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A significant section of President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night discussed energy issues.  According to David Roberts of Grist, it’s important to emphasize that the president “does not control domestic policy,” that “this Congress has shown little appetite for doing, um, anything, [therefore] it’s highly unlikely that Obama’s proposals will become law,” and that “in an election year, the SOTU shows which fights the administration feels comfortable fighting and thinks it can win.”

Given all those caveats, this SOTU could have taken the easy way out, barely mentioned energy, let alone risen to a defense of clean energy. Surprisingly, though, as David Roberts points out, what President Obama ended up doing was actually a pleasant surprise: referencing fossil fuel policies “that are already in place,” in order “to set Obama up for a strong defense of clean energy.” Which is, at it turns out, exactly what happened:

That’s what I was watching for: whether the president would back down on clean energy in the face of coordinated GOP assault. (Solyndra is the battle flag of Republicans, but they’re going after clean energy on multiple fronts.)

He did not. Instead, he doubled down: “Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.” The portion of the speech on clean energy policy was both longer and stronger than I expected. This is the killer bit:

“I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising.”

Even better, as Roberts explains, this part of the speech was highly popular with focus groups, as, “no matter how much money the Chamber of Commerce spends on attack ads, Americans love clean energy.”  Given those warm feelings, the conclusion is that politicians certainly will not be harmed, and probably will be helped, by campaigning for wind, solar, geothermal, energy efficiency, etc.  Let’s hope they realize this as the 2012 election season proceeds, and that Americans vote for candidates who pledge not to “walk away from the promise of clean energy!”

Cross posted from the Great Energy Challenge blog.

President Obama made a smart move this month by putting the Keystone XL pipeline project into the deep freeze. It had been poor politics for him — and it would have been even worse policy for the country, especially when you consider the aggressive retooling of our world energy sources demanded by the International Energy Agency findings in its latest World Energy Outlook.

But for the president’s staff, the question that lingers is whether it will relearn what it had mastered so well in 2008 — that while you have to campaign in the center, your base voters’ enthusiasm matters a lot. Based on articles like this one in Bloomberg Businessweek, about how environmentalists “matter less to Obama 2012,” it certainly doesn’t seem that way. For instance, theBusinessweek article quotes Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt commenting that “[w]hen voters compare Obama’s record with [the Republican candidates for president], ‘there will be no question about who will continue our progress.’”

The problem is, for eco-conscious millennials (the key, according to a new analysis by Center for American Progress political analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, to the 2012 election) like former Microsoft executive Jabe Blumenthal, who care deeply about environmental issues and who want to feel that their concerns are being heard at the highest levels, simply asserting that “I’m not Rick Perry” or “I’m not Mitt Romney” won’t work. To the contrary, Blumenthal says in the Businessweek piece, it’s “simply not true” that the specter of Romney, Perry or Gingrich will be sufficient cause for him to open his checkbook to the Obama campaign, as he did in 2008.

Throughout the Keystone XL process, the message from Washington pundits and experts was that environmentalists “will not be happy, but they have nowhere else to go.”  It’s hard to imagine such an arrogant statement being directed at African-American, gay or Latino voters, but the “nowhere else to go” sentiment directed at environmentalists seemed to have taught them it was time to chuck the tradition of patty-cake politics and “principled loserism” they’ve operated with for so long.

The clincher in the Keystone fight was when committed Obama 2008volunteers, donors and staffers started correcting the “nowhere else to go” idea. These Obama supporters recognized that they did indeed have somewhere else they could go: home, And not just on election day, but on all the days between now and then.

In key states such as Colorado, where the green base is a lot of the base, these base voters realized that they could make themselves matter.

I’m still not sure why the White House let things get to the point where supporters had to threaten to withhold their time, money and effort — all over a boondoggle that wouldn’t have dropped gas prices at all.

To me, the politics around the Keystone XL pipeline were clear from the start. First there were the wildly inflated claims of jobs from an industry with a history of inflating them. And, of the jobs that would have been created, most would have been in states that were politically out of reach for Obama, and many of those would likely have been created after the election. Worse, the project had become a cafeteria line for TransCanada lobbyists, creating apaper trail of revolving door influence-peddling and inside dealing that the media would have acquired and used long into an Obama second term. On top of all that, the president’s approval of this project would have further depressed his base while benefiting an industry that is resolutely opposed to him — including his arch political enemies, the Koch brothers.

It all leaves me scratching my head. But, hey, as a clean energy advocate, I’ll take the result.

Going forward, there’s an opportunity for the Obama staff to stop confusing the critical task of courting the political center with the ill-advised practice of coddling lobbyists from a hostile oil industry. For the environmental community, there’s an opportunity to not resume the folded-hands, broken-hearted mode so much of its leadership has operated from over the last three decades. It will be interesting to see what the younger environmental leadership — people like 350.org’s Bill McKibben, the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune, Friends of the Earth’s Erich Pica, and Greenpeace’s Phil Radford — have shown they aren’t interested in the “nowhere to go” approach. having shown they aren’t interested in the “nowhere to go” approach, does to affect its fate.

