What to expect from Obama on climate change
Last night, in a forceful call to action during his State of the Union address, President Obama highlighted what appears to be a renewed commitment to enacting robust climate change regulations in his second term, dedicating ample space to the topic in his hour-long speech and calling on Congress to enact meaningful legislation "for the sake of our children and our future."
"We must do more to combat climate change," Mr. Obama told the nation in his fifth annual address to Congress. "I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago."
In the aftermath of his speech, environmentalists politely welcomed Mr. Obama's plea for a bipartisan legislative solution; the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group that advocates for climate change legislation, also praised him for doing a "powerful job connecting the need for action on climate change with the challenge of revitalizing our economy."
But in the face of unwavering Republican resistance to any legislation regulating climate change, the real significance in Mr. Obama's remarks wasn't in his demand that lawmakers act -- it was in his threat to do so without them.
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"If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will," Mr. Obama pledged in his remarks. "I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."
In a statement released shortly after his statement, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) lauded Mr. Obama's "vision for needed change," and urged the president to use his "full box of tools to strike back at climate chaos."
Republicans were less enthusiastic about the ideas: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., argued in his rebuttal speech that "the government can't change the weather," and that passing "a bunch of laws" aiming to do so will only "destroy our economy."
To say that environmental lobbyists would welcome federal legislation pushing a more sustainable energy system would be an almost comical understatement: Groups like NRDC have spent years attempting to push through Congress laws regulating carbon emissions, which they see as the number one priority on the road to slowing down climate change. Their efforts, however, have been widely unsuccessful. Republican resistance to regulations on traditional energy sources has proven steadfast; and even in the early years of Mr. Obama's administration, when there was a perception of hope for the so-called cap-and-trade bill, support fell short in a Democratic-led Senate.
Since then, according to experts, little has changed politically to suggest a crack in the shell of GOP opposition -- even if, as Mr. Obama argues, "the overwhelming judgment of science" supports the idea of climate change.
"There's no way in the world that the current Republican caucus in the House will go along with any kind of legislative carbon control caps," said Theda Skocpol, a political science professor at Harvard, in an interview with CBSNews.com.
House Speaker John Boehner's office did not respond to repeated requests
for Boehner's reaction to the president's remarks on climate
change, nor to requests about whether the speaker would bring to the
House floor any bill resembling cap-and-trade legislation. The speaker has cast doubts in the past about the role of humans in climate change, however, laughing off "the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment" as "almost comical." There is little reason to believe he would buck party lines to bring forward a measure that's deeply unpopular among many in his caucus.
The oil and gas industries have a long history of political influence, specifically among the right: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, "individuals and political action committees affiliated with oil and gas companies have donated $238.7 million to candidates and parties since the 1990 election cycle," and 75 percent of those donations have gone to Republicans.
According to Skocpol, who recently published a comprehensive report on why the 2010 cap-and-trade bill failed, energy lobbyists have not only kept up their campaign in recent years, but heightened it. She cites Al Gore's 2006 movie "An Inconvenient Truth" as a sort of turning point in the movement to combat regulatory legislation: In the wake of that film, she says, American public opinion was "moving toward taking global warming seriously as a threat and supporting government action."
"That caused a lot of alarm on the part of forces that don't want new economic regulations" on the existing energy industry, she said. "There was a pretty serious media campaign to turn public opinion, at least among conservatives, against the idea that climate change was a serious problem, or that it was caused by human beings."
By 2007, Skocpol argues, that effort "really had succeeded quite a bit," and it became basically impossible to get a Republican on board for any legislation related to climate change.
"There was an organized campaign to convince conservatives that climate science was invalid and it worked," she said. "We're still in that world. That hasn't changed."
What has changed is the environmental lobby's strategy, which they see as a necessary adaptation to increasingly bleak legislative options. Following the president's re-election last year, the NRDC unveiled a comprehensive proposal urging the president to act through the administrative powers granted him in the Clean Air Act, effectively sidestepping Congress to wage an aggressive war on carbon emissions.
