillingness to come together and make tough choices.  And so I forgive you for thinking that maybe there isn’t much we can do to rise to this challenge.  Maybe some of you are feeling kind of cynical or skeptical about whether we’re actually going to solve this problem. But everything I have seen and experienced with your generation convinces me otherwise.

How interesting he added that line about feeling cynical.  No doubt it is true — and not just of the people sitting in the audience.

I think that precisely because you are coming of age at a time of such rapid and sometimes unsettling change, born into a world with fewer walls, educated in an era of constant information, tempered by war and economic turmoil — because that’s the world in which you’re coming of age, I think you believe as deeply as any of our previous generations that America can change and it can change for the better.

We need that.  We need you to dream big.  We need you to summon that same spirit of unbridled optimism and that bold willingness to tackle tough challenges and see those challenges through that led previous generations to rise to greatness — to save a democracy, to touch the moon, to connect the world with our own science and our own imagination.

That’s what America is capable of.  That’s what you have to push America to do, and it will be you that pushes it. That history of ours, of meeting challenges – that’s your birthright. You understand that there’s no problem out there that is not within our power to solve.

I don’t want to leave this challenge for future Presidents. I don’t want to leave it for my children.  I don’t want to leave it for your children.  So, yes, solving it will take time and it will take effort.  It will require our brightest scientists, our most creative companies.  It will require all of us — Democrats, Republicans, and everybody in between — to do our part.  But with confidence in America and in ourselves and in one another, I know this is a challenge that we will solve.

Thank you very much, everybody.  God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.  (Applause.)

Well, his additions certainly improve the speech.  They show that his natural tendency is to personalize speeches, to try to connect with the audience where they are.  We see that he is very knowledgeable on this subject and does care about it a great deal.

As President, he is forced to give more speeches written by speech writers, which is one reason his speeches are nowhere near as good as the ones he wrote before he became president.

He added a bunch of “climate change” references, which is certainly a good thing, but he never spells out why the listener should care about climate change, so other than demonstrating that he knows about the problem, the speech becomes yet another wasted opportunity.

Sure, if you talk about any subject in a clumsy fashion you will turn people off “” just look at how Obama and major progressive politicians managed to turn a winning political issue, health care reform, into an unpopular one! [see "Can Obama deliver health and energy security with a half (assed) message?"]

Much of the climate language that gets tested is truly lame.  But the fact that poor messaging fails is not an argument for not doing messaging on the subject at all!

Science-based (dire) warnings are an essential part of good climate messaging — along with a clear explanation of the myriad clean energy solutions available today and the multiple benefits those solutions that deliver,  including  millions of jobs,  energy security, competitiveness, and especially clean air and improved public health.  Recent research supports that view (even though many in the media misreported the story).

Ironically, many people think the failure of the climate bill proves that talking about climate change doesn’t work — because they don’t realize that the messaging campaign built around the climate bill was based on not talking about climate change! Those still confused on that matter should read “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

Nearly $200 million was spent by enviornmental, progressive, and business groups in 2009 and 2010 to sell a climate bill.  The vast majority (but not all) of that messaging was built around ignoring the climate message and instead talking about clean energy jobs, energy security, and the threat from China.  Worse, the progressive political leadership (again with exceptions, such as Sen. John Kerry) also generally either refused to talk about climate change or they seriously downplayed the subject.  That includes, most importantly, President Obama and the entire White House communications team [see "The unbearable lameness of being (Rahm and Axelrod)"].

Even worse, as I’ve reported before, multiple sources confirm that the WH comms team shut down an effort by the office of the president’s science adviser,  John Hodren, to mount a strong defense of climate science after the Climategate emails were hacked in late 2009.  So not only was the WH –  the preeminent bully pulpit in American politics — failing to deliver a clear, positive message on climate science, they weren’t even responding to a strong, negative message by the disinformers.  That’s a lose-lose strategy.  As they say, you can’t beat a horse with no horse.  Is it any wonder that they had trouble mustering moderate Senate Democrats to support a climate bill last or to defend EPA’s  ability to regulate greenhouse gases this year?

As Ezra Klein wrote last June after Obama’s failed post-BP-disaster speech:

To expand a bit on a point I made on Rachel Maddow’s show, I’m just not sure how you do a response to climate change if you can’t really say the words “climate change.” And that’s where we are right now: The actual problem we’re trying to solve is politically, if not scientifically, controversial. And so politicians, rather than continuing to try to convince the American people that we need to do something about it, have started talking about more popular policies that are related to solving climate change. You see this in Lindsey Graham’s effort to argue for carbon-pricing from a place of purported climate-change skepticism. You see it in pollster Joel Benenson’s memo that tries to persuade legislators to vote for a climate bill without ever using those words. And you saw it in Barack Obama’s speech last night, which was all about clean energy and grand challenges.

