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Minding the Gap

222 views · Published 3 December 2009 · 2:03:11 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: New America · 2009 · News & Politics

For the first time in more than a generation, President Obama is rewriting America's energy policy through a wide-ranging hodgepodge of initiatives including: stimulus funds, the rescue of the auto industry, EPA regulations, FERC initiatives, domestic climate change legislation, international agreements like the Copenhagen round, biofuel and plug-in hybrid mandates, and many smaller tax incentives and subsidies. The piecemeal nature of these changes makes them seem smaller than they are, and makes their impact--both positive and negative-- difficult to forecast in today's volatile energy markets.

New America Foundation board members Jeffery Leonard and Zachary Karabell are launching the Energy Advisory Council through a series of public forums over the next six months that will tap experts to examine the combined impact of the Obama administration's diverse energy interventions and initiatives. Through these public forums the Advisory Council will game out the impacts and synergies of the sweeping changes in the political economy of energy that are being created by Congress and the Obama administration with particular attention to how they will affect job growth and the economic resilience of middle class families. At the end of its run, the Energy Advisory Council will issue a series of policy suggestions to both "plug holes" in current initiatives and offer more ambitious vision to reframe the energy discussion to foster the long term growth of a thriving low carbon economy that meets the needs of all Americans.

Minding the Gap

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