Shutterstock / George LamsonA California condor — is it expendable?
Is it OK to slaughter hundreds of thousands of birds every year in the name of clean energy? Is it OK for a luxury home developer to kill California condors in its quest for profits?
The Obama administration seems to think so. It is flexing little to none of the legal muscle needed to encourage wind energy companies to avoid killing eagles, hawks, and other birds that can be fatally drawn into their spinning turbines.
An Associated Press investigation revealed that the administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing a bird. Many of the avian victims of the fast-growing wind sector are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and some are protected by the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
Each death is federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines. No wind energy company has been prosecuted, even those that repeatedly flout the law.
Wind power, a pollution-free energy intended to ease global warming, is a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s energy plan. His administration has championed a $1 billion-a-year tax break to the industry that has nearly doubled the amount of wind power in his first term.
The large death toll at wind farms shows how the renewable energy rush comes with its own environmental consequences, trade-offs the Obama administration is willing to make in the name of cleaner energy.
“It is the rationale that we have to get off of carbon, we have to get off of fossil fuels, that allows them to justify this,” said Tom Dougherty, a long-time environmentalist who worked for nearly 20 years for the National Wildlife Federation in the West, until his retirement in 2008. “But at what cost? In this case, the cost is too high.”
And it’s not only the wind industry that’s getting a free pass. The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed not to prosecute deaths of endangered California condors caused by two projects in California — one a wind farm being built in the Tehachapi Mountains, the other a luxury home, hotel, and golf-course development in the middle of condor country 60 miles north of Los Angeles. From the L.A. Times article:
Fish and Wildlife Director Daniel Ashe said the decision reflects a difficult reality. The threat of prosecution jeopardized the construction of large-scale alternative energy facilities and real estate developments in the wild and windy places preferred by condors.
“This is the first time we’ve authorized incidental takes of California condors — and we’re approaching them very cautiously,” Ashe said in an interview.
“The good news is that we have an expanding population of condors, which are also expanding their range,” he said. “We have to make sure that as the condor population grows, we are learning to work with local private businesses to fit a conservation effort into the landscape.”
The agency invited other wind farms to apply for similar permission.
Wildlife advocates and conservationists said the decision threatens the survival of the 150 free-flying condors in California and will weaken the concept of federally designated critical habitat for endangered species.
If wind energy firms are given free passes to kill federally protected birds, they’ll have less motivation to invest in wildlife-friendly technological advances, or to site their turbines in areas where bird strikes would be minimized. (And wind energy at least helps fight climate change, whereas there’s no public benefit from luxury real estate development.) Clean energy and wildlife can coexist, but such coexistence is going to take hard work, planning, research and development — and diligence and occasional heavy-handedness from the federal government.
Several people have asked me what I think of Jonathan Chait’s new column in New York magazine: “Obama Might Actually Be the Environmental President.” Apparently some folks are quite upset about it and think it’s terrible, though I’m not entirely sure why.
Seems to me Chait mostly gets it right. He’s right that Obama has made much more progress on climate and clean energy than he gets credit for. He’s right that Obama has mostly done it through the stimulus bill and a series of low-key regulatory actions, rather than through high-profile “green” fights. In the high-profile green fights that have been had, cap-and-trade and Keystone, Obama has disappointed, and is disappointing, and promises to further disappoint many greens, but Chait is right that the disappointment has unfairly tarred the whole presidency. He’s right that greens’ harsh judgment is born of a sense of desperate urgency about the scale of action necessary.
And — perhaps more controversially — Chait is right that the decisions Obama makes on Clean Air Act authority in his second term are more significant, in carbon terms, than the much more high-profile decision he’s going to make on the Keystone XL pipeline. (Glad to see Chait call out NRDC’s ingenious proposal to make carbon regulations do serious work at low cost.)
What I think has my friends upset, and where they differ, is Chait’s overall assessment: that Obama is therefore “the environmental president.” The question here is — as it is for every historical figure, but especially Obama, and especially on climate — compared to what?
Is Obama a success on climate compared to what needs to be done? Ha ha. No. Of course not. But then all world leaders fail that test. Chait says 17 percent carbon reductions by 2020 is greens’ “holy grail,” but it’s more like a moldy grail. We now know that much more is needed. For the U.S. to truly do its part, to achieve carbon zero by 2040 or so, would require massive systems change, an all-hands-on-deck wartime mobilization. Obama is not delivering that, or anything close, nor could he.
A success on climate compared to previous presidents? Or to a possible President Mitt Romney? Well, of course. Clinton and Gore bungled it and George W. Bush crammed it forcefully out of sight. Mitt Romney would have done doodly-squat. (And no, John McCain wouldn’t have done anything either.) Compared to nothing, Obama’s done a fantastic job.
So those are the poles. Judge him by the dysfunctional sh*tpile that is current American politics or by the crushing size of the climate need? Or somewhere in between? Chait chooses to judge relative to the sh*tpile. Lots of climate hawks judge relative to the need. It’s mostly a matter of aesthetic preference or identity projection, to be honest. I’m not sure the grand historical thumbs-up or thumbs-down is all that important.
The question for me is whether Obama has been a success compared to what was (and is) possible. And here, I’m with Chait: If he delivers ambitious regulations on existing power plants, then yes, Obama will be an overall success on climate and energy, even if he approves Keystone. Given the situation he inherited — a vertiginous economic crisis followed by persistent high unemployment, a Republican Party now single-mindedly devoted to nihilistic opposition, and a series of choke points like the filibuster that give a committed congressional opposition almost total veto power — he has accomplished a miraculous amount. (Remember universal health care? That was cool.)
There’s more he could have done, of course, but as Chait himself has written, the American public and commentariat alike are deep in the grips of magical thinking about the presidency, blowing it up all out of proportion to its real power (on domestic policy, at least). Unless his agenda is shared by a large and muscular congressional majority — and Obama’s climate agenda is not, as was painfully demonstrated — the president has to work by hook or by crook, incrementally, in the margins. Ritually chanting “bully pulpit” and “leadership” won’t change that.
To be clear, I absolutely think Obama should reject the Keystone pipeline. It is the right thing to do, on both substantive grounds and on the basis of its powerful symbolic value. Some people think the Keystone fight is preventing or constraining what otherwise might be bipartisan progress on energy; I think that’s nonsense. Some think Obama can get “credibility” or “credit” from his congressional opponents if he approves Keystone; that’s nonsense too. Any Republican or fossil-state Dem who plans to fight Obama on EPA regs will fight him regardless of what he does on Keystone. But on the merits, it’s clear that those regs, especially the ones on existing power plants, are the bigger brass ring, the fight that must be won.
In a way, it is with climate as it is with so much else in the Obama era. He has not delivered the grand, dramatic transformation so many people wanted. He has not changed the narrative that big government is bad, or that regulations always slow economic growth, or that the deficit is a dire threat, or that “all of the above” is a sensible energy strategy. American politics remains trapped in a set of frames that make active, effective governance of the sort badly needed in the 21st century almost impossible. Obama didn’t change the weltanschauung. He does, however, deserve credit for doing a great deal within its constraints.
Climate hawks should not waste their time hoping for a Great Man (or Woman) to save the day in the next election. No one person, no matter how brave or clever, can turn the tide. The impediments to climate action in the U.S. are primarily structural and systemic; systems thinking, not Romantic tales of individual heroism, is what’s needed.
Enviros hoping for details on President Obama’s promised biofuel push got a few answers yesterday in the president’s new budget, which still left some questions as to how the administration plans to pay for expensive new biofuels research. The budget [PDF] indicates the Interior Department may charge the fossil fuel industry more to drill on public lands, a plan that already had Republicans bristling when the president hinted at it last month.
In mid-March, in a speech at Illinois’ Argonne National Lab, Obama pitched an Energy Security Trust, which would collect $2 billion in additional revenues by 2020 from oil and gas companies that drill on federal land, and invest the funds in R&D for cutting-edge biofuels and clean vehicles. According to the Interior Department, these royalties totaled roughly $7.9 billion in FY 2012.
The speech left unclear the question of how an additional $2 billion in royalties could be raised without either raising royalty rates — a non-starter for the fossil fuel industry — or allowing more drilling on more public lands. A White House spokesperson was quick to rule out expanded drilling in Alaska, but left the possibility elsewhere. A Climate Desk calculation reviewed by MIT-based energy blogger Jesse Jenkins found that to raise an additional $2 billion in royalties through expanded drilling alone, oil and gas development on public land would need to increase by 1.5 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively, by 2020.
“You certainly don’t gain anything by promoting clean energy that ends up promoting the production of more dirty energy sources,” Natural Resources Defense Council policy analyst Bob Deans told Climate Desk last month.
