After a draft copy of the 2017 Climate Assessment Report leaked recently, people are left wondering exactly what it is and why it’s important.
THE CLIMATE REPORT: EXPLAINED
Under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, an inter-governmental agency, is required to research and produce a report that shows the impact of global climate change. The study is conducted by hundreds of scientists and reviewed by multiple government agencies, including NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Despite federal policy mandating an assessment to be released every four years, only three have been issued: once under President Bill Clinton in 2000 and twice under President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2014. (President George W. Bush’s administration was sued for delaying the report’s release.)
There’s speculation whether or not the current White House will sign off on the report’s official release (which is scheduled for the fall), given the Trump administration’s pullback from the Paris climate accord and its push to increase fossil fuel production.
The leaked version of the 2017 report, which was first published by the New York Times, repeats similar warnings of increased greenhouse gas emissions as earlier assessments. But it also uses extremely blunt language regarding the cause, stating that humans are “extremely likely” to be the dominant producers of this pollution.
And according to the latest report, global temperatures have risen 1.2 degrees, in the past 30 years — human involvement accounting for at least 1.1 degrees of that increase. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has publicly said that he does not thinkcarbon emissions cause climate change, writing in the National Review that, “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”
Regardless of political actions or ideologies on global climate change, these reports are accepted by the scientific community as a whole and are used to inform policymakers.
PAST FINDINGS
All issuances of the climate report have been in consensus: Global greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures have increased dramatically in the past century, due in large part to humans burning fossil fuels.
“The human impact on [global warming] is clear,” states the 2000 analysis — the first published report. “[Increased carbon emissions] resulted from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, and the destruction of forests around the world to provide space for agriculture and other human activities.”
The initial report gave warning that U.S. temperatures would rise by up to 9 degrees within the next 100 years if greenhouse gas emissions weren’t curbed.
The 2009 report echoed the same language, stating that human involvement was the largest contributor, but its findings were more dire as carbon emissions continued to rise during the years of the Bush administration. That report concluded that there could be an increase of up to 11 degrees by 2100.
By 2014, when the most recent report was officially published, the evidence was clear to scientists that action needed to be taken, as authors of the report found that certain areas of the U.S., specifically within America’s heartland, were going to experience 2 to 4 degree increases in temperature over the next few decades.
THE REPORT MAKES AN IMPACT
The Obama administration seemingly worked to make climate change policy its primary legacy. In 2009, after the second climate report was released, Obama pledged to reduce the U.S.’s carbon emissions by 2020 and reduce its carbon emissions levels 17 percent below 2005 levels.
Four years later, when the third climate report was under consideration by Obama, the Executive Office of the President released a broad action plan aimed at specifically cutting carbon emissions. These reactions to the climate reports were dramatically different to actions taken by President Bush. That administration hastilyexited the Kyoto Protocol (a global climate change treaty), partnered with Exxon-Mobil‘s leaders to craft U.S. climate change policy and cast doubt among the public that humans were to blame for global climate change. In contrast, polls conducted during thepast three years reveal that more Americans believe humans are to blame for climate change. Furthermore, a March 2017 Gallup poll found that more than 70 percent support alternative energy over traditional fossil fuels.
Which means that Americans are likely to continue curbing greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of whether or not the climate assessment report receives an official stamp of approval. MORE:Can the U.S. Reduce Its Carbon Emissions?
Illegal in Massachusetts: Asking Your Salary in a Job Interview, New York Times
With women only making 79 cents for every dollar earned by a man, how to close the gender wage gap is a hotly debated topic. Will bipartisan legislation in New England, which attempts to level the playing field by forbidding businesses from asking a prospect’s previous salary, be a model for other states to follow? Is School Integration Finally Making the Grade?, New America Weekly
Dozens of studies prove that school integration leads to student success. President Obama’s new “Stronger Together” grant program encourages districts to fully integrate by income, not ethnicity — giving low-income children of all races the opportunity to receive a better education. Meet the Mothers Who Have Been Fighting Police Brutality for Decades, BuzzFeed Described as “ultimate activist mother,” Iris Baez founded the grassroots group Parents Against Police Brutality after her son was killed in 1994. Working alongside fellow grieving mothers, Baez already has scored several important policing reform victories, but the 70-year-old isn’t letting age slow her advocacy work. MORE:5 Ways to Strengthen Ties Between Cops and Citizens
The son of an Air Force veteran and a history teacher, Jeff Eggers attended the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., with his heart set on learning to fly jets off of aircraft carriers. Once he learned about the SEAL program, however, his future headed in a different direction because, “I wanted to get in the business of leadership,” Eggers explains. After a “mostly straightforward SEAL career,” Eggers transitioned from operations to strategic policy, most recently serving as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
These days, Eggers has more work-life balance and the flexibility to invest in his family (which includes two small children) that his previous military service and government work largely prevented. Serving as a senior fellow at New America, his focus on leadership remains, researching how to revitalize American prosperity by changing how the business community thinks about workplace independence and how public policy must take into account behavioral science in order to be effective. NationSwell sat down with Eggers at the Washington, D.C., offices of New America to discuss the need to create a “self-driven, self-directed, more autonomous workforce.” What is the best advice you’ve ever been given on leadership? Someone once said to me, “don’t take yourself too seriously.” We’re all the same species, and one of the greatest mistakes that occurs when people get promoted to increasing levels of seniority is that they start taking themselves too seriously. I think leaders can ground themselves in a sense of humility, empathy, awareness and a respect for others. Doing so is one of the cornerstones of effective leadership. It’s not about you; it’s about the team. Jeff Eggers in the Oval Office with President Obama, Vice President Biden and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. What’s on your nightstand? It’s David Rothkopf’s “National Insecurity,” which is professional reading. I’m writing a longer piece on how our culture of fear is undercutting our national decision-making and that’s one of the books I keep for that research. Unfortunately, my nightstand is not well equipped with enjoyable, light reads. What is your biggest need right now? My greatest need was to rebalance work, life and family, which I did. That box is largely checked, and that was a big deal. One of my big needs right now is to create a network of experts and likeminded practitioners around this idea of behavioral policy and to develop a framework for how you could, with some scale, start to influence at a strategic level how you think about public policy, how we train people to do public policy. Bringing together this kind of core network will become the people who shape and build this program with me.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job? Too many people said it was going to be easy and not to overthink it. I think that I wish more people would’ve said the opposite — that it was going to be very difficult, steady yourself; it’s going to be harder than you think. Because for me personally, my desire was to test this hypothesis: To do the work-life balance and put family first you need to accept risk and you need to leap and hope that the net will appear. I came to advocate for that in such a way that I had to promote it by doing it. I had to live it. I did and that coupled with this mantra of “don’t overthink it; it’ll be easier than you think” — whoa! The leap has been a doozy at times, and some cautionary note of, “Absolutely, take the leap, but do a lot of thinking about all the various aspects of it,” [would’ve been nice.] What inspires you? Mostly, I’m always inspired by people that I respect and admire. My parents have been the longest, consistent source of inspiration. They put a lot of their energies in to their family — invested in their family, made sacrifices for their family. But also, they significantly advanced from one generation to another in life for more opportunities and that’s pretty inspiring, especially at a time when so few people have faith in the American Dream.
