Our President has said a lot of good things about climate change. Unfortunately, the things he’s been doing have been … not so good. Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone:
If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: 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.
You could argue that private industry, not the White House, has driven that boom, and in part you’d be right. But that’s not what Obama himself would say. Here’s Obama speaking in Cushing, Oklahoma, last year, in a speech that historians will quote many generations hence. It is to energy what Mitt Romney’s secretly taped talk about the 47 percent was to inequality. Except that Obama was out in public, boasting for all the world to hear:
“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. 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.”
Great, just great. While the Arctic ocean is giving up its Methane in a process that scientists worry may make global warming irreversible, even catastrophic, President Obama congratulates himself for massive increases in fossil-fuel production. What kind of world does he think our children (and his) are going to face?
This is not one of those things that the mean Republicans stopped him from making progress on; he’s taking credit for making things worse.
…of trying to please Republicans and not getting credit from them anyway. I really don’t understand why he bothers.
I guess my assumption all along, based on the consistency with which he has approached this policy, is that he’s not doing this to try to please Republicans — he really thinks it’s the right thing to do.
of the Obama Presidency settles and historians set to work, I think we’ll find revealed a man who is tempermentally conservative, a man who prefers a slow march forward and prefers consensus, which provides a natural brake on radical progress.
Politicians and most of the media continue to peddle the lazy storyline of more cheap fossil fuel without placing the real costs first.
I understand the importance of the climate issue, but I think that we are approaching the issue with the wrong message. Information about methane and the arctic ocean might be a call to action for scientists, but most other people can’t identify with those concepts. Instead, we should stress three things;
Jobs
Health
Evil Corporations
Those three concepts can appropriate frame this issue, and can motivate people to act.
If the outcome is as imminent and catastrophic as some scientists are saying, none of those things are going to matter at all, because billions of people are going to be dying.
… check out how the EPA (remember, under the Executive Branch) has pushed on MACT, CAIR/CASPR, NAAQS, Regional Haze, 316(b), CCR, ELGs, and most importantly to this discussion, both 111(b) and 111(d).
Every single one of those regulations relates to reducing emissions of a pollutant from power plants, notably (and most importantly), coal fired power plants. The confluence of all of these regulations has resulted in the following:
* No new coal fired power plants in the planning stage. At all. Zero.
* The retirement of 60-100 GW (out of 310 GW) of the coal plants between now and 2020.
* Higher operating costs for the remaining coal plants, helping them to be displaced by lower polluting fossil fuels (gas) and by non-polluting renewables (wind and, soon enough, solar).
End result: reduced air and water pollution, reduced coal mining and its impacts, and reduced carbon emissions moving forward. Note that many of these regulations could be ripped away like a big ol’ bandage should a Republican get elected in 2016; should a Democrat be elected these rules will hold tight and really squeeze coal’s contribution significantly.
So I ain’t saying Obama’s been great on this (I didn’t vote for him in the 2008 Dem POTUS primary in a large part because of the IL coal nonsense) but he’s actually done a remarkable amount of good, with little fanfare, and without any help from Congress.