For progressives, climate change may be the classic Obama frustration: Even though he actually took many positive and decisive steps forward, he still fell far short of what scientists and environmentalists believed was necessary. Not desirable, but necessary. After all, this is the future of our planet at stake.
Yes, Obama did more to address the issue of global warming than any other president before him, yet he failed in so many ways to use the powers of the presidency to take ownership of the issue.
For starters, Barack Obama is no climate change denier. He’s a true believer. As a senator, he studied and talked about the problem. As a candidate for president, he left no doubt that he saw dealing with global warming as one of the great challenges of our time and one on which his presidency would be judged. On June 3, 2008, the night he clinched the Democratic nomination for president, he spoke about climate change in almost messianic tones: “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 the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”1
Once in the White House, in news conferences and speeches, Obama spoke often of the need to act on climate change because, as he said in his second inaugural address, “the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” And on a hot, sultry June 25, 2013, President Obama went to nearby Georgetown University to give what many environmentalists still consider the best speech of any American politician on climate change. “As the world’s largest economy and second-largest carbon emitter, as a country with unsurpassed ability to drive innovation and scientific breakthroughs, as the country that people around the world continue to look to in times of crisis, we’ve got a vital role to play,” he told the students. “We can’t stand on the sidelines. We’ve got a unique responsibility.”2
And Obama took upon himself responsibility for leading the charge: “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing. We will be judged as a people, and as a society, and as a country on where we go from here.”3
On climate change, then, President Obama said all the right things, as usual—and in this case he actually took some important actions, too. So why do environmentalists remain disappointed in his leadership on the issue? It boils down to what he dared do, stacked up against what he dared not do. Given the demands of our times, did he take full advantage of the opportunities he had as president?
Let’s examine what was accomplished—and what was left undone.
Among the strong, positive steps taken by President Obama to save the planet from the threat of global warming:
• He believes in the science of climate change, and talked about the importance of the issue. It’s sad that acknowledging overwhelming evidence has to be considered a positive step, but some presidents—like his predecessor—haven’t even met this basic requirement.
• He dedicated roughly $30 billion of the 2009 stimulus package to energy efficiency and renewable energy projects: from new investments in wind and solar, to development of advanced batteries for electric cars, to making homes more energy-efficient, to biofuel research.4
• He persuaded auto manufacturers to adopt tough, new CAFE standards—not once, but twice. In 2009, with Detroit’s support, Obama announced a goal of 35.5 mpg by 2016. Two years later, again with support of the Big Three, Obama announced the even more ambitious goal of 54.5 mpg by 2025. It is, by far, the largest mandatory fuel economy increase in history.5
• At the end of his first year in office, in December 2009, President Obama flew to Copenhagen and the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The conference turned out to be something of a train wreck, falling far short of expectations and what was needed to get serious about the climate crisis. Nonetheless, Obama managed to broker a weak nonbinding accord with several other nations and committed the United States to achieving a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. Legislation to create a “cap and trade” system had already passed the Democratic-controlled House by then, but it died in the Senate.6
• In January 2014, buoyed by a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA was required by law to regulate greenhouse gases, the Obama administration proposed a rule limiting the carbon dioxide released by new coal-fired power plants. It required that all new coal-powered plants capture some of the carbon they release and bury it underground.7
• In June 2014, the EPA also proposed new rules for existing power plants—requiring states to come up with a plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions from existing plants, the nation’s largest source of carbon emissions, by as much as 30 percent by 2030. After these were temporarily blocked by the Court in a 5–4 decision the following year, the Obama administration released even-stronger emissions rules, calling for a 32 percent cut, two months later, as part of its “Clean Power Plan.” There is hope that this marks the beginning of the end for coal-powered power plants.8
• In November 2014, President Obama traveled to China and announced a major new agreement on climate change with the Chinese government. Under terms of the accord, the United States agreed to cut net greenhouse gas emissions at least 26 percent by 2025, doubling its current pace of carbon reduction. At the same time, China announced a stepped-up time frame for its carbon reduction and for increasing China’s investments in nuclear, wind, and solar energy. And in September 2015, President Xi Jinping came to the White House and announced that China was adopting its own cap and trade program.9
• That same month, while in Asia, the president pledged $3 billion to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, to help developing countries prepare for and slow the effects of climate change. Created in 2011, the UN fund asks industrialized countries that pump most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to provide aid to developing countries so they can shift to low-carbon fuel and adapt to the effects of climate change.10
• As a dramatic sign of his commitment, President Obama led the United States delegation to the all-important United Nations Summit on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015 and pledged that the United States, the world’s second-worst source of greenhouse gases, would adopt strict new limits on emissions.
