Obama’s Climate Change Policy: Bold Vision, Few Specifics, No Hope For Results

Already a defining challenge for millions of Americans after several years of unusual and deadly weather events, climate change has taken on new prominence as a political issue thanks to President Obama’s promise in his second inaugural address that he will seek to “respond” to the “threat” posed by a warming planet.

But environmentalists argue that the president’s sudden shift in acknowledging the impacts of man-made warming in a public a venue as the steps of the Capitol means little for the long-term struggle to finally see climate change attain its proper place as the most important public policy issue facing the United States. Most see only faint hope for a movement beyond laudatory rhetoric and into definitive action.

Mixed signals from the White House, misguided energy policies and the overarching roadblock of congressional opposition is likely to mean little if any progress on substantially reducing carbon emissions and making a dent in the deadly and economically devastating temperature rise linked to superstorms, trillion-dollar droughts and rising seas.

President Obama’s inaugural speech last Monday gave climate change “center stage” with remarks that were cheered for their realistic vision of a planet in crisis but lacked any real policy specifics that could change an increasingly gloomy climatic outlook. Critics pounced on his description of climate change as a sign of a more liberal second term, while scientists were cautiously optimistic for a change in tone from Washington.

The president promised that his administration would “respond to the threat of climate change,” though specifics on how that will be achieved were notably absent, and chided those who would “deny the overwhelming judgment of science.”

President Obama made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address, setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition.

 “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

The decision to give global warming such a featured role at the ceremonial kickoff to his second term marked a stark contrast to a first term that generally ignored climate change and a campaign in which the issue was entirely missing from the discussion. Little priority has been given to climate change in the Obama administration beyond minor regulatory shuffling after the defeat i 2010 of the president’s “cap-and-trade” proposal, of which the potential results have been argued about by scientists regarding whether it would have made any difference in US carbon emissions.

Worried about the political ramifications of embracing an environmental agenda, the White House and Obama’s reelection campaign consciously pushed aside global warming and its mounting destruction across the country, even refusing to link the record-setting Superstorm Sandy to warming seas when that storm swept through the East Coast just days before the November election.

 Still, Mr. Obama has signaled that he intends to expand his own role in making a public case for why action is necessary and why, despite the conservative argument that such changes would cost jobs and leave the United States less competitive with rising powers like China, they could have economic benefits by promoting a clean-energy industry. In addition to the prominent mention on Monday, Mr. Obama also used strong language in his speech on election night, referring to “the destructive power of a warming planet.”

Those remarks stood in contrast to Mr. Obama’s comments at his first postelection news conference, when he said he planned to convene “a wide-ranging conversation” about climate change and was vague about action. He is also expected to highlight his plans in his State of the Union address next month and in his budget plan soon afterward.

 If Obama is serious about the promises made at his inaugural, the road to meaningful action on climate change will be difficult and fraught with barriers that make progress all but impossible. Partnering with Congress on a blueprint for emissions reduction is a certain recipe for disaster given the recent turmoil over self-imposed “cliffs” and debate over raising the government’s debt limit.

Even Democrats on Capitol Hill are refusing to deal on climate change. Top Democrats in the Senate, with little appetite for environmental battles less than two years from another key election season, have expressed no interest in climate-related legislation and instead are seeking to hand off decision-making authority on emissions and other polces on global warming to the EPA.

“There doesn’t have to be a bill (on climate change),” cries Sen. Barbara Boxer of Califronia, one of the foremost liberals in the US Senate.

After years of trying—and failing—to get climate-change legislation through Congress, top Senate Democrats are publicly ready to hand over the power to President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“A lot of people don’t recognize that EPA has huge authority to reduce carbon in the air,” Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said at a briefing Tuesday.

“A lot of you press me … on: ‘Where is the bill on climate change? Where is the bill’? There doesn’t have to be a bill,” Boxer told a group of reporters in her office in the Hart Senate Building. “There will be many approaches, but I’m telling you right now, EPA has the authority in the transportation sector, in the electricity sector, and the industrial sector under the Clean Air Act.”

With even liberal Democrats in the Senate cool on tackling climate change, there is no chance anything will be picked by the Republican-controlled House. Conservatives there are not yet swayed by the weather disasters affecting many of their constituents, and instead embrace the theories peddled by climate skeptics that warming is not happening at all.

