On June 3, 2008, on the brink of securing his party’s presidential nomination, Barack Obama delivered a grandiose address to his overjoyed supporters containing what was destined to become his most widely ridiculed promise. “If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless . . . this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” To Obama’s critics, the notion of slowing the rise of the oceans seemed to capture the delusional arrogance they saw in the freshman senator. To his supporters, the line captured the existential scale of the challenge that lay before them. As early as the nineteenth century, scientists had observed that the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere trapped heat that would otherwise have escaped into outer space.
By the outset of the twenty-first century, their warnings had taken on increasingly frantic tones, as global temperatures soared, glaciers melted, and sea levels rose alarmingly higher. And as the scientific basis for their fears grew steadily stronger, the political basis for any response seemed to erode. Climate change is a problem the American political system is practically designed not to solve. The costs of inaction all lie far in the future, while politicians survive from election to election. (Indeed, Mitt Romney, accepting the Republican nomination four years later, ridiculed Obama’s idealism, telling his supporters, “President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”) Limiting emissions does not offer any tangible benefits—merely the absence of disaster, or more likely, just its mitigation. The fossil fuel industry has powerful allies in politics, including a handful of Democrats in states that heavily produce coal and oil.
What’s more, even successfully jolting the American government into overhauling its entrenched patterns of energy use would merely serve as the precondition for the far more daunting task of coordinating agreement across the globe. The carbon any one country dumps into the atmosphere does not merely warm the air over that country—it spreads its effects across the world. Carbon pollution presents a classic collective action problem: any one country has every incentive to use cheap, dirty energy, letting others bear the costs of reform. Even worse, there is no obvious or intuitively fair basis for allocating the costs between rich and poor countries. The poorest countries can correctly point out that the old, industrialized giants grew rich by filling the atmosphere with the carbon from oil and coal, and have a larger burden for mitigating the damage they inflicted on the rest of humanity. On the other hand, those rich countries can reply that we know far more about the damage of carbon emissions now than we did during the heyday of Western industrialization—and, in any case, allowing the developing world to follow the West’s dirty energy path would court disaster.
The first major attempt to forge an international agreement—in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997—left developing countries out completely. The next major world conference—in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009—foundered upon the inability of rich and poor countries to agree on their level of obligation. In the two decades preceding Obama’s presidency, effective action to halt climate change had come to seem unimaginable. Meanwhile, the horrors of an ever-warming planet, with its rising seas, mass extinctions, droughts, famines, waves of refugees, and abandoned coastal cities, has grown terrifyingly real.
The Obama administration had taken shape in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown that pushed the threat of a slowly warming planet far from Americans’ minds. Yet, in Obama’s mind, the economic emergency he suddenly faced did not blot out the long, slow planetary emergency of unchecked climate change. The two crises served to complement each other, in a way. The president’s first task upon taking office was to find a way to get hundreds of billions of dollars out the door, and green energy provided something upon which to spend it.
The stimulus poured $90 billion worth of subsidies into technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It also extended tax credits for wind and solar power, the scheduled expiration of which threatened to smother those infant industries. The results of the infusion were nearly immediate: Before the stimulus, the Department of Energy predicted that it would take until 2030 for American wind power to produce 40,000 gigawatts of electricity per year. After the stimulus extended tax credits for wind energy, the 40,000 megawatt target was reached by 2010—two decades sooner. The wind boom continued, nearly tripling total wind energy capacity over the eight years Obama held office, as a new generation of taller, more efficient turbines came on line. At the same time, the price of manufacturing solar panels plummeted, setting off an explosive rise in their use. During Obama’s tenure total solar energy capacity in the United States increased more than thirty times over. In Obama’s second term, it even became economical to build entire power plants employing solar power; fueled largely by the tax credits, utility-scale solar power increased some thirty times over during the Obama presidency.
Following a classic pattern of American capitalism, in which the government supplied financing for new technologies—as it had with the railroad, the telegraph, and canals—the stimulus provided more than $30 billion in loans for green energy companies. A handful of the firms that received financing went bust, of course, just as happens in the private sector, but Republicans turned a couple of the high-profile failures into the symbol of what they claimed to be the insolvency of the administration’s agenda. During his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney brought reporters to the shuttered headquarters of Solyndra, a solar company that had received federal loans and gone under. As he’d hoped, the resulting news coverage echoed Romney’s contention that Solyndra had been a boondoggle emblematic of failed big government, or even corrupt “crony capitalism.” (The success of the attack also bore out the administration’s fear during the crafting of the stimulus that any spending seen as wasteful would serve to undermine the whole measure.)
In reality, failures like Solyndra were the exception rather than the rule. Of the Department of Energy’s $34 billion in loans, a mere $780 million, or just 2 percent, had defaulted. When interest payments were included, the loans broke even for the government, while financing transformative new green technologies. The loans “seed[ed] the ground for an energy revolution,” concluded Scientific American.
The stimulus also created a new agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, to fund cutting edge energy technologies. Modeled after a similar agency in the Department of Defense—which established, among other things, the Internet—ARPA-E funded research into green energy technologies whose commercial applicability lay far off in the future: advanced batteries, turbines, and ultraefficient solar cells. Because its work, by design, will not come to fruition in the short term, it is too soon to assess ARPA-E’s success in producing breakthrough technologies. But the agency has won a cult following among green energy techno-enthusiasts, and even grudging respect among a small handful of attentive conservatives. Fred Smith, the Republican founder and CEO of FedEx, has said, “Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, it’s hard to find a more effective thing government has done than ARPA–E.”
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At the international climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, the United Nations tried, and failed, to create a binding worldwide agreement to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, in the wake of that failure, some concrete goals emerged, including a pledge by the United States to reduce its emissions by 17 percent below its 2005 levels. That 17 percent figure became Obama’s ante at the international negotiation card table. If the United States wanted China, India, and other developing countries to veer off the dirty energy path, the 17 percent promised cut was the concession it needed to make. That pledge would not guarantee a successful international deal, but without it, a deal would be impossible.
Obama had a plan to fulfill America’s obligations: the United States would pass a cap-and-trade law. Cap and trade is a market-based policy for reducing emissions, under which the government sets a limit (the “cap”) on total emissions, and then allows businesses to buy and sell permits for those emissions (that’s the “trade”). Cap and trade has impeccable moderate Republican credentials. It was designed as an alternative to blunt government regulations that specify exactly what technologies every industry must use to reduce its emissions, without regard for their cost. Cap and trade assumes that firms can identify the cost of reducing their own emissions more cheaply than the government can, and that a market-based system can allow the companies with the cheapest opportunities to reduce their emissions to make the cuts. As with health care, Mitt Romney pioneered an early version of the idea as governor of Massachusetts, and he promoted a crafty administrator named Gina McCarthy to undersecretary for policy at the state’s Executive Office for Environmental Affairs to implement his vision. Romney backed off the idea shortly thereafter when he decided to seek the 2008 Republican nomination. Still, Republicans like Newt Gingrich and John McCain publicly supported the idea through 2008, and it seemed plausible to imagine that Obama might attract bipartisan support. Even Marco Rubio, as recently as 2008, had positive things to say about cap and trade.
And the administration would certainly need Republicans to pass cap and trade. Democrats still sat two senators short of a filibuster-proof majority at the beginning of Obama’s term, and they couldn’t even win all of them since those representing coal and oil states viewed cap and trade as a surefire career-ender. (Democratic senator Joe Manchin, from coal-rich West Virginia, went on to survive the 2010 midterm elections by dramatizing his opposition to cap and trade in a television ad depicting himself shooting a copy of the bill with a rifle.) What’s more, unlike health care reform, a Democratic Party goal for decades, global warming had only recently matured into a first-rank priority.
Just as turned out to be the case with health care, it might have been possible for Democrats to pass a climate bill with just fifty votes in the Senate through budget reconciliation, but moderate Democrats broke ranks to prevent such a measure. Cap and trade’s survival thus depended on attracting Republican support.
This was not going to be easy, no matter the urgency. As scientists have grown more convinced of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (the scientific name for the phenomenon that the release of carbon and other heat-trapping gasses increases global temperatures), the GOP has rejected it. Senator James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works after the 2014 election, even wrote a book titled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. Its thesis is both self-evident and shared by a good number of his fellow Republican legislators. Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science Committee after the 2010 elections, has mocked climate scientists as “alarmists” who follow “malfunctioning climate models.”
Numerous polls have shown Republican voters growing more skeptical that human activity is contributing to climate change—a shift that reflects the hardening of climate science denial into a pillar of Republican doctrine. The ascendance of this reactionary stance drove Republicans who had once straightforwardly accepted the theory of anthropogenic global warming to nervously edge away from their heresy, or to flee in disarray. Romney, who had once declared, “I believe that climate change is occurring—the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore,” recast himself in 2011 as uncertain. (“Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that but I think that it is.”) Tim Pawlenty, who also sought the 2012 nomination, was called out by a moderator during a presidential debate for having once declared “cap greenhouse gas pollution now!” (The mortified Pawlenty confessed his position had been “a mistake.”)
