Month: July 2009

The policy needs to be clear and bold to have the desired impact. The Arab public will not carefully assess the details of a particular plan.  Instead, they will form impressions based on a fairly crude binary judgment:  is Obama keeping his promise or not?  Artful attempts to slice the problem with carefully calibrated dodges will likely fail.   The skepticism is so high that anything other than a crystal clear closure of Guantanamo will register on the wrong side of that binary.   And because of the symbolic prominence of the Guantanamo issue, and the high priority Obama himself has given it in his outreach to the Muslim world, failure there will have serious spill-over effects for credibility on all other issues in the region. 

[M]y gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.