Politico, “Deadly silence on carbon caps,” Jun. 15, 2010

Obama never even uttered the words “carbon,” “greenhouse gases,” “global warming” or “cap and trade.” He used the word “climate” only once — and then only to acknowledge that the House last year passed a “a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill.”

Dot Earth, The New York Times, “Energy Comes to the Oval Office,” Jun. 16, 2010

President Obama has long asserted that the nation’s energy challenges are a priority. But — like most presidents before him with that same stated concern — he has not been inclined to make the sustained push for an expanded and sustainable energy menu a top priority in the face of competing issues and events.

Now that Obama has made the Gulf of Mexico disaster and energy policy the subject of his first Oval Office address, this may be the start of such a push

Grist, “A mildly contrarian take on Obama’s Oval Office speech”” Jun. 16, 2010

There is one bit of the speech the significance of which is being overlooked. It comes in the part on clean energy policy, which many commenters dismissed as palaver… Normally Obama’s energy pitch includes ritual nods to “clean coal,” nuclear power, and domestic drilling. None of those made an appearance last night; it was only energy efficiency and renewable energy. That strikes me as a deliberate (and welcome) message to the Senate about what Obama wants on the energy side of a bill.

That’s hardly enough to salvage the speech, of course. But it’s not nothing.

Al Gore, Huffington Post, “The President’s Oval Office Address and What’s Next,” Jun. 16, 2010

The president is right to focus on stopping the spill and working to limit, to the degree possible, its impact on the Gulf ecosystem. But ultimately the only way to prevent this type of tragedy from happening again is to fundamentally change how we power our economy. Placing a limit on global warming pollution and accelerating the deployment of clean energy technologies is the only truly effective long-term solution to this crisis.

Wall Street Journal, “Obama Vows Spill Fix,” Jun. 16, 2010

Mr. Obama’s speech was an effort to rebut detractors who say the administration’s response to the oil gusher has been ad hoc and ineffective. He chose a setting almost always reserved by presidents to discuss war or crisis

Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic, “Will Obama’s Actions Match His Words?,” Jun. 15, 2010

A White House official says the goal of the speech is simple: to convince people that Obama gets it, and that he’s doing everything in his power to fix it. On the small-medium-big scale, Obama went medium. Leaving out an explicit call for cap-and-trade was a deliberate choice, obviously. But Obama wants action on climate change, and the only way to wean our dependence off fossil fuels is to put a price on carbon. He did not make that explicit, as he has done before, to smaller audiences. He did not call upon Congress to make the political sacrifices necessary, and it may be difficult to reconcile his words, laced with an urgent tone, with the actions he is willing to put his weight behind. Whether he’s taken command of the response is immaterial now; it is now his spill to fix.

Newsweek, “Obama Chickens Out on Energy,” Jun. 16, 2010

But he failed to use this opportunity to marshal public support for a logical, tangible goal that would reduce our destructive consumption of oil and coal. As Obama noted, he campaigned on, and the House of Representatives passed, a bill that would finally put a cap on U.S. carbon emissions. So you would think that Obama must surely have gone on to note that the bill is now stuck in the Senate, where it has not gained the supermajority needed by the extraconstitutional requirement that is enforced in this Congress by Republicans and conservative Democrats. You would be wrong.

Brookings, “President Obama’s Oil Spill Address a Missed Opportunity,” Jun. 15, 2010

Nowhere was the absence of specificity more notable than in the portion of the speech about which the president was most passionate—the need to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels toward a clean energy future.

Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, “Obama’s Speech,” Jun. 15, 2010

Basically, he’s saying he just wants some kind of bill. His standards are very low. I can’t necessarily blame him — the votes aren’t there in the Senate and he can’t conjure them up. He needs something that at least begins the process of transitioning to a clean energy economy. But with the public uninterested in climate change, interest groups mostly advocating for the status quo, and moderate Democrats unwilling to take another tough vote, he’s not going to get much.

Christian Science Monitor, “Obama speech on BP oil spill a call to action for clean energy,” Jun. 16, 2010

Some pundits commented ruefully that if BP was happy with Obama’s speech, then the president had failed. But presidential scholars counsel perspective.

“What everybody wants from him may be more than is realistic to expect,” says Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. “People want a chapter-and-verse battle plan, right down to the crossed t’s and dotted i’s, with deadlines, and that is just unrealistic. It’s the classic presidential dilemma, exaggerated by emotions.”

