Ted Turner’s back in the news as he promotes his new autobiography (with Bill Burke), Call Me Ted. On the heels of the election he was one of a number of luminaries asked by The Washington Post to offer up suggestions on what Obama’s top priority should be. Said Ted:
A Category 5 hurricane has hit the world’s financial system, but a bigger storm is approaching. Climate change threatens the economic, political and environmental health of the world. Now is the time to remake the vast systems that power the nation and the world. The president must make this his top economic priority — and establish a National Energy Council in the White House to get the job done.
In The Grist today, Amanda Griscom Little asked, What would it do?
We’re heavily subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry, which needs to be phased out. The people who use fossil fuel should pay the full cost of it. What tax breaks and incentives there are should go for the new renewable, locally produced energy that creates jobs here in the United States. That keeps the money in our own economy, because we’re just bankrupting ourselves, as Boone Pickens says, by spending three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year importing foreign oil.
We’ve got to have a new digital [electrical] grid that goes from coast to coast and border to border to move this new energy around. The best place to build solar panels is in the Southwest — Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, and southern Nevada — but we’ve got to move it all the way across the country to New York and Boston. And then the best place for wind power, and where it’s the least disruptive, is out on the Great Plains, and we’ve got to be able to move that electricity generated from wind power to the major population centers as well. And we need a new grid anyway; the grid we have now is over 100 years old, and it’s decrepit.