From the Guardian:
Hillary Clinton's climate change plan 'just plain silly', says leading expert
The Democratic frontrunner’s solar proposal has major holes if she hopes to halt global warming. What would a real climate-change candidate look like?
By Caty Enders
Hillary Clinton’s pledge on Sunday to support renewable energy and boost subsidies for solar panels was set up as a great unveiling – the Democratic frontrunner’s first public remarks on how her presidency would tackle climate change.
“I personally believe climate change is a challenge of such magnitude and urgency that we need a president who will set ambitious goals,” she said in a video posted to her campaign website.
But for many who study climate change, Clinton’s proposal lacked the ambition and sense of urgency appropriate to the scale of the problem.
In her initial policy proposal, Clinton pledged tax incentives that would help install half a billion solar panels nationwide within four years of taking office. She also pledged that the US would generate enough renewable energy to power every home in the country by 2027.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben said that while Clinton’s support for solar was necessary, it was far from a comprehensive energy policy. “Much of the impact of her climate plan was undercut the next day by her unwillingness to talk about the supply side of the equation,” he said. “Ducking questions about the Canadian tar sands or drilling in the Arctic makes everyone worry we’re going to see eight more years of an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy, which is what we do not need to hear in the hottest year ever measured on our planet.”
“It’s just plain silly,” said James Hansen, a climate change researcher who headed Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies for over 30 years. “No, you cannot solve the problem without a fundamental change, and that means you have to make the price of fossil fuels honest. Subsidizing solar panels is not going to solve the problem.”
Hillary says correctly "a challenge of such magnitude and urgency that we need a president who will set ambitious goals,” and then she proceeds to set modest goals, not ambitious ones. I have to agree with Bill McKibben's analysis that Hillary's proposal falls far short of the dramatic changes we need to make to move away from fossil fuels. If Hillary wants to make Changes on the scale that the urgency she mentioned demands she needs to put it front and center to build the mandate she'll need to undertake the kind of paradigm change we need to make.