Bill Clinton Talks Clean Energy on the Daily Show: “We Have Got To Be Competitive in These Areas”

[bananas]

I saw this on tv, it was a good interview, definitely worth watching.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/10/365454/bill-clinton-clean-energy-daily-show/

Bill Clinton Talks Clean Energy on the Daily Show: “We Have Got To Be Competitive in These Areas”
By Stephen Lacey on Nov 10, 2011 at 4:34 pm

Former President Bill Clinton was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday night talking about his new book, “Back to Work. ”

In recent years, Clinton has been a strong advocate for clean energy and addressing climate change, helping bring together numerous large-scale investments in the sector through the Clinton Global Initiative.

In his new book, Clinton outlines a strategy for deploying more renewables and efficiency as a way to continue creating jobs and enhance America’s competitiveness. Ignoring the political pressure to ditch clean energy as a jobs creator, Clinton continues his strong public messaging on the need to invest in the sector.

Due to copyright issues, we can’t isolate specific pieces of the interview. It’s worth listening to the whole conversation. But if you want to skip straight to the clean energy portion, start at around 3:50.

(embedded video)

[marmar]

1. "Ignoring the political pressure to ditch clean energy as a jobs creator"

Easy to do when you're no longer in office.

[kristopher]

2. "wind ... solar ... they're both cheaper than nuclear right now"

Clinton: We don't have to do that. We don't have to do that. What we have to do — that shouldn't be the government's role. We should figure out is, where do we have a competitive advantage? For example, in solar energy and wind energy — both of which would already be competitive with coal if you had to pay the extraneous costs of coal, the healthcare costs and other things — and which will be — wind within 2 years, solar within 5, will be competitive in price with coal; they're both cheaper than nuclear right now. And I think — what we need to do is to make sure that we meet the competition in terms of the tax incentives and other things to bring these manufacturing jobs here. If we do, we're gonna do fine. We've got a great venture capital network, we have massive capacity in all these clean-tech areas. Just think about it: we were bypassed in the last decade by Germany in the production and deployment of solar cells. The sun shines, on average, in Germany as much as it does in London. But Deutsche Bank — not Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank — — did a study saying that even if you account for the subsidies the German government and German people paid to get that solar, they still netted 300,000 jobs. So, we're four times as big and twice as capable, so you do the math: it's 2½ million jobs if we do what they did. We have got to be competitive in these areas, and I don't mind giving people tax credits, but it ought to be to generate jobs and opportunity in America.


From the transcript at: http://lincmad.blogspot.com/2011/11/transcript-bill-clinton-on-daily-show.html

[bananas]

4. Thanks for the transcript link!

That's one of the reasons I wanted to post this after I saw it.
Thanks!

[Rageneau]

3. Repeal the 22nd Amendment!

The 22nd Amendment only exists because Republicans are afraid they can NEVER get a good Democratic president out of office.

[Nihil]

5. As opposed to Democrats ...

... who are starting to get afraid they can NEVER get a good
Democratic president into office ...

:hide: