The Steady State Blog

Obamanomics and Environmental Protection It looks like Barack Obama has the knowledge to put an end to the erosion of common sense that plagued the landscape of our political economy – not to mention our landscape per se! – for the past couple of decades.  The bipartisan rhetoric from the highest positions that “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment” led citizens to believe it, corporations to hide behind it, and shenanigans all over academia and the civil service.

Obama might be the one to tell it like it is, based upon the excerpt (pasted below) from the article “Obamanomics.”   Of course, no presidential candidate can be a viable contender without putting forth a pro-growth agenda during the campaign.  Obama did that and will attempt to follow through.

The best we can realistically hope for is some explicit education, at least, on the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection (etc.), even while the growth is being facilitated via macroeconomic policy.   It is still going to take a ground-up movement, founded securely upon something like CASSE’s scientifically sound position statement, to empower politicians of any party to provide real leadership on this topic; i.e., leadership that will temper consumer behavior and reform macroeconomic policies.

Excerpt from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24Obamanomics-t.html?pagewanted=print:

“Shortly after I boarded Obama’s campaign plane this month, one of his press aides warned me that the conversation might not last long. She explained that he was exhausted from two days of campaigning in Florida and might decide to nap as soon as he got on the plane. But a few minutes later he summoned me to the plane’s first-class section, evidently choosing an economics discussion over a DVD of “Mad Men,” which was sitting on his side table.

His eyes were tired, and he looked a good deal older than he had only four years ago, on the night that he became famous at the 2004 Democratic convention. But we ended up talking for an hour. After I returned to my seat, the press aide walked back to tell me that Obama had more to say.

“Two things,” he said, as we were standing outside the first-class bathroom. “One, just because I think it really captures where I was going with the whole issue of balancing market sensibilities with moral sentiment. One of my favorite quotes is — you know that famous Robert F. Kennedy quote about the measure of our G.D.P.?”

I didn’t, I said.  “Well, I’ll send it to you, because it’s one of the most beautiful of his speeches,” Obama said.  In it, Kennedy argues that a country’s health can’t be measured simply by its economic output. That output, he said, “counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them” but not “the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.”

The second point Obama wanted to make was about sustainability. The current concerns about the state of the planet, he said, required something of a paradigm shift for economics. If we don’t make serious changes soon, probably in the next 10 or 15 years, we may find that it’s too late.

Both of these points, I realized later, were close cousins of two of the weaker arguments that liberals have made in recent decades. Liberals have at times dismissed the enormous benefits that come with prosperity. And for decades some liberals have been wrongly predicting that economic growth was sure to leave the world without enough food or enough oil or enough something.

Obama acknowledged as much, saying that technology had thus far always overcome any concerns about sustainability and that Kennedy’s notion had to be tempered with an appreciation of prosperity. What’s new about the current moment, however, is that both of these arguments are actually starting to look relevant. Based on the collective wisdom of scientists, global warming really does seem to be different from any previous environmental crisis.

For the first time on record, meanwhile, economic growth has not translated into better living standards for most Americans. These are two enormous challenges that are part of the legacy of the Reagan Age. They will be waiting for the next president, whether he is Obama or McCain, and they’ll probably be around for another couple of presidents too.”