I have spent as much time as anybody reading all of the polling and messaging memos, and talking to leading experts in communications.  This is certainly a complicated subject and nobody has figured out the best winning message –  probably because there is no one-size-fits-all message,  particularly in the face of  the most well-funded and sophisticated disinformation campaign in human history. That disinformation campaign complicates all messaging — and all message testing — since it is so pervasive and well-designed.

Because  of the importance of this topic and its complexity, and because I continue to hear otherwise highly informed people get this so wrong — including the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger — I will be doing more posts on it.

I was motivated to write this post because of a terrific HuffPost piece by Brendan Smith, co-founder, Labor Network for Sustainability, which deserves to be read in full:

Should We Remain Silent About Climate Change?

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

To talk of climate change or not to talk of climate change — that is the question.

For the last several years many of the biggest players in the climate movement have argued that to save the planet we need to purge the words “global warming” and “climate change” from our talking points and educational materials. Poll-oriented groups like the Breakthrough Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund argue that public opinion surveys prove Americans care most about jobs and lack the capacity to act on some distant threat.

They maintain that instead of being prophets of doom, climate protection advocates should gather around a “good news” agenda that limits our messaging to green jobs, national pride, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. “Forget about climate change” Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, explained to a gathering of environmentalists last year. Just ask people “Do you love America?”

Eerily, the “good news” strategy is heavily influenced by the Republican pollster and messaging maven Frank Luntz — infamous for coining phrases like “death tax.” In 2009 the Environmental Defense Fund teamed up with Luntz ‘s firm The Word Doctors to figure out how to help marshal public support for a climate bill. Luntz’s advice? “The least important component of climate change is climate change… You’re fighting the wrong battle. What they want is an end to dependence on foreign oil.”

This is the same Frank Luntz who has long been advising the Republican party on how to grind climate policy to a halt. In 2002 he authored an influential memo advising Republicans to greenwash their public image while sowing public confusion about climate change. Republicans should “continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate” because otherwise, he warned, “[s]hould the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.”

Both political parties took Luntz’s advice. Democrats and their allies began calling their climate bill the “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.” They stopped highlighting the economic and environmental implications of failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions. To hear them speak there was no climate crisis, only promises of green jobs and energy independence. Meanwhile, Republicans and their forces of climate denial talked about climate change all the time. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck obsessively ridiculed Al Gore during snow storms and profiled “experts” who denied the existence of climate change.

So what was the effect of climate activists’ decision to stop talking about climate change? The enemies of the planet won. Climate legislation is dead. The US has not cut emissions, created millions of new climate-protecting green jobs, or reduced dependence on foreign oil. Not talking about climate change has failed to reap even modest wins for the climate movement — let alone save the planet.

And possibly the most damning of all: Public concern about climate has plummeted in direct correlation with the “stop talking about climate change” strategy. In 1998, before Al Gore tirelessly began traveling the country with his doom and gloom slideshow, only 50% if the country considered climate change a major worry. By 2008, a year after Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize, two-thirds of Americans said they “worry a great deal or fair amount about climate change.” In 2009 Frank Luntz instructed environmentalists to stop talking about climate change, and by March 2011, the number of people concerned about the climate had dropped back down to 51%.

I think Luntz’s role is a tad overstated here.  Many other progressive messaging groups were selling this before Luntz (see Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica’s phrase ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’ isn’t going to replace ‘global warming’ “” and that’s a good thing).  Indeed, the origins of the myth that you can’t talk about climate change go back to the late 1990s, but that will have to be the subject of another post.

Most progressives never trusted Luntz (and his polling actually supported the view that the public already accepted global warming, which was not the view of some others).  Rest assured Axelrod and his ilk didn’t screw up their messaging because of Luntz.

Smith continues:

It is time to stop trying to save the planet by silence about what threatens it. The climate movement needs to start telling the inconvenient truth again. Richard Wiles, co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, writing recently about his own struggle with climate denial, observed that “what’s worse” than climate denial: “the other lie I’ve discovered in the process. It’s the lie that I’m telling. It’s the lie that we all tell to our children and each other when we don’t talk about climate disruption. It’s the lie of us all pretending that everything will be OK.”