Today, I’m inspired by people who have a lot of moral conviction and intellectual courage to speak up against the mainstream conventional wisdom, especially when the mainstream conventional wisdom needs to be disrupted. That takes a significant amount of courage. How do you inspire others? By making people believe there is greatness in themselves. No one needs to look to anyone else for greatness or inspiration. There’s a tremendous amount of potential for greatness is each person. Too often we look to people that we ascribe greatness as having some sort of inherent advantage that made them great and that’s not the case. I would like everyone to understand that they are themselves a superhero, a genius. There’s no reason why everyone can’t tap into that. If everyone taps into a little bit of that, that small amount of incremental change is going to be extraordinary. What is your proudest accomplishment? It hasn’t happened yet. My proudest accomplishment will be raising my kids [ages 3 and 6]. That’s going to be my life’s work.
It’s more gratifying to see pride in accomplishments made by people that work for me. You don’t get any credit for them, but in my case, they’re more important [than what I’ve accomplished]. Eggers paragliding in the Canadian Rockies in 2009. What should people know about you that they don’t? I’m a pretty avid paraglider pilot. It’s the remnants of a formerly active and robust recreational lifestyle that had to be whittled down and made manageable with a family. The only real thing that I couldn’t ever let go of is my passion for paragliding. I had a bit of a scare back in September [2015] and kind of grounded myself and I’m now going through the soul-searching process of whether I can be both a responsible dad and an active paraglider pilot. That’s kind of a big deal. [Paragliding] is kind of scratching that aviation itch that I’ve had ever since I was a tiny kid and it’s how I’ve become a pilot. So it’s very, very fundamental and hard to let go of. To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here. This interview has been edited and condensed. MORE:How This Veteran Went from the Open Sea to Open Data
Eight years after President Barack Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, there’s not much evidence of a new era of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. His administration, however, has brought an antiquated, disjointed and inflexible bureaucratic system into the tech age. With a team of 153 people working across agencies, the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) retooled and modernized online applications for student loans, veteran’s healthcare and immigration visas. NationSwell spoke with Haley Van Dyck, a San Francisco native who co-founded the initiative, about running the federal government’s in-house startup.
The President asked you personally to change the government’s online systems. Why did you say yes? Well, the president is a pretty hard guy to say no to! Honestly, why I’m here is because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. Government is, I think, an overlooked platform for creating change in people’s lives. When you take a platform the size and scale of the United States government and you combine it with the transformative power of technology to create change, it can be a force multiplier for good.
What specifically are you integrating into government operations? Our team is focused on how we can bring in the best technology talent across the country and pair it with the innovators in government to focus more on the underlying systems. There are services that government provides every single day that are utterly life changing for Americans, and whatever we can do to bring what Silicon Valley has learned about providing planetary-scale digital services that work into services that are in desperate need of upgrades is an incredibly appealing mission.
The federal government currently spends $86 billion on IT projects, but nearly all these projects go over budget or miss deadlines. Two out of every five are shut down. What’s getting in the way? There are a lot of factors that go into it, so there’s no easy answer. Government still builds software the same way it builds battleships: very expensive, long planning cycles. That is simply not the way that Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large has become one of the most innovative sectors, because it’s found ways to take very, very large projects and break them up into smaller pieces where they’re more approachable and [easier to] deliver results on a much faster, much less risky surface area. I think that is one of the big problems of government — it’s structured to do these large projects, and that’s what it continues to do.
Another problem we run into is just outdated technology. You will still find COBOL [a 1959 computer programming language] alive and well in parts of the United States government, because doing these kinds of technology upgrades are hard and complicated and challenging, and it takes a lot of work. So those two — the mentality as well as the existing technology — combine together make a very, very hard problem to solve. That’s basically what our team is targeting, right?
The rollout of healthcare.gov, by anyone’s assessment, was a logistical disaster and a political nightmare. Did that failure mark a turning point in how the government does its business? There was obviously a ton of work underway long before healthcare.gov happened to solve this problem. But absolutely, I do think healthcare.gov was an incredibly critical turning point in two big ways. The first and most important one is that the rescue effort of healthcare.gov was one of the first times that many people with technology and engineering backgrounds were able to see how their skill-sets could truly help benefit a large number of their fellow Americans. It really shone a light onto the pathway for public service. The second way in which it was a defining moment was internally across government (for everyone from the White House down) it showed that the status quo right now is the riskiest option. The way the government goes about building software today is not successful and needed to change. That was a critical piece of energy and momentum that we needed to break the inertia and look at the problem from a different perspective.
Tell us a little bit about your first project with “boots on the ground,” where a team streamlined the transfer of health records from the Department of Defense to the Veterans Administration. Why start with such a huge bureaucracy? If we were filtering for where the easy problems were, we wouldn’t have a ton of business. We ended up very excited and eager to work with the VA because we believe that veterans deserve a world-class experience when applying for the benefits after all they’ve done in service of their country. So it was an incredibly motivating mission.
Where does that project stand now? We’re really excited because the team is making a ton of traction even in one of the largest, most entrenched bureaucracies in government. We’ve found incredible partners and supporters inside the VA who are really doing the heavy lifting and the hard work of creating culture change inside the agency, as they’re looking at how to improve services for veterans from all angles. The team is focused on two areas. First, how do we improve the experience for the veterans? Right now there are hundreds of websites, all intending to help veterans get access to their benefits. The work being done is streamlining all those service offerings and websites into a single place, where veterans can get better information and access to the benefits. Vets.gov is the new website that we’re building. It’s in beta and it’s launched for education and health benefits, and we continue to add services to it regularly.
The second big areas we spend a lot of time working is on the tools for the dedicated civil servants inside the VA to make it as easy as possible for them to complete their job of providing services to the vets. We just launched a product we’re excited about called Caseflow, which was designed with adjudicators inside the VA. It’s focused on streamlining and improving application processing. We realize that by helping upgrade the outdated systems that a lot of employees were using, we’re able to help the vets themselves.
In what ways is USDS similar to your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley tech startup? And in what ways would you notice a difference? We’re in incredible scrappy, bootstrap office spaces, with people running around in jeans, Post-It notes everywhere, tons of white boards and big discussions happening left and right. In many ways it looks and feels very, very similar to many of the startups you see across the country. But a couple of ways that it’s different, we’re actually quite proud of. For example, we have a very diverse team and are over 50 percent women, which I think makes different from a lot of companies in the Valley.
