Energy and Climate Change: C

[Barack Obama]'s "cash for clunkers" program was somewhat misguided on several fronts. Instead of encouraging U.S. consumers to buy fuel-efficient U.S. cars, and help out the ailing auto industry in Detroit, it handed a major taxpayer subsidy to mostly foreign auto manufacturers. The program also did not set the fuel efficiency standards for a car trade-in high enough, thereby allowing people to get cash for new cars that were still relatively fuel inefficient. So, too, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's pledge to help raise $10 billion per year in climate adaptation and mitigation funds by 2012, and $100 billion per year by 2020 (as noted in the Copenhagen Accord), is ambitious but open to criticism. While the United States is at least rhetorically supporting a significant cash infusion to a global climate fund, critical in building trust with developing countries, the U.S. contribution has yet to be put on the table. The challenge remains: to push the Obama administration to support an adequate and unconditional U.S. contribution beyond existing development aid spending, to shift the fund's sourcing from carbon markets to a financial transaction tax and other mechanisms, and to house the new body in the United Nations and not the World Bank.