What Obama Should do About Energy

McKibben criticizes Obama for removing the moratorium on offshore drilling, and for doing nothing serious to move beyond oil dependence. He believes that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf should become a turning point for his presidency:

"[T]he real test will simply be this: can the president seize this moment to move boldly on the biggest question facing the world: our endless addiction to fossil fuel. Not foreign fossil fuel, but fossil fuel period. Between last month's coal-mine disaster and this month's ongoing oil catastrophe, he's got the ultimate in teachable moments. If he wanted to launch a real offensive, here's how it would look: a series of urgent speeches in which he explained that the damage visible on the beaches of the Gulf is only the most dramatic of the problems we face from fossil fuel.

Those speeches would need to come with a plan...[that] would set a truly stiff price on carbon so that we would change our habits; that would sting, as it must. A real plan would also rebate the money raised by those fees to consumers, so the sting would be economically bearable.

But make no mistake--nothing he's done so far represents a real shift in our use of fossil fuel."