You’ve mentioned that USDS is easing arduous applications and centralizing contact information in one website. How does that work actually benefit the most vulnerable Americans? I don’t want to pontificate too much on the status of our tech industry, but as you see various tech companies create change across the industry, they’re simplifying and improving the lives of Americans and really taking out a lot of the biggest inconveniences that we have. It is absolutely imperative that our government makes that same jump to providing services the same way that the rest of the industry does. The internet is obviously a huge conduit for that. In order to make sure that divide doesn’t become larger, between the people who are benefiting from the tech revolution and those who aren’t, government should make sure that we are also modernizing our services for the primary platform where people are looking to do business and communicate.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s the only channel. We, as the government, do not have the luxury of segmenting our audiences the way that most companies do. We can’t just care about people on the internet. We have to care about those who don’t have access. But by the work we’re doing through actual user-centered design and modern technology stacks, we are able to do things like design for mobile, which is also addressing a huge percentage of Americans who now have access to internet only through smartphones and not through broadband. So I think that it’s an incredibly important part of the conversation, but it’s also not the entire conversation.
As a staff member working for the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the mid 2000s, Tomicah Tillemann reported to now-Vice President Joe Biden and worked extensively with, he says with a chuckle, “a new senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.”
Inspired by successful policy work, Tillemann remained in government, serving as Secretary Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter (once going 100 hours without sleep in order to perfect a speech) and later, as her senior adviser. That work informed Tillemann’s current position as director of the Bretton Woods II initiative at New America, a newmodel of investing that combines the public and private sectors and technology to further social impact causes worldwide.
NationSwell sat down with Tillemann at New America’s minimalist offices in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House, to discuss the importance of collaboration and why appealing to logic isn’t always successful. Is there an innovation in your field that you’re particularly excited about right now? In the work we’re doing right now at the Bretton Woods II initiative, we started from the realization that we’re living in a world with a huge quantum of capital and problems. We don’t do enough connecting the two, and we have yet to develop a business model that allows us to move resources to solve big global challenges. What we have recognized is that with good data and good analytics, you can provide big asset holders with the information they need to see how targeted investments in social impact and development can address the root causes of the volatility that eat away at their profits. What is the best advice you’ve ever received on leadership? If you can build a community that is passionately committed to the cause that you are trying to advance, then your job as a leader becomes immeasurably easier. What I’ve tried to do in my work in the private and public sectors and now straddling the two is to bring together individuals that share a common commitment to the work that we are seeking to advance. At that point, I can kind of step aside and get out of the way and watch them do incredible things.
In our current efforts, we are fortunate to have partnered with some of the leading foundations and many of the largest financial institutions in the world. When you put these guys together, provide some vision and serve as a catalyst for their collaboration, they’re going to do spectacular things. The great challenge of leadership is to deliver a vision that can appeal to people who wouldn’t otherwise work together. If you can provide that, then you’ve got it made as a leader. What inspires you? My grandfather came to the U.S. as a penniless Holocaust survivor. He arrived with $7 and a salami in his pocket, and his salami was confiscated at customs. Through a lot of hard work and education, he eventually served the United States in the Congress for 30 years and became chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I was able to grow up learning at his feet; I spent virtually every summer in Washington, D.C., with him. The great benefit of that was seeing his commitment to improving the state of the world. He recognized what could happen if you didn’t; he’d seen the evil that could be unleashed when people looked the other direction. What do you wish someone would’ve told you when you started working in Washington, D.C., but didn’t? In so much of what we do in Washington and certainly the work we do trying to mobilize the world’s largest asset holders to invest in social impact, we’re trying to change behavior. Part of that is based in logic, but a lot of it goes beyond that. We tend to focus a lot of time and energy on logic, and it’s necessary but it’s not sufficient. In order to do everything else, you need to build communities, relationships and get very good at leveraging different centers of power. Ultimately, you can have the best case in the world, but unless you know how to speak to people through those other channels, you’re probably not going to do what you set out to accomplish. What is your idea of a perfect day? My most important job is dad to five amazing kids. Our oldest is 10 and our youngest is 16 months. My happiest days involve them. We go to the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest every summer, and if we go out and catch some crabs, read some books together and spend some time on the beach — that’s real tough to beat. It’s a reminder of why you do everything else that you do. What is your proudest accomplishment? Definitely my five little people, and they’re in a class by themselves. Beyond that, I hope to someday say that my proudest accomplishment is leaving them a world that’s materially better than it would’ve been if I hadn’t engaged in these issues. What is something that people don’t know about you but should? I was born in the car on the way to the hospital. My mother was a very brave woman. What is your all-time favorite book? I really like Thomas More’s “Utopia,” which is a great exercise in how to reenvision and reimagine a society. The questioning that is evident in that book and the reexamination of some of the fundamental principles that you assume that need to undergird our civilization is something that we need more of. I think we can benefit from constantly looking at the way our society is constructed and asking, “Do things really need to be built as they are?” To the extent that we can make that part of our constant conversation in our heads, we can do good things. To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Ask people for their opinion, and they’ll usually give you an honest response. Which is exactly what we wanted when we asked government officials, legislators, environmental experts, scientists and historians what President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy would be. Read on for their judgments.
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“I think and hope President Obama will establish a legacy as one of the most consequential Presidents dealing with the environment, particularly with regard to climate change, which is the greatest threat we face today.” — Former Rep. Harry Waxman, a 20-term California Democrat who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee until 2011 and authored the amendments that strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1990 “President Obama hasdogmatically used energy as a political tool rather than a building block of renewed economic vibrancy…The innovation of independent producers and the scale of larger companies has combined to make the United States a world economic leader in clean energy — one of our few areas of industrial domination. Yet the President has chosen to brand oil and gas as evil forces and essentially shut down federal lands as source of production.” — Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a Republican who implemented higher standards for ozone and other air pollutants and spearheaded a federal cleanup of the Great Lakes while serving as EPA administrator from 2003 to 2005.
