In the process of discussing the collapse of prices in Europe’s carbon emissions permit market, and how that phenomenon illustrates some of the advantages of a cap-and-trade system over a straightforward carbon tax, Bradford Plumer at TNR notes one of the underpublicized upsides of the economic crisis: we’ll see less pollution.
Getting back to the EU, Plumer explains:

Back in 2005, prices dropped to zero because the EU set the cap too loosely and handed out more permits than companies even needed—that was a real flaw, and it got patched up. But this time around, permit prices are plummeting because a global recession has scuppered economic activity across Europe, and companies are polluting less. They’re also using more natural gas and less coal. None of that is a concern per se. Carbon emissions are, after all, going down. In fact, this might be one advantage of having a cap-and-trade regime instead of a carbon tax. During recessions, emitting carbon becomes cheaper under a cap (because fewer people are doing it), so companies can postpone decarbonization projects until the economy starts booming again and they can spare the extra funds to do so.

None of this is terribly surprising if you think about it for a few minutes. But it does underscore a political problem with carbon emissions limits specifically, and with action on global climate change generally, that has at least temporarily abated: the ancient argument that the economy (in either developed or developing countries) can’t afford to Go Green. That’s particularly true if, as Plumer suggests, governments aggressively promote (and subsidize) alternative energy sources and efficiency measures that further reduce the price of shifting away from fossil fuels.
This is not to say, of course, that opponents of action on carbon emissions won’t make the same old arguments with even greater force, claiming that it’s no time to “burden” industries with ambitious “green” goals. But at the moment, the same old arguments make even less real sense.

State of the Union speeches are too often glorified laundry lists, topped off with sober warnings and peppered with soaring riffs of inspiration. The best of them offer a coherent vision, JFK’s inaugural address being a frequently-cited example. Obama’s first inaugural address, however, breaks the mold a little, according to the interpretation of various columnists and writers
Peggy Noonan’s column, “Meet President Obama” in today’s Wall St. Journal, for example, says Obama “used language with which traditional Republicans would be thoroughly at home.” Noonan called it “Low-key and sober” and “not an especially-rousing speech.” But she adds “This is not all bad. When a speech is so calm and cool that you have to read it to absorb it fully, the speech just may get read.”

This was not the sound of candidate Barack Obama but President Obama, not the sound of the man who appealed to the left wing of his party but one attempting to appeal to the center of the nation. It was not a joyous, audacious document, not a call to arms, but a reasoned statement by a Young Sobersides.

Noonan’s most interesting observation is the contrast between Reagan, Clinton and Obama on the role of government: Reagan’s “government is not the answer, government is the problem,” Bill Clinton’s statement that the “the era of big government is over” vs. Obama’s “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”
Noonan spins this as further evidence of Obama’s centrism. I’d say it was a convincing and long-overdue knell for the era of knee-jerk government-bashing. As Harold Meyerson put it in his WaPo column,

We measure the merit of government, he added, not by how wide a berth it gives the market but by “whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”…
With those words, the age of Reagan was ceremoniously but unambiguously interred. For 30 years, the widely shared prosperity created and then enjoyed by the Greatest Generation has been eroding. Obama’s speech was the first presidential inaugural to address the narrowing of American prosperity and to announce the intention to broaden it again.

In his contribution to a New York Times round-up of various presidential speechwriters’ analysis of Obama’s address, another Republican, William Safire expresses a view similar to Noonan, calling Obama’s address “solid, respectable, uplifting, suitably short, superbly delivered” and generally themeless, but it “fell short of the anticipated immortality.” In the same round-up Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol called it “a display of strength (his) and a summoning of strength (ours)” and saw a clear strategy emerge from the address: “He long ago proved that he could make people weep. Today he seemed determined to make them think and, more important, to act.”
WaPo‘s George Will also detected in his column a note of “cultural traditionalism” and a “theme of responsibility” in Obama’s inaugural address, but Will is more worried than Republican colleagues Noonan and safire about the return of Big Government:

…More than any predecessor except the first, the 44th president enters office with the scope of its powers barely circumscribed by law, and even less by public opinion…Obama’s unprecedented power derives from the astonishing events of the past four months that have made indistinct the line between public and private sectors. Neither the public as currently alarmed, nor Congress as currently constituted, nor the Constitution as currently construed is an impediment to hitherto unimagined executive discretion in allocating vast portions of the nation’s wealth.

