About a month ago, I started fantasizing about an Obama cabinet. I didn't let myself spend too much time thinking about it, but once in awhile, as a treat, my friends and I would muse over prominent Democrats and what roles they might play in a new administration. Now, with the election in the bag (o wonder) we can muse freely and out loud, without fear of jinxing it.
After all, the appointment of a cabinet is the first real news in this strangely quiet season, when Democrats and Republicans alike have collapsed from exhaustion and politics overdose. The junk just isn't as good as it was before the election, so we waver between wanting another hit, knowing it will be a disappointment, and trying to clean out our systems. But the promise of cabinet appointments causes our veins to perk up.
We considered the likely candidates: Richardson for state? Colin Powell, maybe? Wouldn't that be interesting. And Hillary would make quite a formidable attorney general. What about Al Gore? Is he too fancy for the cabinet now, with his Nobel Prize? But anyway, what job would you give him?
The compact-fluorescent lightbulb went over two or three heads at once: we need a Secretary of the Environment. Sure, we have the EPA, but a secretary position has a much great symbolic weight than an EPA Administrator.
While Barack Obama did not exactly make the environment central to his platform, he has certainly paid it greater lip service than anyone else elected to this office. And he did make quite a bold statement about the millions of jobs to be created by our great new green energy industry (I love the idea, but really? Five million jobs? How soon?).
American awareness of global warming and other environmental problems has exploded in the last year, thanks in large part to Gore. Rising energy costs have also contributed to this awakening, but it's not only about fossil fuels: issues of food and consumer safety, green living habits, and plain old conservation have also made their way to the fore.
Isn't it time we had a Department of the Environment? Right now, environmental issues are covered significantly by at least four departments: Interior, Transportation, Agriculture, and Energy. It wouldn't be hard to add Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development to the list. The fact is, you could find an environmental component to the province of almost every department, but we won't make any real progress by pecking away at it from 15 different angles.
Even if Obama proves to be no more than a moderate on environmental matters, he'll be a radical compared to Bush. So it's reasonable to hope that the EPA will bounce back from eight years of diminishment. But I just can't see that this agency will be the genesis of the sort of sweeping change that's in order. We need some serious, muscular imagination. We need someone (whether Al Gore or someone else) whose job it is to come up with big ideas and who has the president's ear. Obama's all about big ideas; I think he'd go for it.
I realize that the environment is going to have a hard time competing with the economy right now, but with talk of these five million jobs, Obama has already suggested that each can hold the key to the other's salvation. Let's not miss the moment.
If for some reason, he is opposed to creating a new department, I'd suggest giving the terrorist-fighting to the Department of Defense and repurposing the Department of Homeland Security. They've got natural disasters already; that's a good place to start.