This retreat from any semblance of reason was well under way in 2009, as Democrats in Congress attempted to cobble together Republican support for cap and trade. The House, where Democrats enjoyed a majority swollen by two straight landslide elections of voters reacting against a failed Republican administration, could absorb the defection of forty-four Democrats and still find a majority to pass a cap-and-trade bill. Cap and trade’s fate would lie in the Senate. Yet the anti-Obama tide of reaction that swept away the remnants of Republican moderation on fiscal stimulus and health care in the wake of the 2008 election likewise wiped out any GOP willingness to limit climate change. John McCain had endorsed cap and trade as a presidential candidate, and his senatorial friends Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut hoped to build a cross-party coalition. (In 2005, Graham had joined a cohort of fellow senators to visit the Arctic Circle, where they witnessed firsthand the impact of climate change upon Inuit who had seen their environment transformed. He pronounced himself “moved.”) But McCain’s defeat seemed to embitter his disposition against the upstart president. McCain and Lieberman had worked out a bill in January 2009, but a primary threat back home by fellow Arizonan J. D. Hayworth, a bombastic conservative, made McCain increasingly skittish. By February, McCain had retreated from plans to announce support for a specific bill to plans to announce support for “principles.” Soon after, McCain abandoned plans to declare support for those principles, too.
By 2010, the list of potential Republican supporters had dwindled—perhaps Susan Collins, perhaps Graham (even without his mentor McCain). But by June, Graham, also facing a threatened primary challenge, had abandoned any climate legislation, and was recanting his belief in climate science as well. (“I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question.”) As happened with health care, the nervous Republican sympathizers couldn’t name specifics that would nail down their support; they seemed to want other Republicans to join them, and no such support was forthcoming.
In fact, Republican senators all knew support for cap and trade would run the risk of producing a primary challenger that might end their career. New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, who had once supported limits on carbon emissions from power plants, admitted, “Nothing is going to go anywhere in this climate, as we go toward an election, that involves cap and trade.” Cap and trade perished quietly in the summer of 2010.
The death of cap and trade plunged environmentalists into a profound gloom. A postmortem story in the New Yorker on the bill’s failure lamented, “perhaps the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era, was officially dead.” Paul Krugman called 2010 “the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died.”
The failure of that bill in 2010 set off bitter recriminations, many of which laid the blame on the president’s alleged lack of commitment. “Obama never fully committed to the fight,” complained the New York Times editorial page; he displayed “no urgency on the issue, and little willingness to lead,” concluded Rolling Stone. The administration’s critics did have a point that the Obama administration concluded relatively early that cap and trade stood no chance of passage. In that sense, it did display a lack of urgency for passing a bill for which it could detect no path to obtaining sixty Senate votes, instead focusing its legislative energies on bills that did. Where the critics went wrong was their assumption that Obama’s fatalism about cap and trade caused its failure. There was never a plausible chance for Democrats to corral the combination of Republicans and oil and coal Democrats they needed to break a filibuster.
The critics were also wrong about something else: their dejected assumption that cap and trade represented the last chance to take major action against climate change under Obama. As it turned out, there was another.
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In December 31, 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. The dispatches from that era feel unfathomably remote. The law passed Congress with Pearl Harbor war-resolution levels of support: In the House, 374 members favored it, with just one Nebraska Republican opposed. The Senate passed it 73–0. “Anti-pollution laws,” explained the New York Times, “did not excite political rivalry.” The law embodied a brand of environmental absolutism that would make Al Gore blush. It mandated that power plants use the best available technology, with no apparent thought given to the cost. No law as remotely grand or sweeping could pass Congress in the modern era. But the law turned out to have an enduring power and relevance that few anticipated when Obama took office.
The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Scientists in 1970 did not recognize that carbon dioxide contributed to global warming; they were more concerned with the human health effects of carbon monoxide and other chemicals. But as the scientific case for climate change hardened, environmentalists filed suit to force the EPA to regulate carbon emissions like other pollutants. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in the environmentalists’ favor. In 2008, the agency officially deemed carbon dioxide a pollutant, and sent its finding to the White House. The Bush administration refused to open the email, thus, incredibly, running out the clock on any legal obligation on its own part.
The Obama administration opened all its emails from the EPA, thus resolving the question of whether Washington had an obligation to regulate carbon emissions. But just how vigorously the administration would exercise its regulatory authority, few people knew at the time. The green energy subsidies in the stimulus, just a few weeks into the administration, would turn out to represent the extent of Obama’s legislative achievements on climate change. The administration’s legacy would instead rest upon regulation.