The L.A. Times‘ Susan Salter Reynolds had one of the more interesting round-up articles, featuring short comments by a dozen writers on Obama’s address, including this from author Ron Calrson:

What courage to use a complex sentence talking to a million people! By expecting the best of us, he just might get it.

And memoirist Patricia Hampl had this to say about Obama’s choice of words:

I was glad, that he denied himself rhetorical flourishes and gave a speech as refined and restrained in its power so that political language itself was restored to its greatest value — saying what the speaker means.

The American Prospect‘s Mark Schmitt’s “A Farewell to Words” explains Obama’s oration as part of a deliberate shift from the rhetoric of inspiration to the unveiling of a practical agenda:

And yet, the president has moved on. Through the course of the campaign, his words slowly came down to earth, from inspiring and cocky to the mundane and practical. As the “gathering clouds” of the economic crisis became too dark to ignore, he accelerated his move from inspiration to work. His words no longer serve the purpose of pulling us up but of naming and giving order to the work to be done: roads, the electric grid, ending torture, restoring America’s place in the world.

I would say that Obama’s first presidential address was more moderate in style than in the substance of reforms he is advocating — which indicate a very sharp and most welcome departure from the failed policies of his predecessor. President Obama is clearly preparing the nation for a rocky ride in the months ahead, and laying the groundwork for an ambitious reform agenda to return America to peace and prosperity.

It’s always interesting when, oh, a billion or so people watch or listen to a speech and come away with very different impressions. From the published reviews of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, that may have been the case yesterday.
One of the more positive takes was by John Heilemann of New York magazine, who thought the speech demonstrated Obama’s “strategic mastery.” John Judis of The New Republic, on the other hand, was disappointed, calling the speech “a hodgepodge of themes, injunctions and applause lines.” At the same site, Noam Scheiber thought the speech was actually quite coherent thematically, but stylistically uneven, ranging from high rhetoric to wonkery.
Virtually everyone thought the speech’s somber tone was appropriate, albeit a contrast to the upbeat Obama speeches everyone remembers from the campaign.
The one big negative to the Inaugural (perhaps inevitable in a highly secured event for 2 million people) according to many accounts was a serious logisitcal snafu that kept thousands of ticketed guests from getting anywhere near to the event. If you want to read an especially unhappy account of that problem, Greg Levine of Firedoglake has served one up.

Those who watched the Obama inauguration, up close in Washington or at home, will have their own particular impressions and memories. Mine include a wheelchair-bound Dick Cheney looking for all the world like Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter; Joe Biden looking like the happiest man on earth; the Chief Justice bungling the administration of the Oath of Office; and Joe Lowery delivering a most entertaining benediction (“when the red man can get ahead, man…when the brown man can stick around, man”).
Obama’s address had a lot of interesting moments: his strong rebuke to his predecessor’s foreign policy; his shout-out, during the obligatory passage on religious diversity, to “nonbelievers;” his reminder that his father probably couldn’t have been served lunch in various parts of the country he was being sworn in to lead. The overall tone was obviously somber, part of an expectations-setting exercise that we can expect to continue for a while. There wasn’t a lot of “yes we can” rhetoric. There was plenty of talk about common purpose and sacrifice.
The vast, chilly crowd didn’t seem to care whether Obama delivered a barnburner of an address; the historic nature of the event was enough.
But for me, the big moment (other than watching Bush 43 walk up the steps to Marine One and leave the premises) was actually after the address, when I clicked on whitehouse.gov, and was greeted with a very large photo of President Barack Obama under the legend: “Change Has Come to America.” Yes, indeed, it has.

