This blog doesn’t focus on U.S. politics, but insofar as the Washington’s moves in green energy are likely to have worldwide repercussions … indulge me for a minute.

U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama and his advisors are right now weighing which programs promised during his long campaign might be shelved due the drain on resources the financial/economic crisis will inevitably cause. Hopefully, the ambitious Apollo Program-like green energy push that he has often referred to will remain a short-term priority.

It should, given the potential to unlock multiple simultaneous benefits to the U.S. of high value, including ones that could help dig the U.S. out of its economic funk (granted, it would take time for some of these to bear fruit):

1) Energy security: reduced dependence on foreign oil, and the costs and risks it entails (more efficiency, lower energy intensity, i.e. energy per $ of GDP.
2) Economic boost: Domestic job creation related to green technology investment and lucrative exports of said technology
3) Foreign policy: A freer hand due to #1, plus energy independence prevents oil-export-fed dictatorships like Russia, Iran, Venezuela from maintaining undue geopolitical influence.
4) Positive, needed impact on national environmental quality and global warming.

Now, looking at these 4 points, one might be tempted to think the main one that matters to China and/or India would be the exports part in #2. If U.S. companies developed unique clean-coal patents, equipment and techniques, sure, that would be of interest. (Let’s put aside the question of whether Indian or Chinese entities should have to pay for it or just have it handed to them as part of climate-change related technology-transfer agreements, for the sake of argument.)

The point I’d like to make is: Shouldn’t the national self-interest of China and India make these four motives equally as compelling for them … if not more compelling as rising powers? Why wait around for Washington to take the lead?

Some might say, “These are poor countries without the resources to entertain such lofty ambitions.”

Are they? China is right now running a successful space program at considerable national expense. Rather than striving to reproduce the feats of a “space race” of the past, that the U.S. and the Soviet Union contested four decades ago, might not Beijing inject the same level of resources and national pride into a new green-energy race? The national return on investment stands to be much higher and more tangible than zero-gravity rat experiments and moon rocks.

And who really has the brainpower to make a green-energy Apollo program fly in the years ahead? Looking at the science, mathematics and engineering post-graduate programs at elite U.S. universities today, a massive proportion of the students aren’t U.S.-born but from overseas … places like China and India.

Food for thought.

For more on the topic of what Obama might do and why, see earlier post, “Options for Washington.”

(Image of Chinese Long March rocket courtesy of Livescience.com.)