The administration issued a sweeping array of rules. In 2012, the administration tightened fuel efficiency standards for cars, from 29.7 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The next year, it required cleaner-burning gasoline, the impact of which would remove the equivalent of 33 million cars from the road every year. (“There is not another air-pollution-control strategy that we know of that will produce as substantial, cost-effective, and expeditious emissions reductions,” noted the executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, an organization representing state and local air pollution regulators.) In 2010, it tightened emission standards for trucks and buses, and tightened them again in 2015. It raised energy efficiency standards for federal buildings, for a wide array of home appliances, and began the process of writing emissions standards for airplanes.
The administration’s climate record also benefited from simple blind luck. The recession that began in 2008 temporarily drove down energy usage. (When people cut back on their spending, they do less driving, don’t run the air conditioner as high, and so on.) Unlike the temporary dips in emissions that accompanied previous recessions, though, this time emissions did not resume their upward trajectory as the economy recovered, a break with decades of history. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States peaked in 2007. Furthermore, revolutionary improvements in drilling technology produced a boom in inexpensive natural gas. Natural gas is not clean compared to emissions-free technologies like nuclear, solar, and wind energy, but it is much cleaner than coal, producing about half as much carbon dioxide, and the gas boom helped drive down carbon emissions. (The most common process of drilling for gas, fracking, does release methane, a particularly threatening greenhouse gas, but in 2015 the administration created regulations to limit methane leaks, too.)
All these things—the administration’s green energy stimulus and array of regulations, the temporary emissions dip from the recession, and the gas boom—combined to revive an opportunity that had appeared to slip away. Now the United States had a chance to fulfill the ambitious commitments it had made in Copenhagen.
To redeem its promise, the administration had to fill one remaining hole, a huge one: power plants, which account for 40 percent of all emissions in the United States. Power plants presented a massive regulatory challenge. Unlike cars, or appliances, or fuel, which are used and replaced frequently, power plants are built and stay in operation for decades on end. What’s more, there is no technology that can meaningfully reduce carbon emissions from coal, America’s most common source of electrical power. The only cost-effective way to make a coal plant clean is to shut it down. Thus the only meaningful standard one could impose for a coal plant would result in all of America’s coal plants shutting down—which, even if phased in slowly, would carry large costs and likely provoke a revolt from people suddenly staring at huge electric bills. Modest regulations could slightly reduce the carbon emissions from coal plants, but not nearly enough to put a dent in their emissions. The EPA’s choice, as David Roberts, a writer who focuses on environmental issues, put it, seemed to be “either a firecracker or a nuke.”
During Obama’s first term, the nuke was useful, as nukes tend to be, only as a threat. The idea of the EPA regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant was so abhorrent to power companies and some Republicans that it brought them to the bargaining table during the cap-and-trade negotiations. When negotiations collapsed, however, the prevailing assumption was that the entire ability to regulate existing plants had become a useless tool, paradoxically too powerful to actually deploy. As recently as 2011, fossil fuel industry lobbyists and their Republican allies believed they could find enough Democratic support to pass a restriction on the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. (One giddy lobbyist told Politico, “the chances are better than ever.”) Democrats eventually held enough support to prevail, but the fact that opponents believed they were in range of a bipartisan vote to eliminate the agency’s regulatory authority over carbon shows just how thoroughly the cause of climate regulation had fallen on the defensive.
Toward the end of 2012, the administration began to seriously consider a different plan, based on a concept developed by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The idea was to create state-by-state targets for power plant reductions, and give each state the flexibility to meet those targets as it saw fit—usually by closing some, but not all, of its coal plants, and having their utilities install more clean energy sources. Creating standards for states, rather than for plants, allowed the EPA to escape its all-or-nothing “ban or leave” dilemma.
Few observers outside the administration took seriously the possibility that Obama would throw himself into such an ambitious plan. “I think this has the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening,” wrote liberal Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias in December 2012. In his second inaugural address, Obama promised aggressive action on climate change, but commentators saw it as just so much empty rhetoric. “Many took note of Mr. Obama’s promise to tackle global warming in his inaugural address,” Edward Luce wrote sadly in the Financial Times a few months later. “That was the last anyone heard of it.” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza concluded, “[G]iven the fraught politics around doing anything major on the issue . . . it seems likely that Obama will go small-bore rather than major overhaul if he wants to get something through Congress.” In June, “First Read,” the NBC News daily political crib sheet, reiterated Washington insider opinion: “Yes, the president will announce some executive actions, but to do what he really wants he needs some legislative action, and this Congress is just not going to prioritize anything having to do with climate. . . . Opponents have successfully stopped previous climate-change policy efforts by simply turning the issue into a pocketbook issue by labeling it as an energy tax or a rate hike on average Americans’ power bills. And there’s no reason to think this same tactic won’t work again.”
