Whomever American voters choose as their next President on Nov. 4, he will face a set of problems as daunting as any an incoming president has encountered in recent memory.

In addition to two wars and the financial crisis, a recession and a staggering budget deficit, volatile markets and energy prices, and the shifting geopolitics of oil, the next President will be expected to show a strong and early commitment to joining the international community as a full partner in fighting global climate change.

At a more fundamental level, the next President must lead the United States through a  transformation to a new economic order that can provide reasonable security and stability in the new realities of the 21^st Century. The same is true for all industrial economies, but the U.S. can and arguably should lead the way.

It is a given that we must move from a carbon-intensive to a post-carbon economy, but the required transformation is deeper than that. The American DNA still carries the mind-set of the nation’s forebears, those rugged individuals who encountered and conquered a land of seemingly limitless resources. The American DNA doesn’t like limits and views natural systems as something that must be controlled.

Our continued prosperity and security depends on a different world-view: We have come to and must accept the limits of the Earth’s life support systems; we are part of a global economy that links us with other nations; and we are one of many dependents in the biosphere. Its health is our health. Moreover, whatever philosophy has guided America’s international relationships in the past, we must now engage in mutual assured survival.

When U.S. astronauts took the first picture of the Earth from space, we had unprecedented visual evidence that all the people of the world share the same small planet. In the United States, one result was a body of landmark environmental legislation still in force today. Now we have incontrovertible evidence of a different sort: Environmental issues have gone global. Our ecological impacts used to seem local and fixable – air pollution, water pollution, urban sprawl. Today we are engaged in the long-term degradation of the Earth’s life support systems, including the atmosphere and oceans. Air pollution in Chicago threatens drought in Africa; emissions in Beijing threaten floods in the American Midwest and hurricanes on its coasts; this generation’s emissions will affect many generations to come.

This isn’t new knowledge. The danger of anthropogenic carbon emissions was recognized in the 19^th Century. American presidents as far back as Lyndon Johnson were warned by their scientific advisors that climate change was underway. But now, the recognition of interconnectedness must go mainstream, accepted not only by moralists, climatologists and ecologists, but by political leaders, civil society and the captains of industry.

The new President will encounter a sputtering economic engine that must be retrofit rapidly to run on low-carbon renewable resources, at much higher levels of efficiency. As we figure out how to retool the engine, we must share the knowledge with other nations, including those who are striving to pull their people out of poverty. The environmental ethic must graduate from a personal virtue to a fundamental component of national security, economic development, global commerce and international relations.

As I’ve said, the United States has an obligation to be at the forefront of the transformation. We are the nation most responsible for the carbon in the atmosphere today; we still claim to be the world’s leader in innovation. We are overweight consumers of the world’s resources. We have enormous work to do at home and with other nations to de-carbonize international aid and trade and to disengage from the finite carbon-rich resources that threaten all of us with a future of conflicts and catastrophic climate impacts.

Many public policy organizations in the United States have been creating recommendations for how the U.S. President can jump-start federal leadership on these enormous tasks. I have had the privilege of leading one of those exercises, called the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP). Recognizing the scope of the challenge, we have taken a comprehensive approach, developing scores of recommendations across nearly 20 topics, including ocean ecology; fresh water resources; energy use in transportation, buildings and power production; the role of state and local governments; international leadership; agriculture; and national security. For example:

·         The President should dramatically recalibrate America’s energy goals. The United States should obtain 30 percent of our electricity from renewable resources by 2020; require that vehicles average at least 50 miles per gallon by 2025 and 200 miles per gallon by mid-century; reduce our energy consumption 25 percent by 2020; and increase the federal investment in clean energy technologies by a factor of 10.

·         In his inaugural address, the President should set America’s goal for greenhouse gas emission reductions at 25-30 percent reduction by 2020, compared to 1990. He should make a firm commitment to work with the international community on a post-Kyoto climate plan sufficient to hold global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

·         The President should immediately seek a bilateral agreement with China on emission reductions and technology transfer, demonstrating concrete cooperation between the world’s biggest developing and developed economies. The agreement should be signed prior to December 2009, when nations are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen on a post-Kyoto accord.

·         The President should champion an end to taxpayer subsides of fossil fuels and redirect the money to research on and commercialization of low-carbon technologies such as solar, wind, biomass and geothermal energy.

·         The President should call for a moratorium on the construction of new conventional coal-fired power plants in the United States, while supporting continued research on “clean coal” technologies.

·         He should press for deep reforms in U.S. transportation and agricultural policies. Transportation investments must shift from building roads to building mass transit systems and to policies that result in substantial reductions in vehicle miles traveled. Agricultural policy should be guided by a 50-year plan to help America grow its way out of its dependence on fossil fuels.

PCAP will deliver its full action plan to the president shortly after the election. We’ll post it on the project’s website. In the meantime, we have published an electronic book – The 100 Day Action Plan to Save the Planet – that offers a condensed version of the plan for general audiences.

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While state and local governments in the United States have shown admirable leadership with their own plans for reducing greenhouse gases, the U.S. government – the world’s largest single energy consumer – has sat on the sidelines these past eight years. That can’t continue. The next President must lead us a national effort no less ambitious than our role in World War II, mobilizing the American people to build a new economy for a new era.