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Obama days left in office12/17/2023 And the turnaround that ensued when he was re-elected is not lost on McKibben or anyone. “The decision to go all out for natural gas…turned out to be a great mistake-if you tally the methane that’s leaking,” said climate activist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben.Īs his first term drew to a close, Obama clearly focused on making sure he’d have a second term. “And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.” “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years,” Obama declared in his 2012 State of the Union, making clear that an all-of-the-above energy policy would be his stance that election year. 1 fossil fuel producing country in the world. (It would be finished three years later.) He supported domestic energy production to spur the economy, overseeing an historic shale boom that would make the U.S. He reached agreement with auto companies on improved fuel economy standards, a step they had resisted for 25 years.īut he also waffled on opposing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline early on (although he eventually nixed it) and his administration dragged its feet on the Clean Power Plan, which he was under a court mandate to finalize by 2012. He put a record $90 billion for clean energy into his stimulus package. Some of his plan was still ambitious, even monumental. With global warming suddenly a political lightning rod and re-election looming in 2012, Obama talked about his climate programs mainly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. The House flipped and the Democrats’ lead in the Senate narrowed as a new crop of climate deniers was swept into Congress. Pro-fossil fuel industry groups spent record sums on Republican candidates in that election. The 2010 midterm elections then sealed the fate of the rest of Obama’s tenure. Even before cap-and-trade capsized, he had been dealt an international setback when the Copenhagen climate talks failed to produce a global agreement that Obama believed would help him push domestic climate policies. “But I also think the Obama administration did not play a really strong role in trying to push it.” They had been through these very partisan votes on the stimulus, Dodd-Frank, and affordable care, and they were not in the mood for another big fight,” said Eileen Claussen, the founding president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, who led a coalition lobbying for a bill. “There were many reasons why the Senate was not able to act on climate change. Obama never developed his own legislation proposal to replace it. But after its Republican backers in the Senate got cold feet, Obama rallied no support behind it and it fizzled there. A cap-and-trade bill, Waxman-Markey, based heavily on a proposal by a coalition of industry and environmental groups, had squeaked through the House in 2009. Had the White House pushed for a comprehensive national climate plan early, it could have given Obama’s climate agenda legislative backing, making it much harder for his successor to undo. The Recovery Act, the bailout of the auto industry and the Wall Street reform act, Dodd-Frank, were at the top of the agenda Obama’s team pushed for, followed by health care reform. His priorities were saving major American industries, restoring faith in the economy and stemming spiraling unemployment. Obama had promised “a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” but when he took office, he was facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. “The second term was a totally different story.” “The first term was essentially lost territory,” said Daniel Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Obama had Democratic majorities in Congress during his first two years in office, and failing to press for national climate legislation during that time turned into perhaps his greatest strategic miscalculation, according to climate experts and advocates. deals with what he called the greatest threat to future generations may have come in his first term, and it was lost to the pull of other priorities. What they overshadow is that his greatest opportunity to reshape how the U.S. For all of President Barack Obama’s sweeping and historic achievements on climate change, most have come in a last rush of momentum in the final years of his second term.
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