Beyond an ethical aversion to lying, there are hard-nosed political reasons why the forces of climate protection need to keep ringing the climate alarm bell.

• Whether or not they currently believe in climate change, people are going to experience the climate catastrophe. Disasters are coming — indeed they are already here — and that is going to drive the agenda. It is up to us to explain why the floods, hurricanes, droughts, and other catastrophes are happening and to lay out what to do.

• Even though people may initially curse the messenger and trigger despair, history shows that bad news can spur action and social change. It was the danger of nuclear fallout in America’s children’s milk that spurred the movement that led to a ban on nuclear testing and ultimately to the reduction of strategic arsenals by 80 percent. It was Rachel Carson’s revelation in Silent Spring that DDT was poisoning the songbirds that led the public to understand the ecological interaction of nature and therefore support environmental protection legislation.

• Success goes to those who change the polls, not those who follow them. Al Gore, climate scientists, and millions of climate activists reshaped public opinion on climate. A majority of Americans are still seriously concerned about climate. They — and others — need to know why they’re right. Dreadful events — interpreted truthfully — are unlikely to be ignored forever. But people will have little opportunity to connect the dots between devastating floods, catastrophic storms, and lethal heat waves on the one hand and the greenhouse gasses that cause them on the other unless they are persistently and consistently presented with the facts.

• The right wing, backed by the fossil fuel industry, have spent millions of dollars promoting this story: The climate crisis is an imaginary threat invented by liberals to justify government power over individuals and companies, destroying both liberty and jobs in the process. To remain silent about the reality of the climate change threat is to maximize the credibility and effectiveness of this argument. Conversely, spelling out the facts of climate change is the way to expose the climate denialist argument for the hoax it is.

• As the climate crisis deepens, many people are likely to pass directly from denial to despair. Fear can make people hopeless and immobilized. If they don’t hear realistic explanations of what the climate crisis is all about, combined with rational proposals for what to do about it, they are made vulnerable to fantasy-based explanations and irrational solutions. Climate change is indeed scary, but it is a threat that affects all of us, so it provides an opportunity to cooperate in new ways at every level from the local to the global.

• The right wing is talking about climate change all the time. They have the initiative in framing the debate. And people will make ignorant decisions in the face of a one-sided debate. Without forceful articulation of the truth, the proportion of the public who grasp the seriousness of climate change could fall even further.

The real “good news” is that there are climate activist groups like 350.org and the 1Sky Campaign that never bought into the Frank Luntz’s school of climate politics. They kept sounding the alarm about the climate crisis. These are the folks who organized a global day of action with 5,200 rallies from Mt. Everest to the Great Barrier Reef in what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action on the planet.”

Of course we should keep talking about green jobs and reduced dependence on foreign oil — in fact we need to be presenting a robust vision for how to build a more just and sustainable future. And of course we need to avoid scaring people into despair. But that doesn’t require us to be silent in the face of an existential threat. It is as true as ever that silence equals consent.

– Brendan Smith

I strongly  agree with virtually every one of those bullet points.  Again, the last bullet is crucial. If those who understand the science don’t talk about it clearly and repeatedly, then the  public understanding of the issue will be dominated by the anti-science side, which shouts their message loudly and repeatedly.

I’ll end with an update of something I wrote two years ago about the counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive notion progressives and environmentalists shouldn’t talk about global warming:

We are engaged in a multi-year messaging struggle here.  The planet is going to get hotter and hotter, the weather is going to get more extreme.  One of the reasons to be clear and blunt in your messaging about this is that even if you don’t persuade people today, the overall message will grow in credibility as reality unfolds as we have warned.

To shy away from telling people the truth because they don’t want to hear it or they think it’s liberal claptrap is just incredibly un-strategic. Some groups don’t want people to talk about “global warming.”  And “” even worse “” they don’t want people to talk about extreme weather, which, as I have previously argued, is in fact the same thing that the climate disinformers want “” see “Why do the disinformers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?”

You must tell people what is coming, not just because it is strategic messaging, but also I believe because we have a moral responsibility.

