Investir na substituição de tecnologias energéticas antiquadas ajudaria na criação de empregos

Al Gore* – O Estado SP

A inspiradora e transformadora escolha feita pelo povo americano ao eleger Barack Obama como nosso 44º presidente estabelece os fundamentos para outra escolha decisiva que ele – e nós – teremos de fazer em janeiro para dar início a um resgate da civilização humana, em caráter emergencial, da iminente e cada vez maior ameaça representada pela mudança climática.

A eletrizante redenção da revolucionária declaração feita pelos EUA afirmando que todos os seres humanos nascem iguais prepara o palco para a renovação da liderança americana num mundo que precisa desesperadamente proteger seu dote primário: a integridade e as condições de vida do planeta.

A autoridade mundial sobre a crise climática, o Painel Intergovernamental de Mudança Climática (IPCC), depois de 20 anos de estudos detalhados e da publicação de quatro relatórios unânimes, diz agora que as provas são “inequívocas”. Para aqueles que ainda se sentem tentados a ignorar os alarmes cada vez mais urgentes emitidos pelos cientistas de todo o mundo, a fechar os olhos para o derretimento da calota de gelo sobre o pólo norte e para todas as outras advertências apocalípticas feitas pelo próprio planeta, e para aqueles que dão mostras de tédio à menor menção desta ameaça existencial ao futuro da espécie humana, por favor, acordem. Nossos filhos e netos precisam que vocês nos dêem ouvidos e reconheçam a verdadeira natureza da nossa situação, antes que seja tarde demais.

Eis as boas notícias: os ousados passos necessários para resolver a crise climática são os mesmos que precisam ser tomados para resolver a crise econômica e a crise de segurança energética.

Os economistas de todas as orientações – incluindo Martin Feldstein e Lawrence Summers – concordam que investimentos rápidos e de grande valor numa iniciativa de infra-estrutura capaz de criar muitos empregos são a melhor maneira de reanimar nossa economia de maneira ágil e sustentável. Muitos também concordam que nossa economia enfrentará dificuldades se continuarmos a gastar centenas de bilhões de dólares todos os anos com petróleo importado. Além disso, especialistas em segurança nacional de ambos os partidos concordam que enfrentaremos uma perigosa vulnerabilidade estratégica caso o mundo perca subitamente o acesso ao petróleo do Oriente Médio.

Conforme disse Abraham Lincoln no momento mais sombrio pelo qual a América já passou, “a ocasião nos apresenta uma montanha de dificuldades, e precisamos corresponder à ocasião. Por ser novo o nosso problema, nós também precisamos inovar nas nossas idéias, e agir de maneira inovadora”. No nosso caso atual, pensar de maneira inovadora exige rejeitar uma definição superada e fatalmente equivocada do problema que enfrentamos.

Há 35 anos, o presidente Richard Nixon criou o Projeto Independência, estabelecendo uma meta nacional que esperava, no prazo de sete anos, desenvolver nos EUA “o potencial para satisfazer nossas próprias necessidades energéticas sem depender de fontes estrangeiras de energia”. Essa declaração foi feita três semanas após o embargo árabe ao petróleo ter provocado uma aguda elevação nos preços e obrigado a América a acordar para os perigos da dependência em relação ao petróleo estrangeiro. E – não é coincidência – isso ocorreu apenas três anos depois de a produção de petróleo dos EUA ter atingido o seu ápice.

Na época, os EUA importavam de outros países menos de um terço do total de petróleo consumido. E hoje, depois de todos os seis sucessores de Nixon terem repetido alguma versão dessa meta, nossa dependência dobrou, chegando a importação de quase dois terços do petróleo que consumimos – e muitos crêem que a produção mundial de petróleo esteja no seu ápice, ou muito próxima disso.

Alguns ainda enxergam isso como um problema de produção doméstica. Se ao menos conseguíssemos aumentar nossa produção de petróleo e carvão, argumentam eles, assim não teríamos de depender de importações do Oriente Médio. Outros inventaram maneiras ainda mais sujas e caras de obter os mesmos velhos combustíveis, como o carvão líquido, o petróleo de xisto, a areia alcatroada e a tecnologia do “carvão limpo”. Mas em cada um desses casos, os recursos em questão são caros demais ou poluentes demais.

