The last week has been filled with speculation about what President-elect Obama will and will not do during his first days in office. The prevailing assumption is that his to-do list is so long that he'll have to take some things on and let other things go.

In the words of The New York Times, "With the economy in disarray and the nation’s treasury draining, President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers are trying to figure out which of his expansive campaign promises to push in the opening months of his tenure and which to put on a slower track."

Well, maybe. And then again, maybe not. There's a possibility, or maybe even a likelihood, that the logic underlying this view is flawed. It assumes that these crises are entirely severable—that they occupy solo silos. Not so. The crises are interconnected.

This faulty logic, which we might call the Not-a-System Fallacy, really gets my goat. This is because I've seen it way too many times, and it produces faulty strategies, and these faulty strategies keep the world in its massive rut. It is yesterday's mindset—Old Think—in a world that badly needs new approaches.

In Einstein's famous to the point of cliché phrase, you can't solve a problem at the level at which is created.

If the Obama Administration goes with Old Think, some pretty radical crisis triage is probably in the offing. Important measures will be deferred indefinitely, perhaps forever.
 
However, if the Obama Administration takes a systems tack, the need for triage will be much reduced. Under a systems approach, the following question would come first: what meta-strategy will address multiple crises simultaneously?

The answer to this question leaps out at me like Superman busting through a wall. A green New Deal would simultaneously create jobs, address climate change, make us energy-independent, boost the auto industry, and … well, you get the idea. Think birds with one stone, or bang for the buck. A green New Deal would be highly synergistic.

What this suggests is that there is a compelling strategic logic for making a green New Deal the gravitational field around which Obama's larger transformational enterprise revolves.

From where I sit, the odds seem reasonably good that this will happen. For one thing, Team Obama appears to be constitutionally incapable of practicing Old Think. If their campaign performance is any indication, their sonar will guide them straight to the highest-leverage solutions.

For another, the green New Deal concept is going mainstream rapidly. Late last month, the United Nations Environment Programme issued a call for a global green New Deal, stating: "Mobilizing and re-focusing the global economy towards investments in clean technologies and 'natural' infrastructure such as forests and soils is the best bet for real growth, combating climate change and triggering an employment boom in the 21st century."

About the same time, Newsweek published a lengthy article titled ‘A Green New Deal.’ In the teaser, the magazine made no bones about its position on the issue: "Some of the world's most powerful leaders argue that this crisis is a call to speed up the creation of a new energy economy. Why they're right."

The article went on to observe, "(T)here are …  powerful voices being raised amid the [current] din of despair, saying that now is precisely the time to seize the initiative and launch [a green] 'global revolution' …

And not just because it will stave off disasters two or three decades away, but because it can provide the impetus to pull the global economy out of the slump it's in now and put it on a more solid foundation than it's had in at least a generation. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and American presidential candidate Barack Obama have taken up the cause of what United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week called a 'green New Deal'…"

Finally, the Newsweek article noted that Obama "is talking about goals so ambitious that they amount to a green New Deal, even if he doesn't use the phrase himself."

Add all this up, and you get an impressive trifecta: Team Obama's strategic sagacity, its demonstrated inclination to head in the green New Deal direction, and the concept's careening toward mainstream acceptance.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager on a green New Deal coming soon to a country near you.

This would be a good thing, brought about by bad times. In the words of Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's new chief of staff: "You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste."