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Barack Obama is America’s new president elect. Before long we will know whether he meant it - when he said that, whatever the financial traumas, a national surge to equip America with home-grown, green sources of energy was his number one economic priority.
Even as the votes were being cast, some said going green would have to wait. But the president-elect has been saying it has to be done now: for the planet, for American energy security - and for the good of an economy that badly needs government investment to kick start growth. Green jobs for a green economy.
Entrepreneurs, backed by billions of dollars of venture capital from Silicon Valley, are ready to invest in solar and wind power, and second-generation biofuels and much else in a huge scale. All they want is a green light for the legal fast-tracking and modest tax guarantees that will make it all profitable.
We are talking very big time indeed. As David Mills, head of solar thermal company Ausra, in Palo Alto, told me: "In the coming decades, clean energy is going to be ten times bigger than the internet and IT combined." .
Only the US can yet drive the change needed, because only the US has the markets, the capital, the technology and now, with Obama's transformational victory, maybe the political will too. Only the US, by force of example and through the size of its market, can persuade China and the other fast-emerging economies to embrace the new technologies.
If the US wants green technology on the scale being talked about, China will break its back to provide it. And it will transform its own energy system in the process.
Compare Obama's arrival in Washington with that of Franklin D Roosevelt at the start of the New Deal in 1934. The New Deal remade America and the world by driving governments to centre-stage in managing economies. Environmentally, it brought soil conservation programmes to fight the dustbowl and hydro schemes to bring power to those still without electricity. That drive sparked similar initiatives around the world, right through to the 1970s.
We need something similar now, to fight climate change and the iniquities of unbridled global markets. Why not?
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