Eis o que podemos fazer agora: um investimento elevado e imediato para empregar as pessoas na substituição das tecnologias energéticas do século 19, que dependem de combustíveis perigosos e caros de matriz carbônica, pelas tecnologias do século 21, que utilizam combustível gratuito e abundante: o sol, o vento e o calor natural da terra. Segue-se um plano de cinco partes para restaurar o poder energético da América com o compromisso de produzir 100% da nossa energia a partir de fontes livres do carbono em um prazo de dez anos. É um plano que nos aproximaria de soluções para a crise climática e econômica – e criaria milhões de novos empregos que não poderiam ser terceirizados.

Em primeiro lugar, Obama e o novo congresso deveriam oferecer incentivos de larga escala ao investimento na construção de instalações solares e térmicas concentradas nos desertos do sudoeste, instalações eólicas no corredor que vai do Texas até as Dakotas e instalações avançadas em pontos de grande geração de calor geotérmico capazes de produzir boa quantidade de eletricidade.

Em segundo lugar, devemos começar o planejamento e construção de uma rede nacional inteligente e unificada para o transporte da energia renovável, desde as zonas rurais onde ela é gerada na sua maior parte até as zonas urbanas onde ela é consumida. Nova fiação subterrânea de alta voltagem e grande eficiência pode ser projetada com recursos “inteligentes” , eliminando o desperdício. O custo dessa rede moderna – US$ 400 bilhões ao longo de dez anos – não se compara à perda anual das empresas americanas (cerca de US$ 120 bilhões) provocada pelo efeito cascata de falhas que são endêmicas à nossa rede elétrica.

Em terceiro lugar, devemos ajudar a indústria automobilística americana (não apenas as três grandes, mas também as novas empresas, mais inovadoras) na rápida conversão para modelos híbridos capazes de funcionar alimentados com a energia renovável que estará disponível conforme este plano amadurecer.

Em quarto lugar, devemos embarcar num esforço nacional pela adaptação de melhores sistemas de isolamento e janelas e sistemas de iluminação de maior eficiência energética. Aproximadamente 40% das emissões de dióxido de carbono nos EUA vêm dos prédios – e combater esta poluição economiza o dinheiro dos proprietários de apartamentos e de estabelecimentos comerciais. Esta iniciativa deve ser acompanhada no Congresso por uma proposta de ajuda aos americanos prejudicados pelas hipotecas cujo valor excede o de seus lares.

Em quinto lugar, os EUA devem mostrar o caminho adotando um preço doméstico para o carbono, e liderando, no ano que vem, o esforço mundial em Copenhague pela substituição do Tratado de Kyoto por um pacto mais eficaz, que limite as emissões globais de dióxido de carbono e encoraje os países a investir juntos, de maneira eficiente, na rápida redução da poluição responsável pelo aquecimento global, e na redução do desmatamento.

É claro que a melhor maneira – na verdade a única maneira – de garantir um acordo global para proteger nosso futuro é por meio do restabelecimento dos EUA como um país detentor da autoridade moral e política para liderar o mundo na direção de uma solução.

Olhando para o futuro, tenho grande esperança de que teremos a coragem de abraçar as mudanças necessárias para salvar nossa economia, nosso planeta e, afinal, a nós mesmos.

Numa era anterior de transformação na história americana, o presidente John F. Kennedy desafiou nosso país a colocar um homem na lua dentro de dez anos. Oito anos e dois meses mais tarde, Neil Armstrong pôs os pés na superfície lunar. A média de idade entre os engenheiros de sistemas que comemoraram o sucesso da missão da Apollo 11 na sala de controle de Houston naquele dia era de 26 anos, o que significa que sua média de idade quando o presidente Kennedy anunciou o desafio era de 18 anos.

Este ano viu igualmente a ascensão dos jovens americanos, cujo entusiasmo eletrizou a campanha de Barack Obama. Não há muita dúvida de que este mesmo grupo de jovens desempenhará um papel essencial neste projeto para garantir o futuro do nosso país, novamente transformando metas aparentemente impossíveis em sucessos inspiradores.

*Al Gore escreveu o artigo para The New York Times

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The New York Times

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

Paul Krugman.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get.

Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

A vitória verde
O fim-de-semana dos jornais americanos foi uma seqüência das especulações sobre o prêmio Nobel da Paz de Al Gore. Los Angeles Times define o prêmio como uma derrota para George W. Bush.

