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Obama's Energy Failure
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Jason |
| Last Edited | Jason Jul 06, 2010 11:01am |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Eric Pooley |
| News Date | Thursday, June 10, 2010 03:10:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Engulfed by the worst environmental disaster in US history, Barack Obama is trying to change the subject. On May 26 the president pledged to "keep fighting to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation," and on June 2 he declared, "The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean-energy future." Pivoting from oil spill to climate bill makes sense; a mandatory, declining cap on emissions is America's best chance to wean itself off of fossil fuels -- and Obama's best chance to wring some good out of the catastrophe. With the Senate expected to vote today on Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R-Alaska) call to march in the wrong direction -- a resolution stripping the EPA of the power to regulate greenhouse gases -- this will clearly be a battle. But what did the president mean by "keep fighting?" As the campaigners on the front lines of the climate war know, Obama has not yet begun to fight.
In the early days of the administration, Al Gore sent the new president a confidential memo explaining why it was essential for the US to pass a climate bill in 2009, before the UN summit in Copenhagen, where the world was supposed to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. If the US delegation arrived empty-handed in Copenhagen, Gore wrote, the world would have no chance to reach a new global deal. American leadership was the crucial and still-missing ingredient. But except for a few days in June 2009 spent whipping the vote for the Waxman-Markey climate bill, the White House has not pushed for the cap. It has been all talk -- and even the talk tends to get watered down.
As Earth Day 2009 approached, for example, Obama and his strategists decided that a clean-energy event was needed. When the president prepped for the speech, to be held at a former Maytag factory in Iowa that now makes towers for wind turbines, he said he hadn't been talking enough about the specifics of climate policy -- a complaint that the entire climate community shared. Cli |
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