That’s a good record, as far as it goes. The problem is, according to many concerned about climate change, it just doesn’t rise to address the level of catastrophe we face. Not even close.
Obama gets a bad rap, first, for not making climate change his flat-out, number-one priority—which, environmentalists believe, the issue deserves, and needs, if we are ever going to turn the corner toward a fossil-free energy policy. Obama, in other words, has been hit-and-miss: speaking out strongly on global warming, then ignoring it for months; eking out a promise in Copenhagen, then not delivering on this promise. No focused, concentrated attention.
Early on, former vice president Al Gore, who’s made climate change his life’s passion, with a book and documentary to show for it, faulted Obama for not making the same commitment. Writing in the June 2011 issue of Rolling Stone, Gore complained: “President Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis. He has simply not made the case for action. He has not defended the science against the ongoing, withering and dishonest attacks.”11
Obama almost admitted as much in November 2012, in his first post-reelection news conference. In response to a question about whether climate change would assume added importance in his second term, Obama gave a classic Obama wandering-around-the-barn answer in which he acknowledged that yes, climate change is real; yes, we have an obligation to do something about it; and yes, doing something about it will require tough political choices; but—I’m not sure this is the right time to make those choices, or I’m even prepared to make them.12
Here’s how he put it: “There’s no doubt that for us to take on climate change in a serious way would involve making some tough political choices, and you know, understandably, 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, you know, if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody’s going to go for that.”13
But, he added, if he could push climate change without rocking the economic boat, he might actually go for it: “If, on the other hand, we can shape an agenda that says we can create jobs, advance growth and make a serious dent in climate change and be an international leader, I think that’s something that the American people would support.”14
Suffice to say, it was not the kind of wholehearted commitment environmentalists were looking for.
Obama also gets a well-deserved bad rap for balancing his actions on climate change, no matter how laudable, with unprecedented growth in domestic production of fossil fuels. It’s all part of his “all of the above” strategy on energy: a little bit of energy conservation, a little bit of offshore drilling, a dash of nuclear power. Everything is part of the mix. Once again, Obama is trying to have it all ways—but when it comes to climate change, that’s just not going to work.
Knowing full well that expanding fossil fuel production only traps more heat in the atmosphere and accelerates the climate crisis, frustrated environmentalists watched as Obama seemed to approve one new drilling plan for every alternative energy move he made. In January 2015, shortly after he declared 1.2 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, as a wilderness area, off-limits for oil exploration, he opened up portions of Alaska’s Beaufort Sea for more drilling. At the same time, he also opened up the Atlantic Coast, from Virginia to Georgia, for offshore oil and gas exploration. He reopened the Gulf of Mexico for deep-water drilling, shortly after the BP oil spill. And the Bureau of Land Management agreed to auction off 316 million tons of publicly owned coal in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.15
Bill McKibben, cofounder of the climate change organization 350.org and perhaps America’s leading environmentalist, summed it up in Rolling Stone’s edition of December 17, 2013: “By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.”16
Like any good oil producer, President Obama even bragged about his record in Cushing, Oklahoma, on March 22, 2012, when he gave his blessing to the first, or southern, leg of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. “Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states,” he told the crowd of pipeline supporters. “We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go.”17
Not so. As McKibben points out in Rolling Stone, the real problem is that climate change becomes a more serious crisis by the day. The evidence is all around us in melting glaciers, strange new weather patterns, more devastating storms, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, rising sea levels, changes in crops and animal migrations. Climate change is here. It’s real. And the more we try to “balance” action on climate change with continued development of fossil fuels, the less likely we are to move in a new direction. McKibben says it best: “In any event, building more renewable energy is not a useful task if you’re also digging more carbon energy—it’s like eating a pan of Weight Watchers brownies after you’ve already gobbled a quart of Ben and Jerry’s.”18