Related Post:

• Winning climate messages combine dire scientific threat with solutions for a just world
• Opinion polls underestimate Americans’ concern about the environment and global warming

• Overwhelming US Public Support for Global Warming Action (12/09)
• Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks (12/09)
• Yale:  When asked whether they “support or oppose regulation carbon dioxide”¦as pollutant,” 73 percent said yes, with only 27 percent opposed, including 61 percent of Republicans (2/10)
• Public support for action on global warming has grown since January (6/10)

Australians of the future will look back on [opposition leader Tony] Abbott’s campaign with pity and shame. The pity and shame posterity reserves for leaders who miss the wave of history and misjudge the big calls.…

We will cut carbon pollution. We will not leave our nation stranded by history. We will not live at the expense of future generations. We will get this call right and get this job done: For our nation. For our people. For our future.

That is a small portion of a tremendous March 16 speech by Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard (here, excerpted at length below).

Obama, sadly, now refuses to explain to the American public the high cost of inaction, the myriad benefits of swift action, and the shameful, pitiful strategy adopted by the pro-pollution, anti-science deniers in the GOP political leadership — although he did give pieces of what needs to be said in various speeches back in 2009 (see links at end).

Gillard’s speech is an excellent combination of substance and rhetoric.  The whole thing is worth reading since we’re unlikely to hear such a blunt and courageous speech in this country by any major U.S. political leader for a long time:

Today we must embrace another moment of decision for the future of our nation: adecision to cut carbon pollution and build a clean energy economy for the 21st century….

In all of this, we draw strength from enduring Labor values: Protecting jobs – always our first commitment. A sustainable environment for future generations – an environment with less carbonpollution. Reform with equity, looking after those who need a helping hand. And accepting a scientific world-view in a community of reason.

Friends, the second US President John Adams once famously said that “facts arestubborn things.” No opinion poll can change the fact that climate change is real. It is caused by human activity. And we must cut carbon pollution. In a nation rich in fossil fuels, I wish it were not so. But it is. Greenhouse gas levels are one-third higher than before the Industrial Revolution,and higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

As a result, global temperatures have risen 0.7 degrees celsius over the past century and continue to rise. The last decade was the world’s hottest on record, warmer than the 1990s whichwere in turn warmer than the 1980s. In fact, globally 2010 was the equal warmest year on record, tied with 2005 and1998. 2010 is the thirty-fourth consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th Century average. In Australia, average temperatures have risen almost one degree since 1910, and each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the one before. That warming is real. Its consequences are real. And it will change our lives in real and practical ways.

More extreme bushfire conditions and droughts. Falling crop yields. Loss of species. Increased cyclone intensity. More days of extreme heat. Coastal flooding as sea levels rise. Bleaching of our coral reefs. And a substantial decline in alpine snow cover. Indeed, Professor Garnaut’s latest report indicates that the need to act is greater than ever. And the scientific consensus is stronger than ever. Given these realities, I ask who I’d rather have on my side: Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt. Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world.

It is deeply ironic that as the scientific evidence mounts, the Coalition’s positiongrows more extreme with every passing day.  Mr Abbott doesn’t care about climate change because he doesn’t believe in climate change. Yes, he says the right thing to the wider community. But put him on talkback radio and his true opinion emerges. It is no wonder that Mr Abbott told his party room not to talk about the science. Because half the Coalition party room consists of sceptics, deniers and opportunists. While decent men and women of the small ‘l’ liberal tradition like Judi Moylan, MalWasher and Judith Troeth tear their hair out in frustration watching a hard-won consensus evaporate in a cloud of denial and fear. Friends, that consensus was the product of long years of deliberation and debate

The first warning by a senior world leader came from none other than Margaret Thatcher – a trained scientist who knew what was at stake. At the 2nd World Climate Change Conference in 1990, Mrs Thatcher warned that:

The danger of global warming is … real enough for us to make changesand sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.

That conference led to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 moments of hope, lost to inaction and delay. There have been some brave attempts at reform along the way. As Environment Minister, Senator Graham Richardson first proposed a climate change response in 1989. His successor, David Kemp along with Peter Costello, tried again in 2002. In 2007, Prime Minister Howard accepted the Shergold plan to establish an emissions trading scheme. Both Labor and the Coalition went to the 2007 election pledging to price carbon. That consensus has now been destroyed. And friends, let’s set the record straight about the 2010 election. Yes I did promise that there would be no carbon tax.

I also said to the Australian people that we needed to act on climate change, we needed to price carbon and I wanted to see an emissions trading scheme. Now, if I’d been leading a majority government I would have been getting on with an emissions trading scheme, just as I promised the Australian people. As it is, in this minority parliament, the only way I could act to price carbon was by working with other Members of Parliament, or else do nothing. I had a stark choice: do I act or not act? I chose to act. The Government’s plan means we start with a fixed carbon price for a temporarytransitional period a plan that puts a price on carbon from day one. We will still have an emissions trading scheme but we will get there by a different route.

