Pushing back against fossil fuel interests, Obama backs clean energy choices

President Barack Obama hopes the neon lights of the Vegas strip will bring more attention to the issue of climate change.

The president landed at McCarran global Airport at 4:24 p.m., wearing a dark-colored suit with a blue shirt and tie.

Steps announced on Monday aim to build on that plan with regulations aimed at boosting financial incentives to adopt alternative energies, the White House said in a statement.

The project will be located immediately adjacent to federal land that has been designated as a special zone for solar energy production, Ray Brady, manager of the Bureau of Land Management’s National Renewable Energy Co-ordination Office, said in a telephone interview last week.

Obama “will talk about the imperative of acting to address climate change, the progress we’ve made to cut carbon pollution and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy”, Brian Deese, a senior adviser to the President, told reporters on a conference call Monday. On Sunday, it won the endorsement of Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.

“This challenge should begin by properly valuing rooftop solar, properly valuing energy efficiency and properly valuing other distributed sources of clean energy”. The organization, which previously received money from ExxonMobil, maintains that Obama’s policies promote wind and solar power at the expense of conventional energy and “will inevitably cause skyrocketing electricity prices while providing little if any net environmental benefits”, according to the summit’s website. He’ll announce new efforts to make it easier for homeowners and businesses to invest in green energy improvements that in the past may have been impractical or unaffordable.

“Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing is a simple, cost-effective way for Americans to take ownership of their energy use and generation”.

Obama also was announcing the approval of a transmission line that will support a 485-megawatt solar plant planned for Riverside County in California.

The Wilderness Society’s Chase Huntley called the project a good example “of how we can meet our clean energy goals with limited impact to wildlands and wildlife habitat”.