Thomas L. Friedman escreve no The New York Times que Gore é o que resta da credibilidade dos EUA no Exterior. Furioso, o The Wall Street Journal gastou seu artigo citando outras personalidades que deveriam ter recebido o prêmio ao invés daquele…verde!

Uma boa reportagem ambiental está no britânico The Observer, que conta que o líder ianomami Davi Kopenawa quer que as ONGs internacionais parem de comprar áreas de reserva na Amazônia. O seu alvo é o milionário conselheiro ambiental do governo inglês Johan Eliasch, cuja Ongs promete proteger a Amazônia comprando terras. É a velha idéia de que o problema da Amazônia são os brasileiros.

Leia a integra da coluna O Filtro no portal da revista Época

By FRANK RICH

The New York Times

THE Democrats can’t lose the White House in 2008, can they?

Some 13 months before Election Day, the race’s dynamic seems immutable. Americans can’t wait to evict the unpopular president and end his disastrous war. As the campaign’s poll-tested phrasemaking constantly reminds us, voters crave change above all else. That means nearly any Democrat might do, even if the nominee isn’t the first woman, black or Hispanic to lead a major party’s ticket.

The Republican field of aging white guys, meanwhile, gets flakier by the day. The front-runner has taken to cooing to his third wife over a cellphone in the middle of campaign speeches. His hottest challenger, the new “new Reagan,” may have learned his lines for “Law & Order,” but clearly needs cue cards on the stump. In Florida, even the most rudimentary details of red-hot local issues (drilling in the Everglades, Terri Schiavo) eluded him. The party’s fund-raising is anemic. Its snubs of Hispanic and African-American voters kissed off essential swing states in the Sun Belt and moderate swing voters farther north.

So nothing can go wrong for the Democrats. Can it?

Of course it can, and not just because of the party’s perennial penchant for cutting off its nose to spite its face. (Witness the Democratic National Committee’s zeal in shutting down primary campaigning in Florida because the state moved up the primary’s date.) The biggest indicator of potential trouble ahead is that the already-codified Beltway narrative for the race so favors the Democrats. Given the track record of Washington’s conventional wisdom, that’s not good news. These are the same political pros who predicted that scandal would force an early end to the Clinton presidency and that “Mission Accomplished” augured victory in Iraq and long-lasting Republican rule.

The Beltway’s narrative has it not only that the Democrats are shoo-ins, but also that the likely standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton, is running what Zagat shorthand might describe as a “flawless campaign” that is “tightly disciplined” and “doesn’t make mistakes.” This scenario was made official last weekend, when Senator Clinton appeared on all five major Sunday morning talk shows — a publicity coup, as it unfortunately happens, that is known as a “full Ginsburg” because it was first achieved by William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, in 1998.

Mrs. Clinton was in complete control. Forsaking TV studios for a perfectly lighted set at her home in Chappaqua, she came off like a sitting head of state. The punditocracy raved. We are repeatedly told that with Barack Obama still trailing by double digits in most polls, the only way Mrs. Clinton could lose her tight hold on the nomination and, presumably, the White House would be if she were bruised in Iowa (where both John Edwards and Senator Obama remain competitive) or derailed by unforeseeable events like a scandal or a domestic terror attack.

If you buy into the Washington logic that a flawless campaign is one that doesn’t make gaffes, never goes off-message and never makes news, then this analysis makes sense. The Clinton machine runs as smoothly and efficiently as a Rolls. And like a fine car, it is just as likely to lull its driver into complacent coasting and its passengers to sleep. What I saw on television last Sunday was the incipient second coming of the can’t-miss 2000 campaign of Al Gore.

That Mr. Gore, some may recall, was not the firebrand who emerged from defeat, speaking up early against the Iraq war and leading the international charge on global warming. It was instead the cautious Gore whose public persona changed from debate to debate and whose answers were often long-winded and equivocal (even about the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to ban the teaching of evolution). Incredibly, he minimized both his environmental passions and his own administration’s achievements throughout the campaign.

He, too, had initially been deemed a winner, the potential recipient of a landslide rather than a narrow popular-vote majority. The signs were nearly as good for Democrats then as they are now. The impeachment crusade had backfired on the Republicans in the 1998 midterms; the economy was booming; Mr. Gore’s opponent was seen as a lightweight who couldn’t match him in articulateness or his mastery of policy, let alone his eight years of Clinton White House experience.