Our carbon pricing model will give industry time to adapt in a steady and deliberatemanner. It will generate revenue to assist households and businesses make the transition. And it will provide a real incentive for firms to reduce their carbon pollution. The important thing to know is that from 1 July 2012, carbon will be priced in the Australian economy. The journey of transformation will begin. Friends, I chose action over inaction because of this simple truth: If Australia does not adopt a carbon price in 2011, we probably never will. This is the year of decision. Action versus inaction. Acceptance versus denial. Setting Australia on the path to a high skill, low carbon future. Or leaving our economy to decay into a rusting industrial museum. That is the choice we face. Action will protect jobs.

Inaction will cost jobs. Tony Abbott will cost this nation jobs. In his landmark report, Lord Stern noted that while action has its price, but the cost of inaction will be far greater:

“The costs of action to the global economy would be roughly 1 percent of GDP, while the costs of inaction could be from 5-20 percent of GDP.”

[UK Government, Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, 2006]

As Prime Minister of Australia, I will not trifle with our nation’s future. I will not expose our people to such risks. We cannot afford to be stranded with an outdated high-emissions economy. We can’t freeze our economy in time, any more than we could lock ourselves behindtariff walls while the world changed outside. I don’t want us to wake up in ten years time lumbered with a high carbon economywhen the rest of the world has moved on and then scramble to catch up. Our nation is well equipped to make the transition. We have an abundance of natural resources like wind, natural gas, solar and geothermal.

For example, the highest average solar radiation per square metre of any continent in the world. We have an agile, innovative business sector tempered by three decades of exposure to global competition. We have a talented workforce ready to embrace the jobsof tomorrow. As Deputy Prime Minister, I often spoke about the opportunities that will come with alow carbon economy, like my address to the Green Skills Forum in 2009. It is a conviction I hold even more strongly today as countries like China plunge headlong into new industries like solar energy while we delay and hold back. Friends, the dignity and value of work lie at the very heart of everything myGovernment stands for.

That is why climate change is not just a debate among economists and scientists. Every Australian family has a stake in what we do. Delay will cost them jobs. It will cost them jobs through the impacts of a changing climate. Like the crop failures that will come with longer and harsher droughts. Or the loss of tourism jobs that will come with the bleaching of our coral reefs. Inaction will also cost jobs because emission-intensive economies will becomeun competitive in a low carbon world.

In the quest for comparative advantage, investment will flow towards those countries that can offer more output for fewer emissions. Inaction will cost jobs. Action will support jobs. Friends, action on climate change means creating new jobs for the future. It means saving and transforming existing jobs. It means re-skilling workers for the future. We will see new job opportunities in clean energy generation. Electric and hybrid cars. Manufacturing clean energy equipment. Energy efficient construction and retro-fitting existing buildings. Carbon capture and storage. Today’s workers will find themselves in different industries and different settings. Welders and steel workers will build and maintain large-scale solar power plants. Plumbers and electricians will be reskilled to install solar hot water systems and solar panels. And there will be new jobs too. Just as in the 1960s, the South Australian community could never imagine the job sin tourism, fine food and wine, the film industry and the arts that lay just around thecorner.

Or back in the 1980s that the ingenuity of markets would create enterprises like Google and Facebook that would change the world. In a similar way, clean energy will open up opportunities we are only just beginningto imagine. Those opportunities begin with that simple but momentous decision: Putting aprice on carbon.

Friends, a price on carbon is the cheapest way to drive investment and jobs. A low carbon economy will be more efficient and more productive. It will change behaviour right across the economy, driving innovation and creativity. Like the dynamic benefits of tariff reform, a market in carbon will not only cut carbonpollution but make the economy more efficient as a whole. The countless decisions needed to transform our economy cannot – and should not- be made by government decree. They can only be made by individual firms calculating how best to positionthemselves for a low carbon future. By contrast, the Coalition wants to pick winners from a central bureaucracy located in Canberra. More Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

Their “direct action” approach was a short-term fix cobbled together when Mr Abbott unexpectedly became Opposition Leader. It is a threadbare piece of policy. Never intended to be implemented. Merely a fig-leaf for denial and delay. No Liberal of consequence can support it. No economist of standing does support it. The Coalition’s direct action method abandons any commitment to market forces. It will increase emissions by 17 per cent, not the promised 5 per cent cut. And it will cause a $30 billion black hole that the Federal Budget could never sustain….

