In a speech that focused heavily on the economy, President Obama did spend some time on clean energy but offered few specifics during Tuesday night's State of the Union address.
Acknowledging that climate legislation was unlikely to be agreed upon, the president urged Congress to set a clean energy standard and issued a directive to allow the development of enough clean energy on public land to power 3 million homes.
"I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy," Obama said. "I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here."
In addition, Obama announced that the U.S. Department of Defense will make a large commitments to clean energy with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year.
Obama also proposed incentives to allow manufacturers to upgrade buildings in order to make them more energy efficient. "Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, more jobs for construction workers who need them," the president said. "Send me a bill that creates these jobs." Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, supports the proposal. "Our research has found that energy efficiency is our cheapest and cleanest energy resource," he said in a press release. "As the president said, if we waste less energy 'America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, and more jobs for construction workers who need them.'"