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“While President Obama has taken significant steps to address climate change — establishing the first-ever carbon emissions limits for power plants and new fuel economy standards for cars — his administration continues to lease massive amounts of publicly-owned fossil fuels…It’s clear that President Obama is serious about cementing his climate legacy, but until he takes steps to ensure the vast majority of fossil fuels remain in the ground, his legacy is as vulnerable as an Arctic ice sheet.” — Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA
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“Barack Obama is destined to go down as the greatest climate change-fighting president in history. By the time he leaves office some 15 months from now, he will have instituted game-changing programs to slash carbon pollution from our vehicles and trucks, and from our power plants – together accounting for two-thirds of all U.S. greenhouse gases, the primary driver of dangerous climate change.” — Ed Chen, national communications director for the National Resources Defense Council
“Even as Obama has talked an increasingly tough game on climate change and the need for dramatic reductions [in emissions], he has also pursued policies that have exacerbated the environmental impacts of domestic energy development — and have increasingly exported our dirty energy sources even as we embrace clean renewables. His environmental achievements, then, have been hamstrung by politics — both the unyielding political opposition as well as his own sense of what’s politic in a nation craving economic growth and energy independence.” — Paul Sutter, professor of modern U.S. history at the University of Colorado in Boulder
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“Looking at individual policy accomplishments doesn’t do justice to President Obama’s legacy on climate change…The component parts of his actions — from making cars and power plants cleaner to preserving major swaths of land and sea for future generations to leading on global ocean policy to beginning to take on industrial methane pollution — tell a story about how he and his administration addressed the problem. But the story is larger than that. I’d say the president’s legacy on climate change lies in his success in making climate change a central policy obligation, getting millions of Americans to care about it, bringing along industry and other stakeholders, and tackling the problem in the face of withering opposition from Congress. So I wouldn’t say that setting fuel efficiency standards is a legacy, I’d say that achieving the cooperation and buy-in of all the stakeholders is the legacy accomplishment. This president, more than others, has had to build those coalitions to overcome the legislative obstruction of climate action and he’s changed how climate policy is developed and implemented.” — Carol M. Browner, former EPA adminstrator during the Clinton administration and director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy from 2009 to 2011
[ph] “As soon as Obama took office, [the] EPA began moving vigorously to regulate greenhouse gas emissions…Obama strongly advocated environmental protection and took several highly publicized trips to advance concern about environmental issues and to promote renewable energy. After his first two years, he was confronted with the most anti-environmental Congress in history, so new legislation was challenging, to say the least. However, he pushed against the limits of his authority under existing laws, especially on climate change.” — Michael B. Gerrard, professor at Columbia Law School in New York City who teaches courses on environmental regulation and climate change policy
“Obama has ignored not only bipartisan solutions but Congress itself after it rejected his approach on climate change even when Democrats controlled that body. He was the president who deepened the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over these crucial intersecting issues. His partisanship has been destructive of any consensus on major enviro-energy issues…Meanwhile, the huge energy event that happened during his watch – the shale oil and gas revolution – flourished not thanks to his administration, but in spite of it.” — Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association
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“Mr. Obama is the most radical president in terms of environmental policy in the history of the U.S. It is as if the spirit of Rachel Carson – author of “Silent Spring” – is occupying the Oval Office. Every imagined environmental threat takes on the utmost urgency in this president’s mind, no matter how weak the scientific evidence…He leaves behind a legacy of narcissism, grandiosity and political correctness that will be hard for anyone to match, though Mrs. Clinton, should she survive the FBI probe of her national security lapses, might be able to come close.” — Gene Koprowski, director of marketing for the Heartland Institute, a conservative public policy think tank
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“The stimulus package gave President Obama a chance to invest in renewables early in his first term, allowing him to make progress on the issues unlike most other recent presidents, who have been forced for political reasons to leave critical environmental issues to their second terms. In 2009 and 2010, there was an apparent window of opportunity to promote a carbon cap and trade bill in Congress, but the administration was eager for a quick victory and opted for health care. Whether with Obama’s support this could have happened is a good question, but there is no question that the decision to back off was demoralizing to the environment and climate change community.” — D. James Baker, former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and current director of the Global Carbon Measurement Program at the William J. Clinton Foundation
[ph] “President Obama will be remembered for strong leadership on climate change. He implemented two key policies in the United States that will substantially cut the emissions of heat trapping gases — fuel economy standards for vehicles, and limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. He also brokered a deal with China to cut emissions from that country, which is critical to the success of a worldwide agreement expected to emerge in Paris this year. The missing piece of his legacy is national climate change legislation, which he and congress failed to pass.” — Kenneth Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit MORE:Which Presidents Are the Greenest in U.S. History?
“Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals,” Theodore Roosevelt presciently wrote in a popular magazine in 1913, as he watched the western frontier vanish four years after he’d left the White House. “But at last it looks as if our people were awakening.”
Roosevelt, the hunter from New York whose name became synonymous with conservation, initiated our country’s long-overdue reconciliation with the environment. Because of him, we can still admire the ancient sequoias and redwoods and visit the Grand Canyon. Nearly every modern president who signs major environmental legislation follows his trailblazing footsteps, but few outshine him.
As Barack Obama’s presidency draws to a close, NationSwell surveyed dozens of experts for their evaluation of how his environmental record measures up to those of former presidents. Of course, comparing presidents against each other over the last century is “tricky,” says Paul Sutter, who teaches modern U.S. history at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “For the first two thirds of the 20th century, conservation and then environmentalism were quite bipartisan, with Republicans often showing substantial leadership on environmental issues,” he notes. “The two Roosevelts, perhaps our most important environmental presidents during the first half of the century, embody that lesson (one a Republican, the other a Democrat).” Today, with the country split across a partisan divide, even environmental preservation and industrial regulation draw controversy.
Confronted with an unbudging Congress and a citizenry that is “remarkably hostile to science,” in Sutter’s words, Obama staked his legacy on strong Environmental Protection Agency regulations and international treaties. How do his accomplishments stack up to contemporary presidents, who each had their own circumstances to navigate? Since Rachel Carson first warned of “a strange blight … silencing the voices of spring in countless towns” back in 1962, who has done the most to purify America’s land and waters? From best to worst, here’s how historians rank our country’s recent leaders. Jimmy Carter holds a press conference on the roof of the West Wing in 1979 to announce his alternative energy initiative; the solar panels installed on the roof heated water for the Navy Mess.
1. Jimmy Carter
Because of his handling of the Iran hostage crisis, Carter has the bad rap of being a weak commander-in-chief. On environmental protection, however, Carter is our greatest modern president. A dedicated idealist, Carter pushed the Democratic-controlled Congress to support a seven-point plan in early 1977 until his last days in office in 1981. Raised on a farm, Carter traces some of his concern for stewardship back to his experiences with Georgia soil and Southern Baptist soul: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” he learned at Bible study. Stewardship of the earth, not exploitation, was our role, he believed. That’s why Carter installed solar panels atop the White House, pledged to lower the thermostat and wear sweaters instead and turned off the Christmas tree lights on the lawn.
“Americans long thought that nature could take care of itself — or that if it did not, the consequences were someone else’s problem. As we know now, that assumption was wrong; none of us is a stranger to environmental problems. Industrial workers, for example, are exposed to disproportionate risks from toxic substances in their surroundings. The urban poor, many of whom have never had the chance to canoe a river or hike a mountain trail, must nevertheless endure each day the hazardous effects of lead and other pollutants in the air,” Carter explained in a May 1977 address. “Intelligent stewardship of the environment on behalf of all Americans is a prime responsibility of government. Congress has in the past carried out its share of this duty well. … Environmental protection is no longer just a legislative job, but one that requires — and will now receive — firm and unsparing support from the Executive Branch.”