Deans had hoped that today’s budget would clear things up. While the proposal doesn’t mention the Energy Security Trust by name, it calls for unspecified adjustments to royalty rates that The Hill reports would be redirected from the general treasury toward the trust. An Interior Department spokesperson said that annual oil and gas income to the government is projected to rise by $2.8 billion by 2023, but was unsure whether this money would come from new public land drilling or solely via increased royalties.
The budget also carves out $2.3 billion for the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which oversees R&D on advanced biofuels (as well as solar, wind, and other clean energy research), but doesn’t specify how much of that would go toward biofuels specifically, or whether these funds are in addition to the $2 billion for the Energy Security Trust. A White House spokesperson did not return repeated calls for comment.
If Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) has his way, it could be a moot point: Goodlatte introduced a bill yesterday that would bar biofuels from comprising more than 10 percent of the nation’s gasoline supply. That was the mix limit enforced by the EPA until 2010, but the agency has begun to relax enforcement of the restriction, allowing for the sale of gas with up to 15 percent ethanol. But Goodlatte’s bill would set the 10-percent cap in stone by limiting how much of the nation’s biofuel supply can go to fuel; it would also eliminate federal rules that require gasoline producers to use ethanol. Goodlatte claims his bill could help livestock producers by easing corn prices that were pushed to record highs by recent drought — prices that, incidentally, also hurt the ethanol industry.
At a press conference in Washington yesterday afternoon, Goodlatte, joined by co-sponsors Reps. Jim Costa (D-Calif.), Steve Womack (R-Ark.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), said the government’s support for ethanol “has quite frankly triggered a domino effect that is hurting American consumers, energy producers, food manufacturers, and retailers,” adding that he has support for the bill from livestock interests and the petroleum industry.
But while Goodlatte’s stuck to the topic of corn-based fuel, Brooke Coleman, director of the trade group that represents non-corn biofuel producers, says the bill would apply to all kinds of biofuel, and have the consequence of barring future growth of the kind Obama envisions.
“It’s a total smokescreen,” Coleman said. “You can’t ban ethanol over 10 percent and pretend you’re not affecting the advanced biofuels. You’d be banning our product.”
In November, the EPA, facing pressure from drought-beset governors to waive federal rules mandating ethanol use, found that the ethanol industry did not contribute [PDF] to higher food prices and ruled not to grant the requested waivers, which “greatly disappointed” Goodlatte, who introduced a similar, unsuccessful bill in 2011.
Given how much of the gasoline market corn-based ethanol eats up, Coleman said, placing a hard-and-fast limit on biofuels in the gas supply would kill off the nascent advanced biofuels industry before the president finds ways to fund it.
“[Goodlatte] is an advocate for protecting the free market for oil,” he said. “There’s no place for us to go.”
Last week, President Obama nominated Sally Jewell, CEO of the outdoor gear giant REI, to head the Interior Department — the branch of government that manages national parks, monuments, and rangelands spanning from Ellis Island to Yosemite, and is currently overseeing an epic oil and gas drilling spree. Environmental groups are tripping over themselves to praise the president for his impeccable taste.
“In Jewell, President Obama chose a leader with a demonstrated commitment to preserving the higher purposes public lands hold for all Americans,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune gushed in a statement. Mike Daulton with the National Audubon Society called her “a strong leader who understands that protecting our natural world goes hand in hand with a strong American economy.” Bob Irvin, president of American Rivers, beamed that “she knows how important fishing, boating, and hiking and the great outdoors are to our families, to our future, and to our heritage as Americans.”
You get the picture. Why do the greenies love her so much? For starters, she’s a card-carrying conservationist with a long record of working to protect the wild places where she and her customers like to play. But there’s another reason Sally Jewell is the darling of Big Green groups: Her industry has given conservation cachet in Washington that it hasn’t enjoyed since the 1970s.
Much has been written about how environmentalists have failed to get substantial legislation through Congress since the golden age of the Clean Air and Water Acts. The particulars of their many failures are varied, but it basically boils down to this: Their opponents always manage to dumb the debate down to “jobs vs. the environment” — and when that happens, you can guess who wins. In Washington, as they say, money talks.
