US Presidential candidate Barack Obama has called this week for a million plug-in hybrid vehicles to take to American roads by 2015.
To achieve this target, he has pledged $4 billion in federal aid, and tax credits of up to $7,000 per car for consumers to encourage them to choose such vehicles, if he is elected.
Obama has been campaigning this week in Michigan, heartland of US car-making. ‘I know how much the auto industry and the auto workers of this state have struggled over the last decade or so’, he said. ‘But I also know where I want the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow to be built: not in Japan, not in China, but right here in the United States of America.’
Obama has, however, shifted from his original opposition to selling oil from the federal strategic reserve, and environmentalists are concerned that he has softened on blocking drilling for oil at new sites off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He argues that such measures are now necessary to stop further fuel price rises which will harm the economy as well as individual consumers.
However, Obama is planning a windfall tax on oil companies’ profits, to be channelled back into family tax rebates, plus a $150 billion program over the next ten years to develop new energy sources - not including nuclear power, as supported by his Republican rival John McCain. He says that he wants to free the USA from oil dependency on the Middle East and Venezuela within a decade.
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