The first Democratic president since the creation of the EPA, Carter focused on strengthening the agency that would implement his predecessors’ environmental legislation. Even as the economy faltered, the EPA’s coffers enlarged to confront disasters like Love Canal (1978) and Three Mile Island (1979). In 1977, Carter consolidated agencies to form the U.S. Department of Energy. (Three and a half decades later, Obama’s green tech stimulus dollars would revive the agency.) In the last days of his presidency, during a lame duck session, Carter finally pushed through two major bills: one protected 104 million acres of land in the Alaskan wilderness; the other created the Superfund program, which has cleaned up close to 400 toxic sites.
Despite Carter’s strong convictions, conservative Republicans later reversed much of his agenda. In their minds, his “doomsday” predictions about environmental catastrophe were hindering economic growth. In one of his first orders as president, Reagan tore down the solar panels from the roof and shipped them to a college in Maine.
2. Barack Obama
Experts agree that our current president faced unprecedented challenges in advancing his environmental agenda. “President Obama has had the first ‘climate changed presidency’ and by that I mean that climate impacts are being felt, seen, and survived, as he has been president and that has changed the presidency, permanently,” explains Carol M. Browner, an EPA administrator under Clinton who advised Obama on energy and climate change policy from 2009 to 2011. No president had yet been presented with the incontrovertible evidence of global warming, and no leader had dealt with a Congress that so boldly obstructed conservation efforts. “As a result, I think his achievements to date have been important but relatively modest, in part because [Obama] has found it difficult to do much more and in part because he has been worried about or been scared of the political implications of doing much more,” Sutter argues. “I think Carter was a stronger leader [than Obama], though he suffered for it,” Sutter argues, and that suffering “has likely never been far from Obama’s mind.”
Still, Obama built on the legacy of his predecessors, “bringing a personal interest and knowledgeable appointments,” says D. James Baker, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under Clinton from 1993 to 2001. When legislative accomplishments escaped him, he invested his energy in stricter regulations that will curb emissions from automobiles and power plants.
What will Obama’s legacy be? As expected, the answers are mixed. “Aside from Theodore Roosevelt (who is in a category of his own), I think that Obama will be regarded as the most pro-environmental president to date,” says Michael Gerrard, who teaches environmental law and energy regulation at Columbia Law School. “Obama is the most radical president in terms of environmental policy in the history of the U.S.,” says Gene Koprowski, a spokesperson for the Heartland Institute, a think tank. “It is as if the spirit of Rachel Carson – author of “Silent Spring” – is occupying the Oval Office.”
Perhaps most realistically, Sutter believes that it’s still to be determined. “We have seen the President becoming much more aggressive as a leader on climate change…I am guessing that he will decide that, now that Obamacare seems safe, he will stake much of his remaining legacy-making on positioning the United States to both meaningfully respond to climate change and to become a global leader on the issue. He has perhaps awoke to the realization that, a quarter century from now, we likely will all be measured by our remarkable incapacity to deal with a huge global threat,” Sutter concludes. The 37th President of the United States of America, Richard Nixon, who won presidential elections in 1968 and 1972, making a speech.
3. Richard Nixon
It seems counterintuitive, but the disgraced commander-in-chief deserves a spot among the strongest environmental champions “because his administration ushered in the fundamental environmental laws of the nation,” says Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association. A few months before the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates that federal agencies file environmental impact statements.
As the modern environmental movement rolled ahead, the Clean Air Act in late 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972 quickly came into effect. (Nixon, it should be noted, initially proposed a clean water bill to Congress but vetoed the eventual, more comprehensive legislation because of budget reasons.) With executive orders, Nixon established both the EPA and NOAA. “The fight against pollution,” Nixon said in a 1970 speech to Congress, “is not a search for villains. For the most part, the damage done to our environment has not been the work of evil men, nor has it been the inevitable by-product either of advancing technology or of growing population. It results not so much from choices made, as from choices neglected; not from malign intention, but from failure to take into account the full consequences of our actions.”
With a strong record like that, why isn’t Nixon higher on the list? “Though most of the major environmental laws were signed by Nixon and Ford, they weren’t the leaders,” says Steven Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute at New York City’s Columbia University. “They went along with a Congressional wave.” Spurred by images of the burning Cuyahoga River and Carson’s ominous words, environmentalism had support from Democrats and Republicans alike, “albeit mostly from the sorts of moderate Republicans that have themselves become an endangered species,” Sutter notes. Still, that’s why Popovich believes Nixon should top the list. “Unlike Obama, Nixon accomplished this in bipartisan fashion, reaching across the aisle to secure strong, lasting legislation,” he says.
4. Bill Clinton
“President Bill Clinton preserved land and ocean areas, set stronger standards for air and water quality and brought on Al Gore as Vice President, giving environmental and climate change issues a strong bully pulpit,” argues Baker. The 42nd President, who’d later be impeached, “faced a hostile congress” like Obama did, Baker says, and he “consistently beat them back with vetoes.” Without Clinton’s strong stances, the Republican congress led by Rep. Newt Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole threatened to open the 1.5 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil drilling, place a radioactive waste dump in California’s Mojave Desert, sell protected national forests to western ski resorts, eliminate tax incentives for renewable energy and undermine the Endangered Species Act — all within just one 1995 bill.
Though his legislative record is noteworthy, Clinton missed a chance to respond to early alerts about global warming. “Clinton said the right things and supported the EPA but he never assigned the environment a top priority, and he did not push through action on climate change,” says Gerrard.
5. George H.W. Bush
This Republican leader’s strong environmental record, which set the groundwork for many of Obama’s accomplishments, may seem anachronistic in today’s divisive era. Bush 41 found common ground between corporate and environmental interests. With more than half of America’s floodplains, estuaries, peat bogs and fens drained and built over as residential communities or farmland, he declared a new policy on wetlands in 1989: “No net loss.” Bush’s policy, an update to Carter’s 1977 executive order on wetlands, didn’t prevent industries from impacting the important wildlife habitat; instead, for every acre infringed on by development, an acre of wetlands elsewhere had to be restored.
The following year, Bush, an avid outdoorsman, commenced the first market-based cap-and-trade program — not for carbon, as Obama’s administration focused on, but sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that were causing acid rain to fall from the skies. With “emissions trading,” as it was known then, the government didn’t force one solution on power plants; instead, it created an economic incentive to scrub dirty byproducts from the system. As of 2013, the program was still improving air quality: sulfur dioxide emissions were 69 percent below 2005 levels. Rounding out his green accomplishments, Bush “signed the Clean Air Act Amendments” — the statutory authority that led to Obama’s Clean Power Plan — “the Oil Pollution Act (the most recent federal environmental statutes) and also the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” which Obama may update in Paris this December, Gerrard notes.
6. Gerald Ford
Building on Nixon’s legacy after the Watergate scandal forced Tricky Dick out of office, Ford approved some crucial environmental legislation — particularly the nation’s first fuel efficiency standards, which doubled the requirement for passenger vehicles to 27.5 miles per gallon, after the oil crisis in the early 1970s. He also advocated for allowing drivers to turn right on red lights, not for convenience, but to reduce the time cars idled at intersections, puffing out exhaust.