In August 2015, Obama finally announced the final version of the Clean Power Plan. The new standards required power plants to reduce their emissions 32 percent below their 2005 levels by 2030. Since it merely updated an old law, the Clean Air Act, rather than creating a new one, there was no vote in Congress. That meant the Clean Power Plan had no legislative theatrics—no dramatic votes, no coy interviews with wavering lawmakers, no fevered town hall rallies. There was not much of anything for the media to cover, since all the work went on inside the administration. The drama-free process failed to convey the historic scope of the policy change Obama had brought to bear.
The GOP of the Obama era was now dominated by climate science skeptics and other determined opponents of any government action to limit climate change. But the party’s tattered and besieged moderate wing, now powerless to influence its own leaders, was not entirely extinct. Obama’s reforms incorporated the market-friendly structure that had once attracted such moderate Republicans, and some of them responded favorably. Christie Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator under George W. Bush (and a dissident from that administration’s indifference to climate change), praised the Clean Power Plan as “the most flexible thing” the EPA had ever done. Whitman, along with three other former Republican EPA administrators from the Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush eras, coauthored a New York Times op-ed urging their party to support Obama’s “achievable actions that would deliver real progress.” Ted Gayer, an economist and former adviser in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department, conceded the Clean Power Plan “does a good job of providing compliance flexibility, which is the key to containing costs.” Obama had, again, adapted the best elements of moderate Republicanism and applied them to a world in which all traces of moderation had been driven from the Republican Party.
Obama’s regulatory offensive is, of course, vulnerable to reversal by Donald Trump or the Supreme Court, since it rested upon executive action rather than a law that would need to be overturned by Congress. But its design gave it enduring influence. Its flexibility and gradually tightening standards allowed states long-term planning, the effects of such decisions to play out over years. Since the only cost savings offered by coal was that the infrastructure that uses it was already built, once states had begun transitioning to new sources of green energy, it would not save any money to tear down windmills or solar panels and resume digging up coal. Indeed, one beauty of solar and wind energy is that, unlike fossil fuels, which must be extracted from the ground continuously, they run on their own. Trump promised to bring back coal mining jobs by eliminating regulations. But the revival of coal was a fantasy. Natural gas power plants had replaced coal at a rapid clip in part because they were now dramatically less expensive. Stopping coal’s decline would come at prohibitive cost.
Republicans filed a legal challenge to halt the Clean Power Plan. In January 2016, the Supreme Court issued a stay halting its implementation pending the resolution of the lawsuit. But the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016 deprived conservatives of the fifth Republican-appointed justice they would almost certainly require to overturn the plan. Even without a Democratic-appointed justice to replace Scalia, the Court would have just four justices potentially willing to overturn the regulations. A 4–4 tie would leave the final word in the hands of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, controlled by a majority of Democratic appointees.
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During the debate over cap and trade, when they weren’t questioning the legitimacy of global warming—an argument that had the harmful side effect of reinforcing the party’s deserved reputation for hostility to science—Republicans began to emphasize a second, and newer claim: reducing greenhouse gases in the United States would make no difference, since the rest of the world wouldn’t follow. “We can’t do it alone as one nation,” John Boehner said. “If we’ve got India, China, and other industrialized countries not working with us, all we’re gonna do is ship millions of American jobs overseas.” They continued to make this case after cap and trade failed. “If we could have a pact with other countries in which everybody would reduce their emissions, I would sign on,” is how Charles Krauthammer put it in 2014. “In the absence of it, all that we’re doing is committing economic suicide in the name of do-goodism that will not do an iota of good.”
The skeptics were correct that, without securing cooperative reductions from other countries, American emissions controls would do little good. And they had good reason for their fear. As China industrialized, it followed the same path of cheap, dirty energy that the United States and Europe had blazed a century before. Over the past quarter century, its emissions had quadrupled. Lifting the oppressive burdens of Chinese poverty required massive industrial development—which meant huge quantities of carbon, and the process had no end in sight. As recently as 2009, analysts believed China’s carbon emissions level would continue to rise, not reaching its peak until 2050.