And it’s time Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey and the other climate change believers in the Coalition stood up to be counted. Or are the Liberals not only no longer the party of the free market. But no longer a broad church party where MPs are free to express their convictionsas well? Friends, none of this means we have to lead the world, and we have not. At the same time, we cannot afford to be left behind, yet we are.

While Australia delays, our peers and competitors are on the move. Thirty-two countries and 10 US states already have emissions trading schemes. Other economies, including China, Taiwan, Chile and South Korea, and a number of Canadian provinces, are either considering developing their own ETS or alreadyhave trial schemes in place. Carbon taxes are in place in Britain, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, theNetherlands and Canada and are under discussion elsewhere, including Japan andSouth Africa. China is closing environmentally-damaging, unsafe and economically inefficient small coal-fired generators at the rate of one every one or two weeks and replacing them with larger plants that are economically and environmentally much more efficient.

They are putting up wind turbines at the rate of one every hour. China has also set its own ambitious target of reducing carbon pollution by 40 to 45 per cent per unit of GDP by 2020. India is taxing coal to create a revenue stream for clean energy, and from April thisyear they will have an energy efficiency trading scheme.

In the race to build a clean energy economy, we have given the rest of the world ahead start. We’re going to have to work hard if we don’t want to be left behind. Friends, as we make that transition to a low carbon future, we won’t leave businessand workers and unions to manage on their own. That is not the Labor way. In the coming months, you’ll hear a lot about the impact a carbon price will have onemployment. Let me say this very clearly: We will protect Australian jobs at the same time as we create new ones.

The Government understands that some Australian firms compete with overseasindustries that won’t necessarily incur the same carbon costs as they would here. I don’t want jobs in those industries to go overseas. And I don’t want the emissions that come with those jobs to go overseas either because that would only compound the world’s carbon problems. That’s why the Government has committed to helping Australia’s trade-exposedemissions-intensive industries as the world transitions to a lower carbon future. Some people argue that providing assistance removes the incentive for business toreduce their pollution. I reject that assertion and I reject the lack of importance that this sentiment gives to the importance of protecting Australian jobs. To take just one example of the way this assistance could work.

If the Government chose to provide that assistance in the form of free permits assome have suggested though this decision has yet to be made, these businesses would then have an opportunity to reduce their carbon emissions, sell their surplus permits, and actually make money. Friends, just as we assist industry, so too will we assist households. There is no cost-free way of reducing carbon pollution and I don’t resile from thatfact.

Even Mr Abbott accepts there will be a pricing impact:

“I’m not saying there’s cost-free ways to reduce emissions.”
[MTR, 1 March 2011]

Amid all the misrepresentations, that is a precious grain of truth. But there is another more important truth to accompany it: under Labor’s equitable approach, price rises will be met by fair and generous assistance. We are still yet to decide on assistance measures, so Mr Abbott’s talk of excessivecost impacts is simply absurd. What is certain is that all funds raised by a carbon price will go to assisting households, helping business transition and programs to tackle climate change. Not a cent will go to Treasury. And the biggest share will go to households We will not allow low and middle income Australia to lose out. This is how Labor does economic reform. Make the big decisions. But carry the nation’s families and households with us along the way.

Friends, three weeks ago, I began a process that will equip our nation with a clean energy economy for the future: a price on carbon. It is a big call. One of the biggest in the modern era. A call that will shape the destiny of our nation as greatly as floating the dollar, cutting tariffs or introducing the GST. This nation-changing reform has been met with a campaign of fear just as Dunstan’sgroundbreaking reforms were met with fear and misunderstanding, reforms now taken for granted as part of everyday life. Like those purveyors of fear in the 60s and 70s, Australians of the future will look back on Mr Abbott’s campaign with pity and shame. The pity and shame posterity reserves for leaders who miss the wave of history and misjudge the big calls. The leaders who create fear and try to stop a confident nation dealing with thechallenges of the future.

I will never be such a leader. Faced with hurdles, I will always find a way through. Faced with choosing between taking a few knocks or doing what’s best for thenation, I will put our nation first every time, no matter what the personal price. I will always ensure that this nation seizes the opportunities of the future and doesnot cower in fear. A low-pollution, clean-energy economy is one of those opportunities. Lord Stern calls it ”
the most dynamic and creative energy and industrial revolution inour economic history.”