While Ford also boosted funding for water treatment facilities through the Safe Drinking Water Act, the eco-friendly news pretty much ends there. Instead, Ford is more likely be remembered for how he “consistently reduced pollution enforcement and vetoed coal-mining restrictions,” Baker says. In 1974, Congress tried to restrict strip mining — the process by which companies chop off mountaintops to access coal underneath — but Ford pocket vetoed the bill. Second only to the Nixon pardon, it’s remembered as his most controversial executive action.
7. Ronald Reagan
In the lone debate with Carter, Reagan, then California’s governor, took aim at “literally thousands of unnecessary regulations” promulgated by the EPA. Immediately after his landslide victory in 1980, the Gipper slashed through Carter’s work. “Reagan moved in the opposite direction, but Congress stopped him going as far as he wanted,” says Gerrard. Reagan’s first appointee at the EPA, Anne Gorsuch, promised “to get out better environmental results with fewer people and less money.” But the pared-down agency, which lost a quarter of its workforce, became notorious for letting polluters off the hook. During Reagan’s first year in office, enforcement cases sent from regional offices to headquarters declined by 79 percent. One crisis after another, including the firing of the Superfund chief, led to a mass exodus from the agency in 1983. Gorsuch resigned. Reagan seemed to back off, but his budget team still crippled the agency by withholding vital funds.
Three years later, in November 1986, Reagan declined to sign the renewal of the Clean Water Act, citing its costly price tag; in a new session, the following February, the House overrode a second veto by a vote of 401 to 26. The Great Communicator, in an early act of denial, also dismissed acid rain proposals that wouldn’t get resolved until Bush 41. A Pennzenergy Company oil exploration drilling rig in the Gulf Of Mexico during sunset.
8. George W. Bush
At the bottom of the list is George W. Bush, a Texas oilman who beat back environmental regulations, showing little interest in protecting the planet during his two terms. “George W. Bush seemed to delegate this policy area to Dick Cheney, who was a great friend of the fossil fuel industry,” says Gerrard. Like Reagan’s first administrator, Bush 43’s appointees at the EPA deliberately avoided statutory deadlines for implementation of new environmental safeguards. In 2007, “the Supreme Court decided that greenhouse gasses were an air pollutant that the federal government was required to regulate under the Clean Air Act,” says Cohen. “Bush moved slowly to comply with that ruling,” creating a backlog that kicked the can down the road. (Perhaps luckily, under Obama, the agency drafted the Clean Power Plan in response, “using his authority to require states to reduce their carbon footprints,” Cohen adds.)
He also scuttled global efforts to deal with global warming. The Kyoto Protocol would have “wrecked” the American economy, Bush maintained, in refusing to participate in the international agreement to cut greenhouse gases. For halting research on climate change, lifting drilling moratoriums for his industry pals and weakening regulations, Bush gets the worst spot.
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” That’s what Barack Obama promised in 2008 upon winning the Democratic nomination. Seven years later, he’s returning to his pledge as he ponders his legacy and his final 500 days in office.
Was this really the moment when climate change reversed course? NationSwell asked dozens of scientists, historians, jurists, former EPA administrators, legislators and presidential candidates a simple question: How will future generations judge Barack Obama’s record on energy and the environment? Not surprisingly, the responses vary. Some were glowing (“Barack Obama is destined to go down as the greatest climate change-fighting president in history,” says Ed Chen, national communications director for the Natural Resources Defense Council), while others were hesitant to issue a verdict: “It’s a very unfinished climate legacy, full of steps forwards, sideways, and back,” says Bill McKibben, former staff writer at The New Yorker and founder of 350.org, a grassroots climate change movement.
Indeed, the 44th president faltered on environmental legislation in his first term, preferring to expend his political capital on the Affordable Care Act. But Obama’s use of regulatory authority and his agreement with China likely ensure his place in the pantheon of modern environmental champions.
[ph] BACKPEDALLING FROM CAMPAIGN PROMISES
It’s taken nearly two full terms to bring his labors to fruition. Shortly after defeating Sen. John McCain in the race for the Oval Office, Obama set two bills in motion on which he would stake his legacy: the health care law in the upper chamber, and in the lower, a comprehensive environmental bill that included a market-based carbon cap-and-trade system and renewable energy standards, co-authored by Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat whose amendments strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1990.
In June 2009, Waxman’s bill narrowly passed the House by a vote of 219-212. “There was an apparent window of opportunity” in that moment, says D. James Baker, a scientist who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under Bill Clinton, but by December, “the administration was eager for a quick victory and opted for health care.” The climate change bill became Obama’s “stepchild,” a senior official told The New Yorker.
Offering concessions to earn goodwill from the Republican caucus, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed to delay implementation of carbon regulations for another year. Soon after, the president announced huge sections of U.S. waters along the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico open for drilling and withdrew support for the versions of Waxman’s cap-and-trade bill being negotiated in the Democratic-led Senate.
“Whether with Obama’s support [a nationwide cap-and-trade law] could have happened is a good question,” says Baker, “but there is no question that the decision to back off was demoralizing to the environment and climate change community.” Days later, as oil bubbled up from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Democrats hung their heads in defeat. “The missing piece of his legacy is national climate change legislation, which he and Congress failed to pass,” says Kenneth Kimmel, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. MAKING USE OF REGULATION, NOT LEGISLATION
That’s not to say Obama failed completely during his first term. The 2009 stimulus bill designated $90 billion for a bevy of green initiatives: retrofitting homes for energy efficiency, fueling development in wind and solar power, modernizing the grid, training employees for green jobs, building high-speed rail, researching carbon capture for coal-burning plants and manufacturing cleaner cars.
“The stimulus package gave President Obama a chance to invest in renewables early in his first term, allowing him to make progress on the issues unlike most other recent presidents, who have been forced for political reasons to leave critical environmental issues to their second terms,” says Baker. If anything, the president’s preference for working outside the legislature set the standard for his later environmental accomplishments. After the bruising battle over healthcare and the Republican sweep of the 2010 midterm elections, Obama took the path of least resistance.
Waxman retired last year after 20 terms, but you can still sense his frustration with the gridlock that killed his legislation. In an email, he tells NationSwell that Congress “refuses to learn from the overwhelming scientific consensus on the dangers we are facing.” He applauded President Obama for circumventing the increasingly partisan legislature by using “the power to act domestically and internationally based on existing laws on the books, even without Congress passing new laws.” Bolstered by a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 that George W. Bush’s administration had shirked their duties, Waxman’s Clean Air Act amendments provided all the authority Obama needed.
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In the past month, much of the focus has been on the Clean Power Plan, which will reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 32 percent by 2030. But that’s only the latest in a long series of administrative actions. During Obama’s first term, the EPA and the Department of Transportation set new fuel efficiency standards: All cars built after 2025 must get at least 54.5 miles per gallon. This summer, those same agencies proposed raising standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles as well. Despite litigation that’s made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, the EPA slashed the acceptable levels of ozone that clouds city skylines, mercury released by coal-fired plants and methane billowing from oil fields, landfills and farms. When it comes to conservation, Obama’s designated more land and water as national monuments under the Antiquities Act — 260 million acres total — than any other president.
In creating “the first-ever framework for the United States to achieve long-term emissions reductions,” says Richard Revesz, former dean of New York University School of Law, these achievements will outlast Obama’s two terms — regardless of whom the next president is. “Even if the Democrats lose the White House in 2017, the new greenhouse gas regulations will still need to be implemented,” says Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia’s Earth Institute. Those guidelines, along with states’ actions, “will probably end the use of coal as a source of energy in the U.S.”
Despite the likely positive outcomes, several Republicans interviewed chastised the president for his reliance on regulations, instead of legislation. “It will be seen as a failure that he wasn’t able to get anything through that is enforceable,” says Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor who was George W. Bush’s first appointee as EPA administrator. She argues that using the “heavy-handed tool” of the EPA “will make things more difficult for the agency going forward.”
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Others had even harsher words. “President Obama has dogmatically used energy as a political tool rather than a building block of renewed economic vibrancy,” says Mike Leavitt, former governor of Utah and Whitman’s successor as EPA administrator. Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, agrees. “He was the president who deepened the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over these crucial intersecting issues” of energy and the environment. CONFRONTING CLIMATE CHANGE HEAD ON
Perhaps because the president has been “hamstrung by politics,” as one historian phrased it, he’s not staking his legacy on any one bill or rule. Instead, as his recent photo-ops in Alaska demonstrates, Obama seems to be focusing on perceptions. His prominence on the global stage — including his role in negotiating the limited Copenhagen Accord in 2010 and the recent deal with China to curb their emissions by 2030 — “helped move the issue of global environmental sustainability to the center of the American and international political agenda,” says Cohen.
As the commander-in-chief prepares to convene with leaders from 196 countries to sign a treaty at the United Nations Climate Change Conference this December, his legacy on climate change “lies in his success in making climate change a central policy obligation,” says Carol M. Browner, Obama’s advisor who directed the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy from 2009 to 2011, when Waxman’s cap-and-trade bill foundered. If the president can get millions of Americans, industry and other stakeholders to think about it while also facing opposition from Congress, he’ll be remembered for changing how climate policy is developed and implemented.
As the effects of climate change become more visible, the challenges facing Obama aren’t disappearing like glaciers are. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the president’s loudest critics are on the left. They’re fuming over the Keystone XL pipeline and off-shore oil and gas exploration in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.
“With the president’s permission, Shell is now drilling for oil in the Alaskan Arctic, and his administration has authorized the future sale of 10.2 billion tons of coal,” says Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA’s executive director. “It’s clear that President Obama is serious about cementing his climate legacy, but until he takes steps to ensure the vast majority of fossil fuels remain in the ground, his legacy is as vulnerable as an Arctic ice sheet.”
Van Jones may joke that he’s been an African American “for a very long time,” but it’s impossible for him to ignore the serious racial inequalities in the U.S. criminal justice system. With blacks incarcerated at six times the rates as Caucasians for the same crime, the multi-hyphen Jones co-founded the organization #Cut50, which works to reduce the prison population by 50 percent in the next decade.
During an exclusive interview with NationSwell, Jones discussed how the fight for reform is progressing and which 2016 presidential candidates are mostly likely to bring about change within the criminal justice system. How has your organization #Cut50 participated in the [criminal justice reform] debate?
“I hosted a summit in March with Newt Gingrich — he and I became friends working together on CNN — and we thought, if we work really hard, we could get 100 people together for an hour, leaders from both sides, to talk about this issue. We got 700 people for seven hours, including 10 members of Congress, three governors, two Cabinet secretaries and a video from the president.
“Out of that summit, three bills were introduced and a channel was opened up between Koch Industries and the White House — mortal enemies, but not on this one issue. On JusticeReformNow.org, we collected 120,000 signatures from people saying Congress and the president should work together to get something done this year. We’ve worked as effectively as the other groups — the Coalition for Public Safety, ACLU, the Drug Policy Alliance or FAMM, Families Against Mandatory Minimums. We’re working very hard, and we’re very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish.” In Washington, #Cut50 is lobbying for the SAFE Justice Act. What would that legislation do?
“The most important thing is letting judges be judges again. We so overreacted to the crack epidemic in the 1980s; we stripped judges of their right to judge and instead imposed mandatory minimum sentences. Even if you’re someone caught with drugs because you were forced to by a boyfriend who was threatening your life or you had never made any mistake before, a judge couldn’t say, ‘Well, look, the punishment should fit the crime here.’ In all circumstances, they just rubber stamped it and would give you some atrocious sentence. You can get 25 years for shooting a cop and 30 years for a non-violent drug offense. That’s the kind of thing that this legislation begins to address.” READ MORE:7 States Making Bold Criminal Justice Reforms Even though Congress is talking about criminal justice reform, it doesn’t seem like the presidential candidates are giving it much attention, with a couple exceptions like Rand Paul. Why is that?
“They’re talking about reform more in this election than any other in American history. Even people like Ted Cruz have spoken out against mandatory minimums. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have addressed this issue, after being pushed by Black Lives Matter. But notice on the Democratic side, Bill Clinton in 1992 made his case to the American people by attacking Rev. Jesse Jackson, executing an African-American with mental health issues in his own state and putting more cops on the street. Hillary Clinton is having to speak out about the catastrophic excesses that have resulted from that kind of attitude. Even Bill Clinton himself has had to come out and say that things have gone too far.
“People pretend that Democrats have been good on these issues and that Republicans have been terrible. In fact, it’s the reverse. Some of the worst policies have come from Democrats like Bill Clinton, and Gov. Gray Davis and Gov. Jerry Brown here in California. Meanwhile, Republican governors like Rick Perry, Nathan Deal in Georgia and John Kasich in Ohio have actually been closing prisons. It’s not a traditional debating point, but it’s an issue that’s rising in importance.” There’s a lot of discussion already, but that doesn’t always translate into reform. Do you think that now’s finally the time?
“Now here’s something that I think nobody knows. President Obama went to a prison, the only sitting president who’d ever been to a prison. Some people thought that was historic, but that was only a third of the history that was made that day. When he came out of the prison, he didn’t come out chastising the people who were locked up. Instead, he came out and identified with them. He himself had done some of the same things that got these kids in trouble. Now that’s history. For a sitting president to identify with incarcerated felons? And to point out, ‘There but for the grace of good and good parenting, go I?’ That’s extraordinary. That a president would have been in prison, that an American president would have been a felon — that’s a remarkable statement.