Speaking of the Keystone XL pipeline, that particular project ultimately became much more than another tar sands pipeline. It became the symbol of whether the United States would really turn the corner from a fossil-fuel-driven economy to a renewable energy policy. From a climate-change perspective, forgoing the Keystone pipeline should have been a no-brainer. So, of course, it became the locus of another extended Hamlet routine from the president. As of October 2015, a full seven years after the permit was first applied for, a decision had still not been made. (When Republicans in Congress tried to force his hand earlier that year, President Obama vetoed the legislation, a veto the Senate could not override.)19
Ironically—or perhaps this was his intent—the longer Obama delayed his decision on Keystone, the weaker the arguments in support of the pipeline. By early 2015, the United States was producing more oil than we were importing. Keystone was not needed for energy independence. The price of gas had fallen to under three dollars per gallon. Keystone would not help lower gas prices. Oil prices had fallen to a low of forty dollars a barrel. Nobody needed expensive tar sands oil from Canada. Keystone would not produce that many jobs either. Even its backers admitted that perhaps ten thousand short-term construction jobs would soon dwindle to fewer than fifty permanent jobs.20
Then, finally, on November 6, 2015, President Obama lowered the boom on Keystone and announced his decision to deny the project, because, he said, “the pipeline would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy,” and because it would impede the move toward climate change. “America’s now a global leader when it comes to serious action to fight climate change,” he told reporters in the Roosevelt Room. “And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership.”
While not unexpected, Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline was rather anticlimactic, because just three days earlier, TransCanada Corp., sponsor of the project, perhaps anticipating bad news, had asked the State Department to suspend its review of the project for at least two years.
Even while the Keystone pipeline was being considered, however, Obama continued drilling deeper in other arenas. In May 2015, he approved more deep-water offshore drilling in the Arctic, granting permission to Shell to drill for oil in the remote Chukchi Sea, again frustrating and infuriating environmentalists. Bill McKibben immediately condemned the decision: “Shell helped melt the Arctic and now they want to drill in the thawing waters; it beggars belief that the Obama administration is willing to abet what amounts to one of the greatest acts of corporate irresponsibility in the planet’s history. Arctic oil, like tar sands, is exactly the sort of carbon we need to leave underground if we’re going to have any chance of avoiding catastrophe.”
Fortunately, in this case, the environment was saved from serious damage and Obama was saved from embarrassment when, in late September 2015, Shell Oil abruptly announced that, after having spent $7 billion in exploration, it was abandoning its entire Arctic drilling project. Why? Because there were not enough oil deposits to merit the cost. On October 17, the Interior Department canceled any new drilling permits in the Arctic over the next two years.
So the polar bears are still safe . . . for now—but no thanks to President Obama.
And that’s the trick when it comes to Barack Obama and climate change. Too often, he talked a good game when giving a “climate change” speech, but then turned around and exacerbated the crisis with his fossil fuel and drilling policy. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert charitably called this tendency “self-sabotaging,” while Slate’s Eric Holthaus simply deemed the president a “climate change hypocrite.” Either way, it was not the leadership we needed on this critical issue. As McKibben put it of the president’s “catastrophic climate change denial” in a scathing May 2015 op-ed: “This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.”21
From his public statements, we know that Barack Obama wanted his leadership on climate change to be one of the major positive planks of his legacy. Unfortunately, this record, like his record on so many other issues, is a mixed bag. He blew hot and cold. He took some bold actions, yet he always seemed to stop short of doing what he could accomplish, if only he applied the full, persuasive powers of the presidency. And he could never quite get himself to let loose of the old appetite for fossil fuels, or make climate change his top priority.
Indeed, in terms of legacy, Obama may have chosen the wrong horse to ride. In the perspective of McKibben, “When the world looks back at the Obama years half a century from now, one doubts they’ll remember the health care website; one imagines they’ll study how the most powerful government on Earth reacted to the sudden, clear onset of climate change.”22