President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden officially announced key members of their economic team today, naming Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury and Lawrence Summers as Director of the National Economic Council. Obama and Biden also named Christina Romer Chair of the Council of Economic advisors, and named Melody Barnes and Heather Higginbottom to serve as Director and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
President-elect Obama explained:
Vice President-elect Biden and I have assembled an economic team with the vision and expertise to stabilize our economy, create jobs, and get America back on track. Even as we face great economic challenges, we know that great opportunity is at hand – if we act swiftly and boldly. That’s the mission our economic team will take on.
Visit Change.gov for more coverage of today's announcement, as well as more information on the newly announced members of the economic team.
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The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us It may be too late. But without radical action, we will be the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse George Monbiot Link .... Delivering a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by more than 8% a year. Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that annual emission cuts greater than 1% have "been associated only with economic recession or upheaval". When the Soviet Union collapsed, emissions fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable? ...
... The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. .. federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on the second world war ... This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world's energy infrastructure involves "an enormous front-load of fossil fuels", which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people "to make short term, radical sacrifices", cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years. ...