“Another third of the history that day was that no serious Republican in the United States of America attacked him for it. In fact, John Boehner himself said he wanted to have a vote on bipartisan criminal justice reform. Now this is a president who could put forward a bill that declared kittens are cute and he would be attacked by Republicans. This is a president that cannot get Republicans to agree with him on anything. And yet on this issue a black president goes into a prison and talks to black felons, and he doesn’t get attacked at all. Now that gives you a sense of the level and depth of the sea change on this issue. You can see in that one day how far this issue has moved in a very short period of time.
“We will get comprehensive criminal justice reform signed by this president, if not by Christmas, certainly by Easter. It’s the only thing that a critical mass of leaders actually agree needs to be done. There might be a thousand fights on the details, but everyone agrees it has to happen.” This interview has been condensed and edited. (Front page image: John Moore/Getty Images)
No other sitting Commander in Chief, including Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981 when prison populations spiked upward rapidly, or George W. Bush, the hang-’em-high leader who presided over 152 executions as Texas governor, had ever set foot inside a federal penitentiary. But last month, President Barack Obama stepped behind bars — hinting that he’s conscious of the legacy he’ll leave and is eyeing criminal justice reform as his next issue to tackle.
“When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made,” Obama said after speaking to six nonviolent offenders at El Reno prison, about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City. “The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.” He added, “It’s not normal. It’s not what happens in other countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things. What is normal is young people making mistakes.”
As bipartisan momentum grows in Washington, D.C., reform efforts are also sweeping the nation, many led by conservative governors. Here’s the latest innovations to come out of our country’s statehouses: TEXAS SHUTTERS PRISONS Everything’s bigger in Texas, including its correctional facilities. That is, until recently. Starting in 2007, Gov. Rick Perry, Bush’s successor in a “tough on crime” state and now a Republican presidential candidate, led the conservative state in reining in the size of its prison populations. Texas focused on expanding treatment programs and diverting offenders through probation and parole. In 2011, three juvenile facilities were closed, halving the number of incarcerated youth in the state. Cuts continued in 2013, when legislators reduced the corrections budget by $97 million, a clear sign they intended to scale back the system’s capacity. Two prisons near Dallas mired in scandal and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s largest for-profit prison company, looked to be on the chopping block. When Sen. John Whitimire, the longest-serving legislator, called for the closure of the prisons built during his watch, the decision seemed final. Through the budget process, both were defunded. UTAH REDEFINES A PRISON-WORTHY OFFENSE Obama didn’t selected El Reno prison for his visit at random. He picked the institution because half of its inmates are behind bars for drug offenses — the same proportion for the country as a whole. Utah faced the same situation. While crime fell for two decades, the state’s prison population increased without bound: From 2004 to 2013, the number of inmates grew by 18 percent, six times faster than the national average. This March, Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, signed a comprehensive reform package (developed by a commission of state and local officials) that reclassified all first- and second-time drug possession violations as misdemeanors, instead of felonies. Along with creating new guidelines for parole violations and adding “re-entry specialists” to smooth the transition from prison, the Beehive State’s new law is expected to eliminate the 2,700 projected incarcerations and save the public $500 million over the next 20 years. ALABAMA DOESN’T JAIL FOR PROBATION VIOLATIONS Alabama has one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates, jailing more than 30,000 people in a system designed to hold only 12,000 prisoners — leading officials to call it a “time bomb waiting to explode.” Almost a quarter of newly admitted inmates were thrown into overcrowded cells because they violated the terms of their parole or probation. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, half of those cases were for “minor technical violations,” such as missed appointments, unpaid fines, moving to a new home without permission or losing a job, “that did not result in a new offense.” A law signed in 2010 by Gov. Robert Riley limited incarceration for those who committed an administrative error but didn’t break any laws. The alternatives saved the southern state an estimated $18 million. INDIANA RETOOLS DRUG-FREE ZONE LAWS The signs are so commonplace you might not notice them: “Drug-Free School Zones.” In fine print, they’ll inform you that selling drugs within 1,000 feet of school property, a public park, a housing project or a youth center in Indiana is a Class A felony, automatically upping the recommended sentence to 20 to 50 years in prison. The creation of these areas were one of the government’s first salvos in the War on Drugs, passed by Congress in 1970, more than a decade before Ronald Reagan escalated the battle. Indiana’s reform began in 2007 in an unlikely way: bills in each chamber of the legislature initially set out to expand the drug-free zone to include bus stops and churches. Kelsey Kauffman, a professor at DePauw University, tasked her students with evaluating the law’s effectiveness. Over an eight-year campaign, they presented their findings — that more than 75 percent of the defendants affected by the zones were black — to multiple Senate committees. By 2013, new legislation cut the zones in half, limiting them to a 500-foot radius. A bill last year sought to scale them back even further to 250 feet, but political maneuvering killed the attempt. NEBRASKA OVERTURNS DEATH PENALTY Smack in the middle of America’s heartland, the Cornhusker State became the first conservative state in four decades to repeal capital punishment this May. Nebraska’s nonpartisan, unicameral legislature defied Gov. Pete Ricketts, a fierce advocate for the death penalty, with a 30-to-19 vote, just barely enough to overturn a veto. Liberals and conservatives alike believed the death penalty was inefficient, costly and immoral. “Today we are doing something that transcends me, that transcends this Legislature, that transcends this state,” Sen. Ernie Chambers, an independent from Omaha, said before the vote. “We are talking about human dignity.” Along with Washington, D.C., Nebraska joined 17 other states in banning capital punishment. MISSOURI REPEALS SELECT BAN ON FOOD STAMPS The federal welfare overhaul in 1996, passed by Rep. Newt Gingrich’s Republican stronghold in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, revoked the ability of felons convicted of drug offenses to receive welfare benefits. The lifetime disqualification from food stamps seemed so vengeful and contrary to public safety that 19 states have chosen to opt out of the provision entirely and 24 states created exceptions, according to a tally by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline blog. Barring someone from benefits “increases the odds they will commit new crimes by virtue of the fact that you’re creating a significant financial obstacle,” says Marc Mauer, the executive director of The Sentencing Project. A grassroots push, particularly by religious leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City, united lawmakers in values-based support and won the governor’s signature. GEORGIA WIPES THE SLATE CLEAN Once a person’s made contact with the criminal justice system, it’s hard to allude its grasp. A criminal record follows you into every job interview. It’s a red flag on every background check for a new apartment or a loan. That’s the case — even if a person isn’t a felon who spent years in the pen or if a judge dismisses the case or a jury agrees the accused is innocent. With prodding from the Georgia Justice Project and others, legislators overhauled the state’s burdensome and limited expungement law. On the day the law went into effect, one-third of Georgia’s population had a record expunged. Bolstered by the success, Georgia Justice Project convinced Gov. Nathan Deal to issue an executive order to “ban the box” asking criminal history questions on state employment applications this February — the first state in the Deep South to change its hiring policy.