For one who can remember what America felt like the day before and the day after JFK was assassinated, this day is a long time coming. Although I was a little too young to have much understanding of the politics of 1963, growing up in Washington, D.C., I did have clear sense just before the assassination that hope and idealism were the order of the day. There was this young attractive couple in the white house challenging the younger generation, along with the rising hopes of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of the Birmingham demonstrations and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Then boom, it was gone.
LBJ’s leadership secured substantive domestic reforms, but he got bogged down in the Vietnam quagmire, and the idealism of the young generation was soon replaced by growing rage and alienation. Legions of white youth went Hippie, many, but not all apolitical. The more heroic Black freedom struggle began to spilnter away from the nonviolent consensus forged by MLK. Chicago, Nixon, Watergate, withering idealism and growing cynicism. A brief lift with Carter’s election, then a dozen Reagan and Bush years of unrelenting political bummage. Another lift with Clinton’s election, but despite the good economic times likened to “the golden age of Pericles,” Clinton did not recapture youth idealism on the same scale that JFK generated, even though he was as brilliant a politician as JFK.
Today we conclude 8 years of what more than a few historians consider the worst ever presidency, a low bar indeed. President Obama won’t have to accomplish much to do better than his predecessor, but if he doesn’t do enough, he won’t be re-elected, given the dimensions of the current economic crisis.
The high hopes that attend the inauguration of our 44th President run especially deep for African Americans, the Democrats’ most reliable and alert constituency. While most Black voters realize that Obama’s election is not the fulfillment of MLK’s Dream, it is a powerful step forward and an affirmation that the dream of a multiracial democracy, in which brotherhood can take root, can be realized. In this context, the greatest patriotic poem ever written, “Let America be America Again” penned in 1938 by Langston Hughes fits perfectly on this day:

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed– Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek– And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean– Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That’s made America the land it has become. O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home– For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore, And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we’ve dreamed And all the songs we’ve sung And all the hopes we’ve held And all the flags we’ve hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay– Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again– The land that never has been yet– And yet must be–the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME– Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose– The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives, We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath– America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain– All, all the stretch of these great green states– And make America again!

Today President-elect Obama will be inaugurated on the crest of a great wave of youth idealism, on a scale not seen since the days of JFK. And tonight a very attractive young couple with two young children will once again take up residence in the white house. No one expects a return to Camelot — we’ve been through too much for that. But something beautiful for America begins anew today. My personal barometer is my two previously apolitical but now rabidly Obamaphile young people. I trust that the inevitable compromises President Obama will have to make won’t diminish their idealism too much. Hope is back in young America and it feels good.

In case you are wondering, this is the timetable set out by the Washington Post for today’s inaugural festivities:
4 a.m. — Metro opens (at rush-hour service and fare levels).
4 a.m. — Monday extended alcohol service for bars and nightclubs ends; they can remain open 24 hours through Jan. 21.
8 a.m. — Security gates open for ticketed guests
9 a.m. — Ceremony gates open.
10 a.m. — Musical prelude. See the full schedule.
Noon — Ceremony ends, followed by the inaugural address, luncheon, departure of President Bush and parade.
2 p.m. — Approximate start time for parade
7 p.m. — Official balls start
9 p.m. — Rush-hour Metro service levels end.
2 a.m. — Metro closes.
4 a.m. — Tuesday extended alcohol service for bars and nightclubs ends.
In other words, there will be a lot of public transporation provided and hooching allowed, and that’s a good combination.