Not long ago, Jewell’s industry — made up of companies that manufacture and sell tents and backpacks and kayaks and such — was having similar problems. Frank Hugelmeyer, CEO of the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, remembers huddling over drinks at the Hyatt in Washington, D.C., after a frustrating day of lobbying on Capitol Hill in 2004. The industry was growing by leaps and bounds, but “in the halls of Congress, we were still being treating as tree-huggers,” he told me last spring as I was reporting a story about the industry for High Country News. “I remember saying, ‘We need to quantify this — the real true impact of outdoor recreation.’”
The notes they scribbled on a napkin that evening would inspire two years of work, funded by REI, aimed at putting a price tag on outdoor recreation nationwide. The resulting report, published in 2006, estimated that the outdoor business generated an astronomical $730 billion annually. The figure included everything from gear manufacturing and sales to hotel rooms and restaurant tabs, but if you start throwing numbers like that around, politicians’ ears perk up, Craig Mackey, the OIA’s director of recreation policy, told me. “That report has gained us an enormous amount of traction in Washington, D.C.”
The most recent industry report — released at a press conference last summer where Jewell stood side by side with the president of off-road vehicle manufacturer Polaris and the governors of Utah and Washington — found that, if you toss in ORVs and power boats, Americans spend $645 billion a year on recreation. According to the industry, that number dwarfs what we spend annually on pharmaceuticals, cars, gas, or household utilities.
Under the Obama administration, OIA bigwigs and outdoor company CEOs have become regulars at D.C. press conferences unveiling initiatives to get more Americans recreating on public lands. (The industry’s interests dovetail conveniently with the Obamas’ fight against childhood obesity.) And now Jewell might be unveiling those initiatives herself instead of smiling silently off to the side.
And the environmentalists who love her so much? After decades of being blown off as dirty hippie backpacker types, they can finally declare, with a straight face and data to back them up, that protecting the public lands from oil and gas drilling and other ecological insults is not just the right thing to do — it’s also good for business.
Turns out that the argument has traction. In 2009, at the urging of outdoor industry leaders (among many others), Congress passed, and the president signed, the Omnibus Public Lands Act, protecting more than 2 million acres of new wilderness and more than 1,000 miles of newly designated wild and scenic rivers, and expanding the national parks and monuments system. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) both cited the OIA’s numbers in speeches supporting the bill.
Since that time, of course, we’ve seen the Tea Party revolution and a return to congressional gridlock. But now comes Jewell and the hope that, with her business savvy and the might of her industry, we might see more progress yet.
But will Jewell really be the answer to all the greenies’ prayers? If the Senate confirms her — and it’s hard to imagine that it won’t, despite flailing from right-wing pundits who say the one-time petroleum engineer is too green — she will be the first Interior secretary in at least 30 years who doesn’t wear a cowboy hat. This bodes well for those who value the public lands for things other than grazing cows, logging, and mining: Jewell is, above all, a business woman, but her loyalties clearly lie with those who view the public lands as a playground, not the source of commodities like minerals or meat.
Some have raised legitimate questions about whether the interests of Jewell’s industry line up with what’s best for the land. Off-road vehicle riders love nothing better than tearing up the virgin (and extremely fragile) deserts managed by Interior. And while “human-powered” recreation nuts like myself aren’t drilling and fracking the heck out of the public domain, we burn a fair amount of the resulting fuel in order to get to our favorite recreation areas. As Jewell herself quipped at the press conference last summer, “I don’t know anyone who walks to the trailhead.”
Jewell will no doubt continue her push to get more people — particularly young people and people of color — into the outdoors. That’s good for both the outdoor business and the environmental movement, which have become alarmed of late at the old age and whiteness of their customer/membership bases. It’s also a priority for land managers, who are under increasing pressure to make public lands “pay their way.” With land management budgets in shambles, we will likely see more pressure to outsource services like campground management to private companies and to create “public-private partnerships.”
But the biggest unknown surrounding public lands conservation is Jewell’s boss-to-be, President Obama. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are sure to block any conservation measures from passing through Congress, and while Jewell can steer the department toward more eco-friendly land management, there is a limit to what she can do from inside a government juggernaut like Interior. That means that her most powerful tool for any lasting progress is to work through the president, via executive fiat.
President Clinton used his executive powers to create a pile of new national monuments at the encouragement of his Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt. So far, however, Obama has shown little appetite for such action. He has made it clear that he plans to continue the oil and gas drilling orgy that his predecessor started. Meanwhile, he has protected less public land administratively than each of the four presidents who preceded him — even George W. Bush.
Can Jewell convince Obama to create a substantial conservation legacy, even if it’s only to shore up her beloved “recreation economy”? It might require getting him off the golf course and out onto the Potomac in a kayak — but then, I suspect that Jewell knows people who could provide the necessary gear and instruction.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story suggested that the outdoor recreation economy had shrunk between 2006 and 2011. A spokesperson for the Outdoor Industry Association tells us that, according to the industry’s numbers, it has been growing at approximately 5 percent a year.
Last week, President Obama nominated Sally Jewell, CEO of the outdoor gear giant REI, to head the Interior Department — the branch of government that manages national parks, monuments, and rangelands spanning from Ellis Island to Yosemite, and is currently overseeing an epic oil and gas drilling spree. Environmental groups are tripping over themselves to praise the president for his impeccable taste.
“In Jewell, President Obama chose a leader with a demonstrated commitment to preserving the higher purposes public lands hold for all Americans,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune gushed in a statement. Mike Daulton with the National Audubon Society called her “a strong leader who understands that protecting our natural world goes hand in hand with a strong American economy.” Bob Irvin, president of American Rivers, beamed that “she knows how important fishing, boating, and hiking and the great outdoors are to our families, to our future, and to our heritage as Americans.”
You get the picture. Why do the greenies love her so much? For starters, she’s a card-carrying conservationist with a long record of working to protect the wild places where she and her customers like to play. But there’s another reason Sally Jewell is the darling of Big Green groups: Her industry has given conservation cachet in Washington that it hasn’t enjoyed since the 1970s.
Much has been written about how environmentalists have failed to get substantial legislation through Congress since the golden age of the Clean Air and Water Acts. The particulars of their many failures are varied, but it basically boils down to this: Their opponents always manage to dumb the debate down to “jobs vs. the environment” — and when that happens, you can guess who wins. In Washington, as they say, money talks.
Not long ago, Jewell’s industry — made up of companies that manufacture and sell tents and backpacks and kayaks and such — was having similar problems. Frank Hugelmeyer, CEO of the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, remembers huddling over drinks at the Hyatt in Washington, D.C., after a frustrating day of lobbying on Capitol Hill in 2004. The industry was growing by leaps and bounds, but “in the halls of Congress, we were still being treating as tree-huggers,” he told me last spring as I was reporting a story about the industry for High Country News. “I remember saying, ‘We need to quantify this — the real true impact of outdoor recreation.’”
The notes they scribbled on a napkin that evening would inspire two years of work, funded by REI, aimed at putting a price tag on outdoor recreation nationwide. The resulting report, published in 2006, estimated that the outdoor business generated an astronomical $730 billion annually. The figure included everything from gear manufacturing and sales to hotel rooms and restaurant tabs, but if you start throwing numbers like that around, politicians’ ears perk up, Craig Mackey, the OIA’s director of recreation policy, told me. “That report has gained us an enormous amount of traction in Washington, D.C.”
The most recent industry report — released at a press conference last summer where Jewell stood side by side with the president of ORV manufacturer Polaris and the governors of Utah and Washington — put the figure slightly lower: $645 billion a year. But still, if you believe the industry, that number dwarfs what we spend annually on pharmaceuticals, cars, gas, or household utilities.
Under the Obama administration, OIA bigwigs and outdoor company CEOs have become regulars at D.C. press conferences unveiling initiatives to get more Americans recreating on public lands. (The industry’s interests dovetail conveniently with the Obamas’ fight against childhood obesity.) And now Jewell might be unveiling those initiatives herself instead of smiling silently off to the side.
And the environmentalists who love her so much? After decades of being blown off as dirty hippy backpacker types, they can finally declare, with a straight face and data to back them up, that protecting the public lands from oil and gas drilling and other ecological insults is not just the right thing to do — it’s also good for business.
Turns out that the argument has traction. In 2009, at the urging of outdoor industry leaders (among many others), Congress passed, and the president signed, the Omnibus Public Lands Act, protecting more than 2 million acres of new wilderness and more than 1,000 miles of newly designated wild and scenic rivers, and expanding the national parks and monuments system. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) both cited the OIA’s numbers in speeches supporting the bill.
Since that time, of course, we’ve seen the Tea Party revolution and a return to congressional gridlock. But now comes Jewell and the hope that, with her business savvy and the might of her industry, we might see more progress yet.