Mr Abbott wants us to believe that Australians are incapable of such change. I don’t share his basic lack of faith in the Australian people. Growing up here in Adelaide, I learnt something better than that. I learnt to have faith in the creative and optimistic spirit of this nation and its people. To believe that we are a smart, competent, resilient nation. A nation that has done great things in the past, and which can do even greater things in the future. A nation that understands when the soft options are gone, only hard choices remain. That is why we choose action over inaction.

We will cut carbon pollution. We will not leave our nation stranded by history. We will not live at the expense of future generations. We will get this call right and get this job done: For our nation. For our people. For our future.

Hear!  Hear!

Gillard has of course come under attack from the opposition for this speech, in part because she has switched on her campaign pledge not to support a carbon tax.  She responds to the critics here.

Related Posts (from 2009):

• Obama: “The world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, famine and mass displacement that will fuel more conflict for decades.”
• Obama takes on the anti-scientific delayers, while Australia’s Rudd slams the “deniers” and the “gaggle” of “conspiracy theorists” opposing climate action
• Obama at MIT: “From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to producing and use energy. The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy. I am convinced of that. And I want America to be that nation”¦. There are going to be those who make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Obama also seems to have bad luck.  He endorsed offshore drilling shortly before the biggest offshore oil disaster in history.  He embraced new nuclear power plants in a speech last February, and now we are seeing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl unfold.

But in many respects people make their own bad luck from a messaging perspective when they don’t have a coherent guiding philosophy that they explain to people again and again, a narrative, as it is more popularly called (see Is progressive messaging a “massive botch”? Part 2: Drew Westen on how “The White House has squandered the greatest opportunity to change both the country and the political landscape since Ronald Reagan”).

Ironically, Obama has so wanted to be a Reagan, but whatever one thinks of Reagan — and certainly he helped destroy US leadership in clean energy, among other things — he had a story and he stuck to it, so much so that he is revered for things that he never even did.  How else could a multiple tax-raiser be revered by those who make no new taxes a litmus test?

There was no philosophical or political reason for Obama to embrace offshore drilling, especially when he did, since he got nothing in return for it.  Same for nuclear power.

What inspires this latest post is Obama’s refusal to make the clear case that Republican budget cuts would be devastating to the health and well-being of this country.  A number of people have complained to me just how bad last week’s press conference was.  Let me pull out just the question and answer on the budget:

Q … And my question on the budget is — there’s been some criticism from members of your own party about your leadership on negotiations on spending. And I’m wondering, given that, if you can talk about where you stand on a three-week CR, on longer-term priorities, and what you would and would not accept on cuts.

THE PRESIDENT: … Now, with respect to the budget, I think it’s important to understand that right now the discussion is about last year’s business. We’re talking about how to fund the remainder of this fiscal year. This is an appropriations task. And we have been in very close contact with all members of Congress — both parties. I’ve had conversations with Mr. McConnell, I’ve had conversations with Mr. Boehner, I’ve had conversations with Nancy Pelosi, and I’ve had conversations with Harry Reid about how they should approach this budget problem.

Here’s what we know: The Republicans in the House passed a budget that has been now rejected in the Senate. They are not going to get 100 percent of what they want. The Democrats have put forward spending cuts, many of them pretty painful, that give Republicans already half of what they were seeking, because they’re the right thing to do. Many of those cuts are ones that were already embodied in the budget that I proposed for 2012. Now, that’s been rejected as well.

So here’s what we know — that both sides are going to have to sit down and compromise on prudent cuts somewhere between what the Republicans were seeking that’s now been rejected and what the Democrats had agreed to that has also been rejected. It shouldn’t be that complicated. And so what I’ve done is, every day I talk to my team, I give them instructions in terms of how they can participate in the negotiations, indicate what’s acceptable, indicate what’s not acceptable. And our expectation is, is that we should be able to get this completed.

Now, because I think neither Democrats or Republicans were in the mood to compromise until their 100-percent maximal position was voted down in the Senate, we’ve probably lost some time. And we may not be able to fully resolve this and meet next week’s deadline for the continuing resolution, which means that there may be potentially one more short-term extension.

Have you fallen asleep yet?

From a rhetorical perspective, he repeated the word “conversations” four times in one breath, so that’s presumably what he wanted listeners to come away with.  Obama is the converser in chief.

I suppose that his advisors have poll-tested this gobbledygook whereby he triangulates himself between the Democrats and Republicans while sort of staying above the fray, which is to say, by not doing anything but conversing.