There will be a natural tendency this year to conflate the annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with the inauguration of Barack Obama. Without question, Obama’s election represented a milestone in the racial saga of the United States, and had he lived until now, no one would have been more pleased, and perhaps astonished, by this development than King himself. (It is a bit startling to realize that Martin Luther King was born just 80 years ago, and might today still be an active and respected voice–perhaps an Inaugural prayer-leader?–had he been permitted to live).
But it’s important to maintain the integrity of King’s legacy, which was reflected in Obama’s election, but hardly fulfilled.
King represented, after all, a perpetual challenge to the people of the United States that is always necessary, but can never be fully met: to live up completely to the civic and religious values nearly all of us claim to cherish.
He held up a mirror to the Americans of his time, and demanded they take a close look at themselves according to their own professed standards. Many refused, and some never forgave him for the audacity of the demand itself. But although Jim Crow finally died, and we now have an African-American president, the demand remains as provocative and essential as ever.
So take some time today, if you can, to read or re-read Letter From a Birmingham Jail, or, if you are a Christian, Paul’s Letter to American Christians. They haven’t lost their power despite the passage of years. And they still serve as a reminder of the fundamental radicalism of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gospels.
All too many people think of MLK as merely a historical figure, and of his commemorative day as a tribute to the Civil Rights movement that culminated before King’s death. For such people, the inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow will become just another reason to consign King and his mission to the history books. But if you actually read him or listen to him, it becomes clear that his message is as fresh and relevant–and radical–as ever.

As the George W. Bush Era comes to a merciful close, and we bid farewell to his many appointees, there are plenty of retrospectives being written and published, mostly negative, a few more mixed or even hilariously positive.
But one of the most eerily consonant assessments was actually published more than three-quarters of a century ago, by The Nation, in an editorial goodbye to Herbert Hoover and the GOP ascendancy he represented, entitled “A Farewell to Republicans” (republished this week). Here is one very pertinent excerpt:

[W]e are taking leave not merely of a single Administration. For twelve years the Republican Party has been in power. During ten of those years it controlled the executive and legislative branches of the government. When, a few years hence, an attempt is made to minimize the disaster of this last quadrennium, and to point to a preceding eight year period of material development and growth, let it be noted that in a purely material sense the American people are much worse off today than they were twelve years ago. Far more than was gained has been swept away. Savings have been dissipated, lives have been blasted, families disintegrated. Misery and insecurity exist to a degree unprecedented in our national life. And spiritually the American people have been debauched by the materialism which made dollar-chasing the accepted way of life and accumulation of riches the goal of earthly existence.

And the editorial concludes with an observation about the new administration that should sound familiar to many contemporary readers of The Nation:

Have these captains and kings departed—not to return? The epoch of their wanton and repulsive leadership is ending. Their incompetence and their betrayal are manifest. But much of the evil they have done lives after them. The coming years will see the struggle to purge America, to reassert the promise of American life, to validate, in consonance with the changed times and conditions, the high aspirations of the founders of the nation. Mr. Roosevelt has the opportunity to be the leader of this renaissance, but he will have to forge as his instrument a wholly different Democratic Party from that which so long has been indistinguishable from the Republican.

I think it’s reasonably safe to say that the New Deal made it a lot easier to distinguish Democrats from Republicans (unless you were an African-American living in the Solid South, of course), and I think the same will be true of the two parties during the Obama administration, the talk of “bipartisanship” notwithstanding. It’s less clear that today’s Republicans will go through the gradual transformation that eventually, and for a time, discredited laissez-fair domestic policies and isolationism in the GOP. But in any event, it’s fascinating how much the transition of power looked the same in 1933 as in 2009.

Note: this is a special guest post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. We hope to hear from other Democrats offering varying views on the political and policy strategy challenges facing the Obama administration.
We’ll find out soon enough whether President-elect Obama is as adept at governing as he is at campaigning. But this much is already certain: Barack Obama has presided over a spectacular presidential transition – maybe the best in modern times.
In picking a crew of political heavyweights to run his administration, Obama has radiated both self-confidence and seriousness about governing. And in recent weeks, he has crystallized the key dilemmas facing the country with greater candor and specificity than ever before.
Yesterday, for example, the President-elect promised to reform Medicare and Social Security. “This, by the way is where there are going to be very difficult choices and issues of sacrifice and responsibility and duty,” Obama told The Washington Post. “You have to have a president who is willing to spend some political capital on this. And I intend to spend some.”
Now that’s audacity. Despite some vague rhetorical gestures toward social security reform during the campaign, Obama gave little reason to believe he would give high priority to modernizing America’s mammoth social insurance programs. This might strike some as nothing more than a bow to fiscal reality, but it’s a reality that many in his party have had a hard time accepting.
Looking back ruefully on his White House tenure, President Bush has conceded that his 2005 push to “reform” Social Security was a miserable flop. The public’s negative verdict, however, had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the “just say no” reflex that grips many liberals when the subject of entitlement reform comes up.
But Obama, like President Clinton before him, knows that the unsustainable growth of retirement and especially health care costs, poses a threat not only to America’s fiscal health, but also to progressive government itself. Already, the big entitlements consume more than half the federal budget. If unchecked, their automatic spending growth will squeeze out space for public investments in health care, education, childrens’ well-being, public safety and everything else progressives care about.
As Obama told the Post, social security is, relatively speaking, the easy fix. Its funding gap is modest (“only” around $4.3 trillion, according to the Social Security trustees) compared to Medicare’s (an estimated $36 trillion). The menu of options for closing that gap while at the same time strengthening Social Security’s ability to lift seniors out of poverty are well known.
Obama, for instance, has called for raising the cap on salary subjected to the social security payroll tax. But rebalancing the generational compact embedded in social security will also require action on the benefit side of the equation. The best approach, developed by Bob Pozen, is the “progressive indexing” of social security benefits. It would trim benefits only for well-off retirees who are less reliant on Social Security than middle- and low-income people. The proposal is detailed in Memos to the New President, a “big idea” book the Progressive Policy Institute released this week.
While social security essentially presents a demographic challenge – fewer workers supporting a rapid expansion of the nation’s elderly population – fixing Medicare is a more complicated matter. In addition to the worsening “dependency ratio” as the baby boomers flood into retirement, the costs of medical services themselves are growing much faster than the economy. Unless the Obama Administration can find ways to reduce the rate of health care cost growth, even as it expands coverage to the uninsured, the United States is headed toward a fiscal trainwreck.
Obama also announced his intention to hold a fiscal responsibility summit. He clearly recognizes that America’s faces a dual economic crisis. Our immediate challenge is to get credit markets working again, and stimulate the economy to reduce the severity and duration of today’s recession. The long-term challenge is to impose discipline on the federal budget, so that America’s burgeoning debts won’t undercut our future growth or shrink our childrens’ economic prospects.
Striking the right balance between the short- and long-term needs of the country will be the central drama of the Obama administration. It will require the President to pursue ostensibly contradictory policies over the next four years: first, a spending surge, then, as the economy starts to recover, a smart pirouette toward fiscal restraint. It will be a tricky maneuver and will require consummate political skill. Obama’s full-throated embrace of fiscal realism suggests he is up to the task.

No, I didn’t watch George W. Bush’s “farewell address” last night, figuring my blood pressure was high enough. Reading it today brings no particular insights, other than the feeling that Bush’s once-proud claims have now become bits and pieces of self-exculpatory evidence of the sort that criminal defendents offer at sentencing hearings.
Spencer Ackerman, in the Washington Independent, offers the best brief take I’ve seen:

It’s hard to remember, but in 2000, Bush’s campaign plane was called Accountability One. Nearly nine years later, his speech is about why he shouldn’t be judged by his disastrous results, but instead by what was in his heart.
If there’s any real parting gift that George W. Bush has given conservatives, it’s that they can no longer use Jimmy Carter’s presidency as a laugh line. Carter never seriously argued that his presidency succeeded because only 3000 people died from terrorism on American soil while he was president. Indeed, the speech’s most inspiring stories are about people who persevered despite his policies:
“We see America’s character in Dr. Tony Recasner, a principal who opened a new charter school from the ruins of Hurricane Katrina … We’ve seen it in Staff Sergeant Aubrey McDade, who charged into an ambush in Iraq and rescued three of his fellow Marines.”

Indeed, the only “results” Bush could cite in his speech was something that didn’t happen, another terrorist attack on the United States. I’ve always felt that this “accomplishment” was ultimately the reason he was re-elected in 2004, even if few Americans really bought the idea that invading Iraq had cowed or distracted al Qaeda into inaction. But eventually the visible results of Bush’s policies overwhelmed his one invisible claim to success. And that’s why he bids us farewell offering the plea of all failed leaders: I Meant Well.