But will Jewell really be the answer to all the greenies’ prayers? If the Senate confirms her — and it’s hard to imagine that it won’t, despite flailing from right-wing pundits who say the one-time petroleum engineer is too green — she will be the first Interior secretary in at least 30 years who doesn’t wear a cowboy hat. This bodes well for those who value the public lands for things other than grazing cows, logging, and mining: Jewell is, above all, a business woman, but her loyalties clearly lie with those who view the public lands as a playground, not the source of commodities like minerals or meat.
Some have raised legitimate questions about whether the interests of Jewell’s industry line up with what’s best for the land. Off-road vehicle riders love nothing better than tearing up the virgin (and extremely fragile) deserts managed by Interior. And while “human-powered” recreation nuts like myself aren’t drilling and fracking the heck out of the public domain, we burn a fair amount of the resulting fuel in order to get to our favorite recreation areas. As Jewell herself quipped at the press conference last summer, “I don’t know anyone who walks to the trailhead.”
But the biggest unknown surrounding Jewell’s abilities to effect change is her boss-to-be, President Obama. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are sure to block any conservation measures from passing through Congress, and while Jewell can steer the department toward more eco-friendly land management, there is a limited amount that she can do from inside a government juggernaut like Interior. That means that her most powerful tool is to work through the president, via executive fiat.
President Clinton used his executive powers to create a pile of new national monuments at the encouragement of his Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt. So far, however, Obama has shown little appetite for such action. He has made it clear that he plans to continue to continue the oil and gas drilling orgy that his predecessor started. Meanwhile, he has protected less public land administratively than each of the four presidents who preceded him — even George W. Bush.
Can Jewell convince Obama to create a substantial conservation legacy, even if it’s only to shore up her beloved “recreation economy”? It might require getting him off the golf course and out onto the Potomac in a kayak — but then, I suspect that Jewell knows people who could provide the necessary gear and instruction.
That is, the president said the words “climate change” three times during the address, and made a mention of “dangerous carbon pollution” to boot. That’s compared to just one mention of “climate” in his 2012 SOTU, and zilch in 2011, for those of you keeping score at home.
This year’s climate callouts weren’t a surprise — Obama paved the way with his inaugural address last month, and in recent days his advisers had been hinting strongly that climate change would get a substantial nod in the speech.
Even though he also lauded increased oil and gas drilling, the section on energy and climate was substantial enough to encourage some greens:
The President’s call to put a price on carbon pollution and solve the climate crisis was bold and meaningful. We must act now. #sotu
“[F]or the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change,” Obama said. He noted that “the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense.”
He called on Congress to pass a “market-based” climate plan like the McCain-Lieberman bill of yore, but he knows that won’t happen, so he followed right up by saying, “if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”
What might those executive actions be? David Roberts laid out possibilities earlier this week: The biggie would be regulating carbon pollution from existing power plants. Others include curbing methane emissions from natural-gas drilling and developing new efficiency standards for appliances and equipment.
Obama’s lines in the SOTU about “produc[ing] more oil at home than we have in 15 years” and “cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits” show that he’s far from ready to leave the oil industry behind. (But, hey, at least he didn’t mention coal.)
More disheartening was the lack of enthusiasm Obama showed for the climate fight. Yes, he said some good stuff and demonstrated that he thinks the problem is serious, but he was much more passionate about other issues, like raising the national minimum wage to $9 an hour and providing universal preschool. He even sounded more worked up about cyber attacks than about climate chaos. And his rousing, powerful calls for new gun-control legislation electrified the Capitol, showing what it’s like when he really cares about an issue and intends to put serious muscle behind it.
After a year of near-silence on climate change, it’s good to have the president talking about it again. But so far it’s just talk.
—–
Here’s the full text of the climate and energy section of the speech:
As regular readers know, I believe many people wildly overestimate the president’s power in general and the power of presidential rhetoric in particular. Ezra Klein had a great piece on this in The New Yorker a while back, in which he made two points. One was that there’s very little evidence that presidential backing leads to passage of legislation or major shifts in public opinion. And the other is that the president’s rhetorical support is as likely to polarize an issue as it is to bring people together around it.
This last point was on my mind today when I read about The Washington Post’s new poll. It’s a fascinating look at which issues are sensitive to Obama’s involvement. They asked people about various issues, and then asked about those same issues accompanied by Obama’s support.