"The president has the authority, through the Clean Air Act, to do the single most important thing we can do to strike a blow against climate change, which is to reduce the carbon pollution coming from our power plants," said Bob Deans, associate director of communications at NRDC, in an interview with CBSNews.com. "If we could reduce the carbon from our power plants by just one fourth -- which is imminently doable -- we would keep half a billion tons a year of carbon out of our atmosphere. That would be almost 10 percent of our entire carbon footprint."
This plan, which would seek to transition the U.S. economy away from coal- and oil-oriented energy sources to a new, more sustainable energy system, is a practical solution for environmentalist groups that have been thwarted by Republican opponents in national and state legislatures. But it would also, unsurprisingly, invite the immediate and vociferous wrath of those groups that have spent the last half a decade trying to keep more stringent regulations at bay.
"Opponents of this action would immediately tell Americans the administration is raising your electricity prices," Skocpol said. "The positive spin is that Obama has been re-elected. He doesn't have to face the electorate again."
Even if Obama administration does take action, likely through the Environmental Protection Agency, it's unclear what exactly it will do or how far it will go in efforts to curb carbon emissions. The White House did not respond to requests for more details on the president's plan, nor about the timeline with which he might make good on his threat. So while that option is arguably the most feasible short- and even medium-term option for slowing climate change, federal legislation remains a long-term goal for most green energy advocates.
Skocpol argues that liberals need to be ready for a conversation on regulatory legislation when the time is right. Changing minds about climate science has proven consistently difficult even as the nation experiences extreme weather events like superstorm Sandy, and that won't change, she says, if people aren't personally invested in the issue. By that token, advocates for green energy need to make public enemies of those who are trying to prevent action, and give people a reason to get on their side.
"People who want action to spur America's transition to a new energy system - they've been dealing with abstractions and they've been having a hard time pointing to enemies," Skocpol said. "To make the transition to the green economy, it has to be something that people have a real stake in... I don't think the next [legislative] opening is going to come until 2016, but if people aren't ready for it, and don't start moving toward a more realistic strategy, then there'll be another repeat of what happened last time around."
Despite the obvious hurdles of getting anything done in Congress, there's a small group of liberal senators that is trying to begin that campaign, by raising awareness on the issues, engaging the public and the president, and ultimately pushing legislative options that "can be made feasible" by success in the first two areas.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., argues that an aggressive public opinion campaign, combined with some old-fashioned congressional politicking, can lead to meaningful a large-scale bill reducing carbon emissions, be it cap-and-trade or "a pollution fee of some kind."
"I think we can end up in a position very like on the fiscal cliff, very like on immigration, or gay rights, where over in the House the heart and soul of the Republican party is against progress in those areas but the speaker realizes that they are way out of step with the American public, so he has to waive the Hastert rule and allow a vote," Whitehouse told CBSNews.com. "If the executive branch has done its job of being forceful enough that the carbon fuel industry feels it has to come and negotiate, and if the Senate can then do a strong bipartisan bill," the speaker will have no choice but to let "the House work its will," he argued.
Whitehouse acknowledges that's a lot of "ifs," and that the first contingency -- the White House taking an aggressive posture on the issue -- is both "a very important element in this equation" and "that we have not seen it before."
But he argues that Mr. Obama would not be putting such a public focus on combating climate change if he didn't mean to make it a priority. And as have many clean energy advocates before him, Whitehouse also contends that the evidence is on his side.
"I think they're looking at their legacy. No president in this era who fails on climate change can have a good legacy," he said, of the Obama administration. "I think we can approach this debate with the confidence that every day the public is going to be more and more with us; every day the evidence is going to be plainer and plainer; every day the denial position is going to be more and more isolated."
"The only risk," he says, is "can we get it done before it's too late?"