Recently, Andrea Luecke of the Solar Foundation provided a briefing on her organization’s release of a groundbreaking study on solar jobs in America.

The top line numbers were impressive, to say the least: more than 100,000 solar jobs in America, solar jobs up to 24 percent growth over the next 12 months, solar industry growth that is 10 times faster than the national economy as a whole over the last 12 months. However, not all states benefited equally. As Luecke discusses in the video, it basically comes down to whether a particular state has adopted smart energy policies — or not.

As Luecke explains, “the states that are doing well in terms of solar job creation are the states that have those integral policies like [Renewable Portfolio Standards -- RPS], net metering…local rebate programs…third-party purchase agreements.” In contrast, those states that have chosen not to put strong pro-solar policies into place are failing to reap the benefits that more enlightened states are seeing.

Virginia is a state that tends to fall into the less-enlightened category. Thus, although Virginia ranks #19 overall in the 2011 Solar Jobs Census, Luecke notes that “there are still many [pro-solar-energy] policies that Virginia lacks.” Policies like a strong, mandatory RPS, for instance, as well as a “solar carve-out” within that RPS. The lack of such policies means that, despite an overall business-friendly climate, Virginia’s ability to become the “energy capital of the East Coast,” as current Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has stated as a goal, is seriously impaired. To quote Tigercomm President Mike Casey, “It seems like some states are taking a pass on one of the fastest growing industries in America…they’re not making the policy investments to create an environment in which this industry can take root within their state’s borders.”

Instead, in the case of Virginia, Gov. McDonnell appears heavily focused on 19th and early 20th century fossil fuels, including environmentally destructive coal (produced in Virginia by blowing up mountains) and dangerous, expensive offshore oil drilling, instead of looking forward to the clean energy revolution of the 21st century. If these policies are enacted and/or continued, what it will mean is that Virginia – and other states that pursue similar policies – will increasingly be left in the dust, as other states and other countries race ahead, take advantage of lucrative business opportunity, and create the high-quality, long-term jobs that could have gone, but didn’t due to erroneous energy policy choices, to states like Virginia.

Cross posted from the Great Energy Challenge blog

What wasn’t to dislike about the spectacle of this summer’s recently concluded budget battle? There was the impending economic disaster, the Full Monty on just how dysfunctional Congress has gotten, and the outsized role given by those operating on the political fringe.

But for clean energy advocates, there was another reason to throw the remote at the TV: Pro-clean energy elected officials missed the opportunity to cut government handouts to fossil energy companies.

I’m no budget expert, but when we need to cut a lot of spending, shouldn’t we cut the really big stuff that people dislike anyway? Nothing qualifies for that category like the combined welfare check we cut each year to the oil, coal and gas industries: $52 billion a year according to the most comprehensive count to date. For those in elected office trying to scale the clean economy, shouldn’t kicking these highly profitable, mature industries off the dole have been a policy and political no-brainer?

The answer given by Democratic pollster Mike Bocian is an unqualified “yes.” (See video above.) Bocian, now with GBA Strategies, spoke at our Communicating Energy lecture series before the budget standoff hit its climax. His message was the same I heard echoed roughly a week later by top Republican pollster Neil Newhouse: Cutting government handouts to big oil companies is a political winner with practically no electoral downside.

By similarly large majorities of over 70 percent, Americans want to cut the massive government welfare check fossil energy, and they want the relatively inexpensive federal policy support for clean energy left alone. Plenty of Republicans around the country want this waste ended, and we ought to have the two political parties racing to see who can cut the most from the handouts to fossil energy.

But the plans offered by Congressional Republicans – the “Ryan Plan,” named for author Rep. Paul Ryan (WI); or the “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan from Speaker Boehner –would have done exactly the opposite. For President Obama and other clean energy advocates, this gap created an opportunity to put small government advocates in the position of defending large, unpopular forms of government waste.

However, whether you’re marketing products or policies, busy Americans want things bottom-lined. You just can’t win their attention without message discipline, simplicity, repetition, and the plain language that connects to where their attitudes are.

To win the budget fight in the court of public opinion, each side –President Obama and his staff on one side, and Speaker Boehner and his caucus on the other – should have been trying to boil this messy situation down to a bottom line, anchored by key phrase.

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According to FuelFix, it appears that natural gas “frackers” could face a new obstacle to their expansion, in addition to opposition from communities across America to the threat that fracking poses to water supplies and public health.

A number of lawmakers have called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate aspects of the natural gas E&P business, namely whether companies are reporting the financial viability of shales accurately.

Now, Fuel Fix reports that “the SEC has pulled the trigger,” with “subpoenas seek[ing] documents and information regarding the actual performance of shale gas wells against forecasted or projected performance, the propriety of decline curves for the wells, and the calculation and public disclosure of full-cycle margins.”

This will definitely be a story to keep a close eye on.