When it comes to a ban on assault weapons or ending the war in Afghanistan, Obama’s support increases public support. When it comes to a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers, Obama’s support decreases public support — which is another way of saying that it polarizes the issue, sending Republicans away from it. And when it comes to climate change, Obama’s support has … virtually no effect at all.
What are we to make of this? The WaPo story doesn’t really speculate. So I shall fill the speculation gap.
The “path to citizenship” thing is easy, and roughly what I would expect. As an idea, it makes sense, and it’s been floated by and to Republicans a number of times. But the country is intensely polarized, so when Republicans find out it’s Obama’s idea, they recoil.
How about the assault-weapons ban and an end to the war in Afghanistan? These are harder to explain. My guess is that a certain slice of the populace fears that such positions are “weak” and are afraid to support them without the validation of a Strong Leader. But I’m curious to hear other theories.
And finally, what about climate change? That one’s easy: Everyone has already made up their minds. The issue is thoroughly, 100 percent polarized. The tribal lines are drawn, so nothing Obama says is going to have much effect.
This polarization on climate is a bad thing and probably the most serious impediment to federal action. I know lots of climate hawks think that Obama could lead some kind of national teach-in and change things, but this poll, to me, confirms that such hopes are forlorn. Obama is already a partisan player in a partisan drama. He speaks for “his side,” or at least that’s how conservatives see it.
To bring conservatives around on climate, you need conservatives, or at least cultural figures who are viewed as trusted and nonpartisan by conservatives, to carry the message. Obama can do many things, but he can’t do that.
The White HouseHe’s thinking about climate. Now to get him acting …
The bloom is back on the rose. Since President Obama’s strong words on climate in his inaugural speech, Facebook and the blogosphere have been abuzz with climate hopefuls. The consensus is that Obama has always really wanted to act on climate and has simply been stymied by opposition forces. This time around, though, the gloves are off. The executive branch is back in action. Forward climate action!
Before we break out the champagne, though, I think our community needs to remember something: Barack Obama is a politician. He is facing a second term where climate will not be on Congress’ agenda. He knows that the environmental community worked itself into a frenzy over his perceived failure to lead during his first term. The words of a speech cost no more than the air. The inaugural address is an opportunity to pacify angry constituents by recognizing their concerns. Just as Obama included representatives of key communities in the inauguration ceremonies, he recognized another group of discontented supporters — i.e. climate activists — in his speech.
Let’s assume for the moment that the Obama administration does hope to act on climate. Here are the political realities: Every time the executive branch moves to exercise its authority — for example, to regulate some industry through the Department of Energy or the EPA — the Republicans will react with vigorous opposition. They will threaten Democratic leaders politically. They will hold press conferences. In the House of Representatives, GOP leaders will hold hearings, subpoena officials, and try to cut funding. Republicans will, in other words, make the administration’s life difficult. Facing these challenges, the executive branch will occasionally, and perhaps frequently, back down. This is politics.
The question then becomes: What can the environmental community do to encourage the Obama administration to follow through on its commitments?
To answer this question, we need to take a short step back. Over the last few weeks, many of the majorclimateanalysts have resurfaced a dormant debate over the failure of climate legislation back in 2009-2010. The major question on the table is how to allocate the blame and in particular how much blame the White House deserves for not making climate a greater priority. This is difficult to resolve. As I note in a recent report on climate in the 111th Congress, actually measuring the influence of a president on a given issue is impossible. I happen to think that presidential leadership matters a great deal; after all, the last major overhaul of our energy system happened under President Carter. Carter was a terrible politician and yet still succeeded because energy reform was his top objective.
But whatever your opinion, most commentators agree on one thing: Climate has not been the Obama administration’s highest priority. Historical inquiry aside, the more relevant issue is not the effects of his inaction but their cause. We need to know why Obama failed to make climate the linchpin of his first term. The answer to that question will help us develop a strategy for making sure climate doesn’t get ignored this time around.
In my report, I suggest that the environmental movement had a strong inside-the-Beltway strategy for climate legislation. What they lacked was an equally strong outside-the-Beltway strategy and, in particular, the capacity to shift public opinion and exercise political power at the local and state level. Though the advice is in danger of becoming rote, it remains true. Over the next four years, the Obama administration will respond only under pressure. The executive branch is in a constant balancing act amidst competing forces, and we will need to make sure that it tips in the right direction.
