Tackling environmental challenges - like global warming - will likely be at the forefront of our new President-elect's agenda.  After eight years of the most anti-environment administration in our history, there will be a lot to do to better care for our precious planet. Without a healthy planet, we can't hope to attain our dreams for more prosperity, more democracy, more diversity, etc.  Virtually all of our aspirations are tied to this reality. 

As President-elect Barack Obama enters the White House in January, he will understand this better than any President who has been elected to lead our country.  He acknowledged in his speech last night that we have a "planet in peril".  While NRDC did not take a position on the race for the White House (we are a non-partisan, charitable organization that cannot endorse candidates), it is heartening to think of having a President in office who truly cares and is educated about the environment.  It is also exciting to think that the solutions will help create new jobs through energy conservation, clean energy and transportation, and redesigning our communities to be more people and environment friendly. 

One of the more difficult issues our next President and Congress will have to tackle is the rapid development of a synthetic, high-carbon fuels industry in North America. On top of our list of concerns is the strip mining for oil in Canada's Boreal forest - one of the planet's last large intact ecosystems and our largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon. Oil from this region - called the tar sands - is literally scraped out of what was previously part of a beautiful forest of green, slow growing trees and winding rivers, and the nesting ground for nearly 40 percent of our songbirds and waterfowl.

Sadly, our rapacious appetite for oil (some 20 million barrels a day) has seen oil production from this forest increase substantially as other sources of oil decrease or become unavailable to the multinational oil companies.  Boreal forest derived oil now makes up nearly 8 percent of our daily oil use and its production releases three times the global warming pollution per barrel than conventional oil. Its contribution to our oil bottom line is expected to triple in the next decade with over $100 Billion spent building a spider web of new pipelines and expanding refineries.

President-elect Obama and the next Congress will have a real choice to make - will our government continue to provide incentives to develop these high carbon fuel sources or will it put us on a path to develop a low carbon economy?  We know that cleaner alternatives are available now, such as fuel efficiency, better public transportation, and renewable energy. And our latest national poll conducted on energy and gas prices shows us that almost 80% of Americans believe we need to switch to renewables too.  We don't need these high carbon fuels as a "bridge" (giving new meaning to "bridge to nowhere").  We have the necessary technologies now to start to move America beyond oil. 

We hope that our next President will do everything he can to put this technology in place and promote American ingenuity and policy to move us along a very different energy path.  This seems a far better alternative than scraping the bottom of the barrel and losing irreplaceable natural resources.   

We have a lot of environmental history to make in the 111th Congress. We can't wait to get started. NRDC will be there every step of the way.

Photo: Canada's Boreal forest in the tar sands region