Obama’s Address Outlines Green Strategy
US President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night touched on many of the country’s hot-button issues, including reducing gun violence, improving the country’s education system, and slowing climate change.
That third issue directly affects the world of green IT, as proposals get drawn up that could change the rules of the datacenter efficiency game. While of course no laws or executive orders came out of the address, Obama called upon congress to strive toward potentially significant goals down the road.
“I urge this Congress to get together,” Obama said, “pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago.” Obama here referred to the various proposed Climate Stewardship and Innovation Acts in the years of 2003, 2005, and 2007. McCain and Lieberman, as Obama noted, led a bipartisan effort to essentially institute a cap-and-trade system that would have put a ceiling on nationwide carbon emissions equivalent to the 2000 levels.
Eventually, that effort would have expanded over the decades to reflect carbon emission levels in the 1980s and the 1960s. However, none of the three bills garnered executive support and none of them passed.
What does that mean for technological infrastructure today? At the very least, it brings about a greater focus on increasing power efficiency within datacenters. If a cap-and-trade system were to be adopted at some point soon by the Obama administration, companies with investments in datacenters and data-intensive IT operations would have to comply with something resembling a government-allocated carbon emission level. Ensuring that those datacenters are as efficient as possible is one path toward that.
Obama’s other proposed climate change initiatives were less specific, leaving it up to congress and states to institute measures toward reversing climate change. He did, however, emphasize STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and research, noting that those jobs were out there for Americans to take. While Obama did not directly relate STEM education to green technology, high tech opportunities exist for those working in the climate change business. STEM training will indeed be important if he wants the United States to become a leader in green research.
“Four years ago, other countries dominated the clean-energy market and the jobs that came with it,” Obama noted as he closed out the green energy portion of his speech. “And we’ve begun to change that…Let’s drive down costs even further. As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we.”
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