This vast new source of global warming in the East, just as the West was making a dent in its emissions, provided the single largest reason for the sense of helplessness among the environmentalist movement. Worse, most of the developing world longed to replicate China’s astonishing new prosperity.
It is hardly selfish for developing countries to refuse to force their impoverished people to shoulder the burden of averting climate change. (Even now, China burns less than half as much carbon per person than does the United States.) But there were also reasons to believe China would not simply burn its way to affluence. Its cities are already choked in smog from coal, and Communist Party elites must breathe the same air as ordinary workers. What’s more, China has aspired to global leadership, and the rise of climate change created a new avenue for that country to exert its influence. And the prospect of a global transition to green energy created a void for a new industry it hoped to anchor. For markets domestic and beyond, China has invested vast sums in green energy, erecting wind turbines everywhere, and pumping out inexpensive solar panels for global export. In the first half of 2016, China increased its solar capacity by 20 gigawatts—which is nearly three-quarters as much solar power as already existed in the U.S. Its wind energy production has increased tenfold in a half-dozen years, and the country is in the midst of what one analyst called “the largest build-out of hydroelectricity the world has ever seen.”
In 2013, when the Obama administration first signaled its intention to implement the Clean Power Plan, and thus to live up to its emissions targets, it began to negotiate with China. Later that year, the two countries jointly pledged to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas used in air conditioners and refrigerators, and which would have grown to a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury if unchecked. The next year, the two countries agreed to deepen their cuts in overall greenhouse gas emissions. Obama, already pledged to the 17 percent 2020 target, promised to push emissions levels down 26–28 percent by 2025. China pledged its emissions would peak by 2030—two decades before what had not long before been the expected date—and to draw a fifth of its power from renewable sources by that time.
When the Chinese government announced its participation in the bilateral agreement, American conservatives rolled their eyes. Their skepticism that China would curtail its emissions rested upon the premise that maintaining its prosperity required it to burn ever-increasing amounts of dirty energy, forever. “China almost certainly won’t take significant steps to reduce carbon emission,” explained National Review. “That’s because the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist party’s government rests squarely on economic development. Energy—often produced by dirty coal—allows that economic development to occur, lifting millions out of hand-to-mouth poverty.” This analysis relied upon a fatally flawed assumption: that producing more energy required producing more carbon emissions. The ratio of carbon emissions to energy produced is called “carbon intensity,” and China’s carbon-intensity ratio has dropped precipitously. In 2009, China promised to reduce carbon intensity 45 percent from its 2005 level by 2020. It is well on track to achieve this (as of 2015, it was already down 34 percent) and is now promising to deepen the cut to 60 or 65 percent—evidence that China not only had begun the process of producing more energy without producing more carbon, but more important, has begun thinking seriously and practically about what it will mean to steward the majority of the world’s future population.
The energy revolution in China has laid the groundwork for a future scarcely anybody could have imagined just a few years ago. For most of the 1.3 billion people globally without access to electricity, building new solar power is already cheaper than fossil fuel generation. And so, the possibility has come into view that, just as the developing world is skipping landlines and moving straight into cellular communication, it will forgo the dirty-energy path and follow a clean one. The global poor can create a future of economic growth for themselves without burning the world.
The revolutionary developments in China primarily reflect decisions the Chinese government made for its own reasons. But the administration’s diplomacy and domestic reforms surely played an important role. A Wall Street Journal editorial published in June 2014 provided one of the rare times that American conservatives acknowledged that Obama’s strategy was not merely to unilaterally reduce American emissions, but to entice China into cooperative reductions. “Mr. Obama’s logic seems to be that the U.S. should first set a moral example by imposing costs that reduce our prosperity,” scoffed the Journal. “This will then inspire China (8.7 billion tons), which produces and consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined, to do the same to its 300 million people who still live on pennies a day. Good luck persuading [Chinese president] Xi Jinping.” Given that events exactly followed the sequence that Obama’s critics mocked, it seems fair to credit the strategy for helping to produce this very outcome. Obama’s Clean Power Plan attracted close attention abroad, and especially in China, where reporters found that Chinese limits on carbon emissions came as a direct response to Obama’s own targets.
By the end of Obama’s second term, green energy had expanded at a pace even its most optimistic devotees could not have imagined a few years before. Political willpower and technological innovation fed into each other, and as one of the dynamics accelerated, the other would accelerate in turn. The United States and China, the two largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world and, respectively, the leaders of the industrialized and the industrializing economies, had unique power to set the terms of the global climate bargain. A commitment to reduce emissions in the United States, Europe, China, and elsewhere created incentives for green energy entrepreneurs to develop new technologies to reduce energy use and harness emissions-free sources. Those innovations drove down the price of clean energy. And the availability of affordable clean energy made it easier for political leaders to commit to reducing emissions, knowing they can do so without imposing punishing price increases on their constituents.