Mrs. Clinton wouldn’t repeat Mr. Gore’s foolhardy mistake of running away from her popular husband and his record, even if she could. But almost every answer she gave last Sunday was a rambling and often tedious Gore-like filibuster. Like the former vice president, she often came across as a pontificator and an automaton — in contrast to the personable and humorous person she is known to be off-camera. And she seemed especially evasive when dealing with questions requiring human reflection instead of wonkery.

Reiterating that Mrs. Clinton had more firsthand White House experience than any other candidate, George Stephanopoulous asked her to name “something that you don’t know that only a president can know.” That’s hardly a tough or trick question, but rather than concede she isn’t all-knowing or depart from her script, the senator deflected it with another mini-speech.

Then there was that laugh. The Clinton campaign’s method for heeding the perennial complaints that its candidate comes across as too calculating and controlled is to periodically toss in a smidgen of what it deems personality. But these touches of intimacy seem even more calculating: the “Let’s chat” campaign rollout, the ostensibly freewheeling but tightly controlled Web “conversations,” the supposed vox populi referendum to choose a campaign song (which yielded a plain-vanilla Celine Dion clunker).

Now Mrs. Clinton is erupting in a laugh with all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer. Mocking this tic last week, “The Daily Show” imagined a robotic voice inside the candidate’s head saying, “Humorous remark detected — prepare for laughter display.” However sincere, this humanizing touch seems as clumsily stage-managed as the Gores’ dramatic convention kiss.

None of this would matter if the only issue were Mrs. Clinton’s ability as a performer. Not every president can be Reagan or J.F.K. or, for that matter, Bill Clinton. But in her case, as in Mr. Gore’s in 2000, the performance too often dovetails with the biggest question about her as a leader: Is she so eager to be all things to all people, so reluctant to offend anyone, that we never will learn what she really thinks or how she will really act as president?

So far her post-first-lady record suggests a follower rather than a leader. She still can’t offer a credible explanation of why she gave President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq (or why she voted against the Levin amendment that would have put on some diplomatic brakes). That’s because her votes had more to do with hedging her political bets than with principle. Nor has she explained why it took her two years of the war going south to start speaking up against it. She was similarly tardy with her new health care plan, waiting to see what heat Mr. Edwards and Senator Obama took with theirs. She has lagged behind the Democratic curve on issues ranging from the profound (calling for an unequivocal ban on torture) to the trivial (formulating a response to the MoveOn.org Petraeus ad).

As was proved again in Wednesday night’s debate, her opponents have not yet figured out how to seriously challenge her. Now the story line of her inevitable triumph is gathering force. At the same time, her campaign works relentlessly to shut down legitimate journalistic vetting of her record. In the latest example, Politico.com reported last week on the murky backstage machinations by the Clinton camp before the magazine GQ killed an article by Joshua Green, whose 2006 Atlantic Monthly profile judged Mrs. Clinton a practitioner of “systematic caution” with “no big ideas.” The donors’ list and first lady archives at the Clinton presidential library remain far from transparent.

Senator Clinton may well be the Democrats’ most accomplished would-be president. But we won’t know for certain until she’s tested by events she can’t control. Had Bill Bradley roughed up Mr. Gore in 2000, it might have jolted him into running a smarter race against George W. Bush.

In this context it’s worth noting that Mr. Bush’s desperate lame-duck campaign to brand himself as a reincarnation of Harry Truman is not 100 percent ludicrous. A tiny part of the analogy could yet pan out. In 1948, Washington’s commentators and pollsters were convinced that Americans, tired of 15 years of Democratic rule, would vote in a Republican. Like today’s G.O.P., the Democrats back then were saddled with both an unloved incumbent president and open divisions in the party’s ranks on both its left and right flanks. Surely, the thinking went, the beleaguered Democrats couldn’t possibly vanquish a presidential candidate from New York known for his experience, competence, uncontroversial stands and above-the-fray demeanor.

You don’t want to push historical analogies too far, but it’s hard not to add that the campaign slogan of that sure winner, Thomas Dewey, had a certain 2008 ring to it: “It’s time for a change.”