The first ARPA-E summit is currently underway, and as the author notes, despite frequent references to the Apollo Project, the “premise of the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA–E is somewhat simpler—emulate its older sibling, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)” in spurring the development of new technologies. “Since its founding in 1958 during the Cold War in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik,” DARPA has given birth to a wide range of inventions, including stealth fighters and the Internet. For its part, ARPA–E “plans to fund multidisciplinary technical ideas that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve national security and create jobs.”

Out of some 3,700 applications, “37 technologies qualified for government funds, with each getting an average $4 million.” On the bright side,  ”‘the number of good ideas has been amazing, and we don’t even have all the intellectual horsepower of the U.S. into clean energy,’ [ARPA-E director Arun] Majumdar says. But as he notes, ”‘we need multiple lunar landings, not just one.’”

Unfortunately, ”political realities might short-circuit those ‘lunar landings,’ many of which (according to the ARPA-E director) won’t become manifest for 10 years or more.” Majumdar says, ”We are not short on ideas. The question is, what happens next?”

In any case, things are moving ahead: “$100 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (better known as the stimulus) was made available on March 2, to be awarded via ARPA–E to the best proposals for new grid-scale storage devices, better power converters and more efficient air conditioners.

However, the article’s author worries that ”the bulk of [projects funded by ARPA-E] are old ideas dusted off after years of storage.” He asks if “ARPA–E been too conservative in these early stages, funding ideas that have been around for awhile? … Besides the stimulus monies, the Obama administration committed just $400 million to ARPA-e specifically—and asked for just $300 million in next year’s budget—for an agency intended to remake the multitrillion dollar U.S. energy landscape.”

In contrast, “China is spending $12 million an hour on clean energy, according to John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, a politically liberal think tank. And the U.S. lacks what many here regard as the key to driving a transition to clean, abundant energy: a price on carbon. ‘Let’s not take this growth industry [in clean energy] and give it to every other country in the world but the U.S.,’” GE’s Jeffrey Immelt says.

But the article ends on an optimistic note: “ARPA–E’s conservative approach may prove to have been both politically and scientifically smart. In considering Galileo’s breakthrough, ‘he didn’t invent the telescope, he improved the telescope,’ said Chu in his address to the conference. ‘If you find a new rock or a new way of looking at the rock, chances are you can make a good discovery and you don’t even have to be that smart.’

• Figures released Monday show China “surged past the United States to become the world’s largest automobile market.” (in units sold, not in dollars)

• China “surpassed Germany as the biggest exporter of manufactured goods, according to year-end trade data.”

• The World Bank estimates that China will soon overtake Japan to become the No. 2 economy in the world. It was only the world’s fifth-largest economy four years ago.

According to the New York Times:

“the shift of economic gravity to China has occurred partly because growth here remained robust even as the world’s developed economies suffered the steepest drop in trade and economic output in decades.

But that did not happen by chance: China’s decisive government intervention in the economy, combined with the defiant optimism of its companies and consumers, has propelled an economy that until recently had seemed tethered to the health of its major export markets, including the United States.”

Indeed, Chinese media are in a celebratory mood:

The country’s economic miracle, the newspaper People’s Daily boasted last week, exists because its leaders — unlike those in other, unnamed nations — can make quick decisions and ensure underlings carry them out. The Great Recession, the newspaper said, has laid bare cracks in plodding Western-style capitalism.

(Hm… I wonder if that’s also an underhanded swipe at Western-style democracy…)

However, as the article warns:

Sustaining a global-size economy is nowhere near as simple as building one, some Chinese and Western economists say. As the Chinese navigate toward a bigger role in the world financial system, they are already running into diplomatic and political headwinds.

At home, ordinary citizens and economists alike worry that the government’s decision to flood the economy with cash has created speculative bubbles — in housing, in lending — that could burst with disastrous effect. But curbing speculation requires moves, such as raising interest rates, that could crimp the sprees of investment and industrial expansion that are the main contributors to growth.

There are also worries about the way the Chinese government has gone about its stimulus package. The projects given funding last year seemed to be primarily state-owned enterprises, while many private companies were left high and dry. A number of commentators (also in TIME, Asia Times, Financial Times) are concerned this may reverse the trend of private sector expansion and return China to government-driven growth, led by SOEs. Also see a Carter Center report on the impacts of stimulus spending on SOEs at the expense of other companies.

In the near term, China certainly seems like it’s in an enviable position. But if we keep our eye on long-term goals (enhanced competitiveness, sustainable growth — particularly of the kind mentioned in this blog, like innovating and deploying clean energy technologies and greening industry), that’s a race that’s still getting underway. And America is still very much in the game.