Despairing of a climate agenda in the House or Senate, environmental groups and scientists are prepared to hold President Obama to his inauguration promise and are calling on him to work around the gridlock in Congress by using executive authority to further new measures and regulations to curb the worst impacts of climate change.

Activists contend that any substantive bills will surely “die” in Congress, making it imperative that the White House step up and fill the void. Unlike his slew of “executive decrees” on gun control released to much fanfare this month but which are basically toothless, environmentalists are demanding tougher and substantive orders from the president that can and will make a significant difference on issues like carbon emissions, clean energy and conservation efforts like fuel efficiency.

“Congress has proved to be the place where good ideas go to die, and clearly the climate bill’s failure back in 2009 is an example of that,” said Melinda Pierce, legislative director for the Sierra Club.

Obama acknowledged the difficulty of getting climate legislation passed when he was asked about it during a Nov. 14 press conference. “I don’t know what either Democrats or Republicans are prepared to do at this point,” he said.

But environmental activists say the president has already taken steps outside Congress, pointing to the work done on fuel efficiency standards that the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation adopted in 2012.

To build on that, green groups are urging the president to use the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to put emission restrictions on existing power plants.

“He’s already tackled cars,” said Bob Keefe, senior press secretary for the National Resource Defense Council. “Now we need to go after this other big source of carbon pollution.”

The small steps forward in the political discussions over climate policy comes as experts continue to warn that global warming is rapidly escalating to a tipping point where the worst effects of climate change can only be mitigated, not avoided.

Climate catastrophes that have wracked the US over the last 12 months — like Sandy’s destruction in NEw York and New Jersey and the Midwestern record drought — are being repeated across the globe, leading to an unsustainable pattern unless serious action is taken by political leaders.

Within the lifetimes of today’s children, scientists say, the climate could reach a state unknown in civilization.

In that time, global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are on track to exceed the limits that scientists believe could prevent catastrophic warming. CO{-2} levels are higher than they have been in 15 million years.

The Arctic, melting rapidly and probably irreversibly, has reached a state that the Vikings would not recognize.

“We are poised right at the edge of some very major changes on Earth,” said Anthony Barnosky, a UC Berkeley professor of biology who studies the interaction of climate change with population growth and land use. “We really are a geological force that’s changing the planet.”

Putting Americans at even greater risk is that while President Obama pledges to take climate change seriously in his public speeches, more routine policy decisions by his administration have the potential to greatly exacerbate the crisis.

Part of the president’s push for “clean energy” includes decidedly dirty energy sources like natural gas derived from shale gas deposits and “fracking.” This facet of the White House plan to tackle global warming is actually one of the 14 dirtiest fossil-fuel projects targeted for their contributions to climate change by 2020.

Even more concerning is the likelihood that the president and John Kerry, Obama’s nominee for secretary of state, will eventually approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the US Gulf Coast, a project that has been fingered by some experts as having the potential to singlehandedly make climate change irreversible.

Political pressure on the administration has been intense throughout the debate over the pipeline, but new developments have raised the stakes in the battle in which the president had sided with environmentalists fighting the new outlet for fossil fuel transport.

Decisions made by the Republican governor of Nebraska in changing the route of the pipeline have removed “breathing space” for Obama on the issue, and soon-to-be secretary of state Kerry’s investments in Keystone-related companies are also in play to sway the president.

 Barack Obama’s powerful call for climate action faced an immediate test on Tuesday, with the president forced into a decision on one of the most contentious items on his agenda: the Keystone XL pipeline.

A day after Obama made a strong commitment to climate in his inaugural address, the governor of Nebraska signed off on the pipeline, leaving it up to the White House to decide on the fate of the project.

“Construction and operation of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline … would have minimal environmental impacts in Nebraska,” Dave Heineman, the governor of Nebraska, wrote in a letter to the White House.

The approval now leaves the fate of a project seen as a litmus test of the administration’s environmental credentials entirely in Obama’s hands.

It also removes any breathing space the president might have had to put together a plan to make good on the stirring promises on climate in his inaugural address.

Republicans immediately pushed Obama to approve the pipeline. “There is no bureaucratic excuse, hurdle or catch President Obama can use to delay this project any further,” John Boehner, the Republican speaker, said in a statement. “He and he alone stands in the way of tens of thousands of new jobs and energy security.”