And so a great nation crumbles.

Somewhere around this point in the answer is where the PBS Newshour got so bored it cut off the clip, so when I was watching it I thought it was even worse than it actually is.  I thought Obama hadn’t defended anything in the budget.  But it turns out he did.

But let me just make some broad points about this. Number one, we can’t keep on running the government based on two-week extensions. That’s irresponsible. We’ve got a war in Afghanistan going on. We’ve got a wide range of issues facing the country on a day-to-day basis. And the notion that we can’t get resolved last year’s budget in a sensible way with serious but prudent spending cuts I think defies common sense. So we should be able to get it done.

Point number two. There are going to be certain things that House Republicans want that I will not accept. And the reason I won’t accept them is not because I don’t think we’ve got to cut the budget; we do. And we’ve already put forward significant cuts in the discretionary budget, some of which have not made members of my own party happy.

But the notion that we would cut, for example, Pell Grants, when we know the single most important thing to our success as a nation long term is how well-educated our kids are, and the proposal that was coming out of the House would cut this year about $800 out of Pell Grants for 8 million kids, and if were extended into next year would cut in half the Pell Grants that they’re receiving — that makes no sense. The notion that we would decide that, under the Republican budget proposal, to eliminate 200,000 Head Start slots that also would mean the layoffs of 55,000 teachers — that doesn’t make sense.

Pell Grants and Head Start.  That’s it.  Good ‘ole education.  Can’t go wrong with defending the education of our children.  How about defending clean air and clean water for our children, too?

The principle that I’ve tried to put forward since the State of the Union is we’ve got to live within our means, we’ve got to get serious about managing our budget, but we can’t stop investing in our people. We can’t stop investing in research and development. We can’t stop investing in infrastructure — those things that are going to make us competitive over the long term and will help us win the future.

Specifics?  Nahh.

And so I’ve communicated directly to Speaker Boehner as well as to Republican Leader McConnell that we want to work with them to get to a sustainable discretionary budget. And we think it is important for us to stop funding programs that don’t work. But we’re going to make sure that we hold the line when it comes to some critical programs that are either going to help us out-educate, out-innovate, or out-build other countries.

Last point I’ll make on the budget. The Republican budget that passed out of the House included a whole range of what are called riders. These aren’t really budget items. These are political statements. And I want — I’ve said, again, directly to Speaker Boehner that we’re happy to discuss any of these riders, but my general view is, let’s not try to sneak political agendas into a budget debate. If Republicans are interested in social issues that they want to promote, they should put a bill on the floor of the House and promote it, have an up or down vote, send it over to the Senate. But don’t try to use the budget as a way to promote a political or ideological agenda.

I think that’s the American people’s view as well. I think one of the messages that the American people have clearly sent is get serious about living within our means and managing our budget in a responsible way, and stop with the political bickering. And if we have that view in mind, then I think that not only can we get this short-term issue resolved, but I think we can actually solve the long-term budget issues as well.

Live within our means?  How about not die within our means?  Peter DeFazio says “people will die” from GOP cuts to NOAA, disaster response programs.

This lame messaging — where Obama tries to be GOP-lite on the budget — isn’t even working, as yesterday’s Pew Research poll results show:  “Republicans Are Losing Ground on the Deficit, But Obama’s Not Gaining.”  Presumably Obama is so obsessed with the deficit because his advisors think it will help with independents.  Too bad for Obama that more independents understand the basic economics — spending cuts cost jobs:

Interestingly, Obama’s spokesman recently got some cajones:

The White House is bashing a proposed Senate GOP amendment to small business legislation that would nullify the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gases.

“This amendment rolls back the Clean Air Act and harms Americans’ health by taking away our ability to decrease air pollution,” Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday night.

He adds:

“Instead of holding big polluters accountable, this amendment overrules public health experts and scientists. Finally, at a time when America’s families are struggling with the cost of gasoline, the amendment would undercut fuel efficiency standards that will save Americans money at the pump while also decreasing our reliance on foreign oil.”

The White House decision to weigh in directly on the amendment signifies the stakes of the escalating Republican-led effort to crush a major part of the Obama administration’s environmental agenda.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is seeking to attach Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-Okla.) bill that would kill EPA climate rules to pending legislation that would reauthorize key small business programs.

The same block-EPA bill cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday afternoon.

Memo to White House:  Could you have that blunt message delivered by Obama himself, not a spokesman — during prime-time?