Because these developments have reinforced each other, innovation has advanced more quickly than straight-line projections could forecast. In a March 2011 post for Scientific American’s website, technologist Ramez Naam compared the rapid progress of solar power to Moore’s Law, the famous dictum that described the process by which microchips grew steadily more useful over time, doubling in efficiency every two years. The price of solar power had fallen in two decades from nearly $10 a watt to about $3. By 2030, he predicted, the price could drop to just 50 cents a watt.
Four years later, in the spring of 2015, Naam revisited his post and admitted his prediction had been wrong—it had been far too conservative. The price of solar power had already hit the 50-cent threshold. In the sunniest locations in the world, building a new solar power plant now costs less than coal or natural gas, even without subsidies, and within six years, this will be true of places with average sunlight, too. Taller turbines, with longer and more powerful blades, have made wind power competitive in a growing swath of the country and by 2023, new wind power is expected to cost less than new power plants burning natural gas. Experts predicted in 2000 that wind-generated power worldwide would reach 30 gigawatts by 2010; when 2010 arrived, it was 200 gigawatts, and by 2014 it reached nearly 370, or more than 12 times higher. Predictions in 2002 stated that installations of solar power would add one new gigawatt per year by 2010. It turned out to be 17 times that by 2010 and 48 times that amount last year.
Meanwhile, the coal industry has gone into free fall. In 2009, 523 coal plants operated in the United States. More than 200 of them have since shut down, displaced mostly by natural gas plants. Only one coal-fired plant has been green-lit since 2008, and new regulations make it virtually certain that no coal plant will break ground in the United States ever again.
The energy revolution has rippled widely through the economy. In the first half of 2016, renewable-energy installations accounted for 70 percent of new electrical power. As the energy mix has grown cleaner, people have found ways to use less of it, too. Incandescent bulbs have been replaced with efficient LEDs in what Prajit Ghosh, director of power and renewables research at energy company Wood Mackenzie, refers to as a “total bulb revolution.” Tesla has introduced a new home battery, the “Powerwall,” and broken ground on a plant in Nevada, called the Gigafactory, with the capacity to churn out 500,000 lithium-ion battery packs per year, which will allow it to cut battery costs by a third and sell less expensive electric cars. And these are only a few of today’s greener technologies. Laboratories from Cambridge to Silicon Valley are racing to develop next-generation batteries, as well as ultraefficient solar cells, vehicles, and kitchen appliances. For more than a century, everything that consumed energy was designed without a thought to the carbon dioxide that would be released into the air. Now everything from buildings to refrigerators is being designed anew to account for scientific reality.
This is a story of ingenuity, but the energy market has been disrupted because governments disrupted it; progress came not in spite of our government but because of it. The private sector developed LED bulbs because Washington required higher-efficiency lighting. The post-crash stimulus package pumped $90 billion into green energy subsidies, as China and Germany made similar public investments. Obama’s regulations may have ramped up the pressure on old, fossil fuel industries. But, far from being “job-killing regulations,” they helped set off a period of intense innovation and discovery.
On December 12, 2015, the Obama administration’s work reached its culmination when negotiators for 196 countries gathered in Paris approved the first agreement in world history to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris talks succeeded where those in Copenhagen failed for two reasons. One was that the clean energy revolution—which had been nurtured in places like the United States, China, and Germany—had come to fruition. In 2009, placing the future of your country’s energy sector in the hands of technologies like solar and wind power was a leap of faith. Half a dozen years later, the price of new clean energy sources had fallen to the point where politicians could embrace them with confidence.
The second distinction lay in the different agreement structure. Copenhagen, and other previous climate negotiations, all tried (and failed) to establish overall caps on greenhouse gas emissions, doling out enforceable caps to each country. Paris turned that structure upside down. Instead, each country would submit its own targets for reductions. The more forgiving bottom-up structure worked. The pledges collected in Paris closed about half the gap between continuing the world’s old energy policies unabated and the reductions that would be needed to stay within the temperature limits recommended by climate scientists.
The Paris agreement represented a staggering triumph of cooperative diplomacy, credit for which must be spread across the globe. But Obama’s role in nurturing the accords is singular. Only in the United States does one of the two major parties question the validity of climate science. So, while presidents from Australia to Norway had to hammer out difficult negotiations with industries and fellow politicians to propose emissions targets they could live with, only Obama had to face down an opposition party that denied that dumping unlimited carbon into the atmosphere amounted to a problem.