In other words, the environmental community needs to make failing to act on climate as onerous for the administration as acting on climate. For every oversight hearing that the Republicans convene in Congress, we need a protest around the White House grounds. For every threat of funding cuts by the GOP, we need a storm of petitions. If we can do that — if we can push not only with lobbyists and policy reports but with demonstrations and public opinion polls — we can make Obama’s words into promises, and his promises into action.
Back in 2011, the Obama administration postponed a decision on whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline until after the election. Now, this week, they’ve postponed it again until at least April.
But the White House can’t kick the can down the road forever. Someday the decider must decide. What do you think Obama’s decision will be?
Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.
Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools.” Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published “A Nation at Risk,” insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and … we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.
Even facing undeniably real problems — say, discrimination against gay people — one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe. There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.
Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.
And that’s always been the difficulty with climate change — the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. It’s not a fight, like education reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn’t be more different at a fundamental level.
We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.
Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets. Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.
We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible — all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.
Unless you understand these distinctions, you don’t understand climate change — and it’s not at all clear that President Obama understands them.
That’s why his administration is sometimes peeved when they don’t get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the next decade.
It’s precisely the kind of gradual transformation that people — and politicians — like. We should have adopted it long ago (and would have, except that it challenged the power of Detroit and its unions, and so both Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But here’s the terrible thing: It’s no longer a measure that impresses physics. After all, physics isn’t kidding around or negotiating. While we were discussing whether climate change was even a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic. If we’re to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5 percent a year to make a real difference.
It’s not Obama’s fault that that’s not happening. He can’t force it to happen. Consider the moment when the great president of the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analog to physics we’re going to get, in that he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn’t muster America to get off the couch and fight.
There were even the equivalent of climate deniers at that time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America. Indeed, some of them were the same institutions that are opposing climate action today. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, vociferously opposed Lend-Lease.
So Roosevelt did all he could on his own authority, and then when Pearl Harbor offered him his moment, he pushed as hard as he possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant, for instance, telling the car companies that they were out of the car business for a while and instead in the tank and fighter-plane business.
For Obama, faced with a Congress bought off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic approach would be to do absolutely everything he could on his own authority — new EPA regulations, for example; and of course, he should refuse to grant the permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, something that requires no permission from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) or the rest of Congress.
So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best when it comes to such measures. The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement prices to coal companies. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change negotiations. (It’s hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen summit.) And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth. Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would save.
If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just the obvious and easy. He’d also be looking for that Pearl Harbor moment. God knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest year in the history of the continental United States, the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of the Arctic so severe that the federal government’s premier climate scientist declared it a “planetary emergency.”
In fact, he didn’t even appear to notice those phenomena, campaigning for a second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble, even as people in the crowds greeting him were fainting en masse from the heat. Throughout campaign 2012, he kept declaring his love for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, where apparently oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as sun and wind.
Only at the very end of the campaign, when Hurricane Sandy seemed to present a political opening, did he even hint at seizing it — his people letting reporters know on background that climate change would now be one of his top three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top four) for a second term. That’s a start, I suppose, but it’s a long way from telling the car companies they better retool to start churning out wind turbines.
And anyway, he took it back at the first opportunity. At his post-election press conference, he announced that climate change was “real,” thus marking his agreement with, say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to “future generations,” he also agreed that we should “do more.” But addressing climate change, he added, would involve “tough political choices.” Indeed, too tough, it seems, for here were his key lines:
“I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”
It’s as if World War II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had declared, “I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears, and sweat. And God knows that polls badly, so just forget about it.”
The president must be pressed to do all he can — and more. That’s why thousands of us will descend on Washington, D.C., on President’s Day weekend, in what will be the largest environmental demonstration in years. But there’s another possibility we need to consider: that perhaps he’s simply not up to this task, and that we’re going to have to do it for him, as best we can.
If he won’t take on the fossil fuel industry, we will. That’s why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment movements are now doing their best to highlight the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.
If he won’t use our position as a superpower to drive international climate change negotiations out of their rut, we’ll try. That’s why young people from 190 nations are gathering in Istanbul in June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won’t listen to scientists — like the 20 top climatologists who told him that the Keystone pipeline is a mistake — then top scientists are increasingly clear that they’ll need to get arrested to make their point.
Those of us in the growing grassroots climate movement are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast as physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough even this all-too-patient president will get caught up in the draft. But we’re not waiting for him. We can’t.
