David Orr - "Perhaps The President Reasoned That Climate Destabilization Would Not Be All That Bad"

[hatrack]

I wrote Down to the Wire between 2007 and 2008 when many still believed that the United States was capable of making an effective national response to global climate destabilization. At the time I was involved with several dozen others in drafting “The President’s Climate Action Plan” (PCAP) a document that aimed to define the actions that the next U.S. President would have to take immediately in order to avoid the worst of what lies ahead. The numbers are stark. We have raised the temperature of the Earth by 0.8C and are committed to another 0.5 to 1°C that will bring us close to the 2C warming that many scientists have cited as a threshold we should not transgress. Time, in other words, is not on our side. Climate destabilization, we argued, was not just another issue on a long list of vexing problems, but the linchpin issue the solution of which would lessen many other problems including national security, balance of payments, economic recovery, and public health. As Bill Becker, the Executive Director of PCAP put it, “climate change is not about Right or Left; it’s about backward or forward.” Our efforts built on those of many others dating back to the early 1970s who pointed out that for many good reasons energy efficiency and deployment of renewable energy were the smartest, cheapest, and best policy options we have. The difference between the first warning about climate change given to President Johnson in 1965 and November, 2008 when the report was delivered to John Podesta, Director of President Obama’s transition team, was the accumulation of overwhelming scientific evidence that climate destabilization would most certainly threaten our security and well-being as a nation and would, in time, erode the foundations of civilization itself. The scientific evidence is clear that the magnitude of the changes ahead are greater, the speed much faster, and duration of climatic destabilization will last far longer than once thought.

The economic collapse of 2008 diverted attention from climate policy to economic recovery, but they were and remain related problems. A robust, well-thought-out climate and energy policy would have amplified the effects of stimulus funding, which by reliable accounts was about half of what was actually needed. On the other hand, the economic crisis was ”solved,” but in ways that compounded the long-term climate problem. Indeed, a good fraction of stimulus funding went to projects that will directly and indirectly increase U.S. carbon emissions.

This is not to say that the administration did nothing. On the contrary, President Obama launched the largest effort in U.S. history to deploy solar and wind power and raise national standards for energy efficiency. Behind the scenes, the administration has taken significant steps, much as recommended in the PCAP report, to redirect Federal policies for purchasing, building standards, and research in advanced energy technologies. What the President did not do, however, was to use the power of the Office as a “bully pulpit” to lead public opinion when he still had the opportunity to do so. Nor did he make climate and energy policy the first priority of his administration. Instead he chose to pursue a “bi-partisan” approach with an intransigent Republican minority that would have none of it. He decided to place a politically divisive healthcare reform battle before the health of the planet. And he let Congress patch together whatever legislation it could to deal with climate issues. Perhaps the President and his advisers reasoned that climate destabilization would not be all that bad despite the scientific evidence. Perhaps they thought that the issue could be deferred to a more convenient time. Maybe they believed that it would be politically impossible to do much anyway. In fact by their failure to lead, they helped make it impossible—at least for a while. In short, whatever his many other successes, President Obama has so far failed the test of transformative leadership on what is likely to be the most important issue humankind will ever face.

In the absence of firm and decisive Presidential leadership on climate destabilization, among other factors, the two years since have not been our finest. The Waxman-Markey Bill, such as it was, passed the House of Representatives in 2009, but the U.S. Senate could muster no filibuster-proof majority on climate legislation. And had it done so the results would have been inadequate at best. We needed then, and need now more than ever, national climate and energy legislation that eliminates upwards of ninety percent of our greenhouse gas emissions and that is also fair, transparent, and straightforward. This needs to be executed with wartime urgency. Indeed, we are at war, but with ourselves and the devils of our lesser nature. At the international level, lacking vigorous U.S. leadership, climate conferences at Copenhagen and Cancun produced little progress relative to the magnitude of the looming crisis. In the meantime other countries are surging ahead to seize the lead and reap the economic advantages of a solar and wind powered world.

EDIT

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-04-05/confronting-climate-collapse