An agreement to carry out half the necessary greenhouse gas emissions could be seen as a glass half-full—or, alternatively, half-empty. The environmental community is filled with people who tend toward the latter interpretation, as you might expect of people who spend their days contemplating mass extinctions, the flooding of major coastal cities, deadly heat waves, and other unspeakable horrors to be endured by future generations. Accordingly, headlines from Paris conveyed tightly restrained optimism, emphasizing that the real work lay ahead. It is certainly true that the world has not been saved. But the Paris agreement did not only ratify vast change on a planetary scale—it also implemented steps to ratchet up its goals over time. The negotiators agreed to reconvene every five years and attempt to tighten their collective targets. If green energy innovation proceeds in the half decade after Paris at anything like the pace of the half-dozen years after Copenhagen, securing deeper emissions reductions will be simple.
Political willpower and technological progress operate in tandem. As many governments set out to reduce their emissions, scientists and entrepreneurs, some of them subsidized by those governments, produced cheaper and more effective technologies. And as the price of green energy came down, more governments found it easier to embrace low-emission policies. More willpower produces more innovation, and on and on.
The Paris agreement represents a clinical sample of the extended time horizons on which Obama’s mind operated. The problem of climate change itself is the ultimate long-game objective, the polar opposite of the sort of issue where a president can expect immediate gratification, but one of absolute, paramount, long-term significance. Obama set out to tackle a challenge at a time all his critics and many of his allies urged him to turn his attention elsewhere. And when the first attempt at a solution failed, he devised a second one, and pursued it even in the face of widespread skepticism from opponents and well-wishers alike. All the elements of the plan—the regulatory reforms, the patient diplomatic work—came together slowly. His plan’s prospects evolved, almost invisibly, from fanciful to inevitable.
Some of Obama’s critics on the left have complained that, unlike Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, his administration has left no imprint upon the landscape to rival the Hoover Dam or the Tennessee Valley Authority. But the imprint of Obama’s climate legacy is everywhere—rows of houses covered in panels, wind turbines stretching across the plains, glistening new solar power plants arising in the desert.
But if there was a single aspect of Obama’s legacy most vulnerable to reversal, it was his achievements on climate change. Trump openly derided climate science, surrounded himself with advisers who did the same. (He even derided wind turbines as ugly and bad for tourism.) He pledged to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, to end the Clean Power Plan and eliminate all federal regulation of greenhouse gas pollution.
Unlike other extreme positions Trump had taken, most of which would inflict an immediate harm to many Americans, his rigid opposition to any policy response against climate change stood a good chance of remaining in place because its effects would only sink in long after he departed. Trump had little incentive to conform to reality or the needs of his constituents. Containing climate change ultimately requires not just continuing Obama’s policies but expanding and deepening them, ultimately weaning the economy off carbon altogether. The most hopeful scenario, which had finally come into view at the end of Obama’s term, was rendered hopelessly optimistic by Trump’s election. And the damage wrought would likely be irreversible: a glacier cannot easily be un-melted.
This did not mean the task of sparing the planet from the worst effects of runaway global warming was hopeless, though. Obama had thrown the federal government’s regulatory and diplomatic resources into organizing an international response to the crisis. With that government now in the hands of climate science deniers, leadership would have to arise in other places. States and cities, especially massive California, had already begun efforts to reduce their emissions beyond what Washington required. Other countries, having committed to an energy future, expressed reluctance to turn back in the wake of Trump’s election. Obama will remain the president who launched the green energy revolution in the United States and forged the first international agreement on climate change.
In some ways, the work of the green energy revolution has already changed the economic calculus irreversibly. By the end of 2016, American power plants had already met their 2024 emissions reduction targets, thus fulfilling Obama’s promises under the Paris climate agreement. Even if Trump managed to halt all further progress, a case could be made to the world that America had upheld its end of the bargain, and the agreement could remain in place. Many developing countries (which tend to be located in the sunniest parts of the world) can now build a new solar plant at lower cost than one using fossil fuels. A strong enough international consensus might resolve to outlast Trump and wait for him to be replaced by a more rational successor. Obama’s efforts will be honored by future generations, while they will regard Trump’s with horrified incomprehension. The cause will not disappear, nor will all the progress that Obama drove. Obama will go down in history as the first American president to take up the fight against the planetary catastrophe of global warming, and he will not be the last.