With no hope of getting Congress to do anything, President Obama will announce his plans to address climate change in an address at Georgetown University this afternoon. In doing so, he will create some stresses in the Democratic coalition. Traditionally, the Democrats have relied for their power in the Senate on having seats in energy-producing states like Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia. Those senators don’t like to hear things like this:
Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who is the head of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a member of a presidential science panel that has helped advise the White House on climate change, said he hoped the presidential speech would mark a turning point in the national debate on climate change.
“Everybody is waiting for action,” he said. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”
Our form of government is uniquely ill-suited to tackle climate change because small energy-producing states have disproportionate power in the Senate and because Senate rules give the minority effective veto power. This leaves the president with few options, but you’ll be surprised by how much he can do unilaterally as the head of the executive branch. Before his reelection, he couldn’t afford to divide his own caucus, and it still comes with potentially enormous costs to his ability to hold the party together and keep control of the Senate past 2014.
The left is distracted right now, as they always seem to be in the aftermath of a successful election, but we need to have the president’s back on this because it’s so vitally important and such a threat to our cohesion.
Exactly right. This has always been the problem with any energy related legislation. It is why the energy bill that almost passed 4 years ago was so larded with gifts to energy state Dems. Bless the President for doing this, but the risks are great.
Unfortunately, the president appears to have concluded that the best way to declare war on coal is to expand fracking operations to the point that we’re effectively declaring a simultaneous war on water resources.
And even more unfortunately, the President is right about that.
Closing the coal plants means replacing them with gas plants, that emit half the GHG, for at least a decade while renewables ramp up.
Between mercury and the dumping of slag, keeping the coal plants open is already a war on water resources.
It’s an awful choice for us to have to make. Coal mining and burning is most definitely murder on lakes and streams and the water table in areas where it’s mined, but from what I can tell, fracking vastly expands the damage done to wells and aquifers and etc to places where coal can’t be found.
I remember a report by the CIA, or maybe one of the defense institutions over a decade ago laying out how future wars would be fought over potable water. We’re really screwing ourselves with this energy policy. I don’t blame the president for that, but it’s hard to accept that we really are this helpless in the face of opposition to cleaner energy sources.
It is a terrible choice we have to make, but climate change has to be the priority. At this point, I’d support building a geo-thermal plant in Yellowstone if I thought it
Fracking, unlike coal burning, can be done right. There are best practices that can be used. Right now, it’s the wild west out there, and we need some regulations.
And the problem isn’t just political opposition to renewables. There’s also just the technical problem of getting them deployed enough to take up all of coal’s slack. That’s a big, long job.
The left won’t have the president’s back. They haven’t lifted a finger to help him with any policy issue. They are too busy bitching that he isn’t pure enough.
Don’t confuse the actual left with a handful of internet loud mouths.
Progressive groups, labor groups, women’s groups, and the activist left in general have consistently had the President’s back in all of the major fights during his Presidency. They’ve been much more loyal than, for instance, the Blue Dogs and other centrist/conservadem factions.
There are some loud voices on the internet, but they don’t even represent the majority of the internet left.
I got his back but he better reject the damn pipeline.
The left is distracted right now, as they always seem to be in the aftermath of a successful election, but we need to have the president’s back on this because it’s so vitally important and such a threat to our cohesion.
Perhaps this latest stink bomb from the Supreme Court regarding the Voting Rights Act will get folks undistracted.
I would suggest waiting for the speech before making pronouncements like this. Unless you already know what’s in it. More coal and oil talk will not go down well at all. Doing a shuffle to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to go ahead will set over even more anger. Silence on the growing reach of ALEC-sponsored fracking laws in the states and the loosening of mineral rights laws in the states will not communicate concern about the environment.
I keep waiting for the day when they declare ground water a mineral and come to our property to extract it all.
Have you seen what the CEO of Nestle said about that?
And coincidentally Roberts chooses today as the day to kill the Voting Rights Act. So Big News Day, but what story will be run as the bigger?
I’m awaiting the long delayed climate change speech. There is much the prez can order as long as EPA retains power to regulate CO2—guess we’ll see how long that lasts under the Roberts Court. Unfortunately, the speech comes after years of regulatory complicity and conciliation with hydro-fracking and greatly expanded drilling rights in the most fragile ecosystems imaginable. We need much more than trying to have national fossil fuel policies go both ways. “All of the Above” is a dead end for the planet. Fossil fuels simply must have to start paying their actual environmental costs.
Also, too, which DC Dems have been tasked with immediately denouncing the (certain-to-occur) Repub blasting of whatever Obama says as bein’ Job Killin’ Reguulayshun that will destroy Murican industry?
It is an interesting coincidence, isn’t it?
On the right, we have the extremist right wing court throwing out the 15th amendment by citing the 10th. Perhaps the most overt of their long string of decisions to do whatever helps their big contributors regardless of the actual law.
On the left we have Obama who, if pre-announcements are a correct guide, is going to take a stance asserting the scientific position on climate change and also assert that he will unilaterally do whatever he can as President to combat it (since Congress will do nothing).
The move from the right is news, but it’s just part of a long trend towards Corporate Government.
The move from the left is a major shift. First, most Democrats say little about climate change in hopes of avoiding controversy. They do support, at some level, efforts to counteract climate change but at the same level as they support abortion rights – this is a topic to be avoided and certainly not to be championed. For Obama to openly champion it means he has to abandon what Washington punditry sees as a moderate position and take a real stance.
Just two weeks ago I saw Colorado Governor Hickenlooper – a Democrat and former Mayor of Denver who did lots of progressive stuff and even has the political courage to be on the forefront of minimal gun control legislation – on TV talking about our local forest fires and obviously scared to death of addressing the climate change issue. Every time he was asked about it he avoided it and then used the word “prayer” half a dozen times like it was a charm to scare away the climate change fairy.
So if Obama is staking out a stance on a controversial issue – even if it is one in which the science is fully on his side – that’s huge.
The second thing he’s apparently will do is threaten to use executive power to enact policy. This shouldn’t be controversial – Reagan and Bush II did this wantonly and pretty much every other modern President has assumed this as part of the rights of the office, but not so much Mr Centrist. (If in doubt, look at how his administration chose to administer HAMP. The program which was used for the infamous Santelli rant because it opened the door to helping mortgage payers who were under water instead was used exclusively to help the banks.)
So, speaking as someone from the left who has been highly critical of Obama, if he actually does these things I’ll be firmly in his court. Because his failure to do these things is precisely the basis for my criticism of his administration. I’m still skeptical – I can see Obama making this speech this week and turning around and approving Keystone and Arctic drilling next month. But I hope to be proven wrong.
But back to the contrasts – the SCOTUS did what the right wing has been doing all along, playing hardball and saying “what are you gonna do about it”. If, on the same day, the leader of the Democrats finally adopts the same stance then maybe we actually have a fighting chance.
I don’t much care who likes it or doesn’t like it. We don’t have a choice. Climate change really should dwarf all other issues, so it’s way past the time when we should at least be having a vigorous debate about it.
The timing is good, at any rate. Every summer and every hurricane season is another chance to wake a few more people up to the fact that this is real. We’re sleepwalking into a catastrophe here, so I have more than got his back here. I demand action.
well said, but your arguments only have merit to the rational and unbrainwashed.
So be it. If there was ever a time for Obama to stick his neck out, this is it.
Lisa Jackson spent Obama’s entire first term waging a war on coal, mainly through rules about air emissions like fine particulates, ozone precursors, and mercury/toxics. Just continuing the trend line of what the EPA has been doing all along would be great policy.
But they did those things relatively quietly, so quietly that even many environmentalists don’t connect the dots. It looks like the administration has decided that it’s time to stop being quiet.
As best I can gather, there is now an interagency methane task force. And the old and new coal plant carbon emission final regs (the draft regs came out in 2011) will be finalized in 2015. Some statements about increasing various standards, but it is not clear to me whether that requires Congressional action.
Good steps forward IMO, but did not live up to the hype. And apparently got almost zero coverage on the media.
Apparently the purpose of this exercise was to piss off Joe Manchin.
What TPM did is not what the White House communications operation likely wanted to see: