Kyle Meyaard-Schaap’s environmental revelation came on the top of a mountain. What was left of one anyway.
As an undergrad at Calvin College, a Christian liberal arts school in Grand Rapids, Mich., Meyaard-Schaap began learning about mountaintop-removal mining. He took trips to West Virginia in 2010 and 2012, where for decades swaths of mountains in the mid-Appalachian region have had their peaks blasted off, allowing miners to bore out the coal within. Before then, Meyaard-Schaap, who grew up in a close-knit evangelical family in a small Michigan town, hadn’t given much thought to the environment. “Those issues weren’t even on my radar,” he says.
But in West Virginia he camped with nuns on top of denuded, geologic stumps. They had to shower with rainwater, because the groundwater had become so polluted. He met with families of children diagnosed with cancer attributed to the mining waste that had seeped into the region’s aquifers.
“I started to connect environmental care with people care,” says Meyaard-Schaap, 29, who went on to found the activist group Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA). “It wasn’t much of a stretch to connect that to climate.”
Meyaard-Schaap is part of a new generation of activists who fight for tougher environmental laws — the sort usually associated with liberals — by asserting the values and policies more commonly embraced by conservatives. Framing issues of the left through the political lens of the right is a method that’s worked in the past, especially when it comes to climate change. A member of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action participates in the People’s Climate March in April 2017. A POLICY INNOVATION THAT ‘SKIPPED-A-BEAT’
Two decades before Meyaard-Schaap’s activism, a Republican lawyer and political advisor named C. Boyden Gray crafted a potential solution to the rising threat of climate change. Gray had been intrigued for decades by the possibility of using cap-and-trade to clean the atmosphere. The system works by setting aggregate limits on pollutants while allowing businesses to meet them by paying, trading or innovating to account for their share.
Gray had previously worked for Ronald Reagan, a president whose popularity with evangelicals helped catapult him to the White House, and watched as Reagan’s tenure ended with an environmental crisis. So much sulfur had been belched by Rust Belt coal plants into the wind currents that blew across the Great Lakes and into Canada that fragile ecosystems, along with many thousands of people, had become sick. The prime minister of Canada quipped grimly about declaring war.
In 1988 — the first presidential election to feature staunch environmentalist Al Gore as a candidate — Republican nominee George H. W. Bush pledged to be an “environmental president.” Gray saw his opportunity. With little fanfare he helped write cap-and-trade legislation targeting sulfur; it became law under the Clean Air Act of 1990. Within a few years, the amount of acid rain (which occurs when sulfur rises in the atmosphere and mixes with water, oxygen and other pollutants) decreased by half — at a cost of around one-eighth what critics had feared. The success was resounding.
“You let the market take over, and government doesn’t get in the way,” Gray tells NationSwell. “It’s the most efficient, frictionless way to reduce pollutants.”
Gray and others believed this tool, cap-and-trade, could be expanded and modified to squelch climate change too. But then government — or, rather, politics — did get in the way.
Far-left environmentalists and far-right Republicans both soured on cap-and-trade. Meanwhile, the common ground stood on by centrist members of both parties was splitting apart. Environmentalism was ceded to the left, and then weaponized against them by the right. By 2009, Democratic representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts had written cap-and-trade legislation for carbon that passed the Democratic-controlled House. But Senate Republicans wouldn’t even consider it.
Cap-and-trade, Gray says, “skipped a beat.”
TAKING IT TO THE STATES
Three years earlier, the acrid political climate had made state lawmakers in California give up on the federal government. Assembly speaker Fabian Nunez, a Democrat from Los Angeles, co-authored the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. In sweeping fashion, it reshaped the state’s electric, construction and automotive industries. Inspired by the success against acid rain, parts of this act included cap-and-trade. But Nunez insisted, against the wishes of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that it also include mandates limiting carbon emissions.
“My idea was, we’ve got do a mandate; necessity is the mother of invention,” says Nunez today. “I’m a Mexican-American from Los Angeles. I grew up in a polluted neighborhood in San Diego underneath the smokestacks of a shipbuilding company, surrounded by junkyards and stray dogs. I care about the environment; I just came about it a little bit differently.” California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (C) signs the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 to reduce greenhouse emissions.
That landmark California law inspired others. Hawaii, for example, made a bold commitment to get its energy completely from clean renewables by midcentury. Dozens of U.S. cities also did the same. Some states, including Illinois and New York, have made more gradual commitments.
Utilities are responding to this pressure. Duke Energy, a large utility provider in the Southeast and former scourge of environmentalists, has set a “new goal to reduce C02 emissions 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2030,” says spokeswoman Dawn Santoianni.
This dogpile against carbon pollution by states, cities, shareholders, customers and citizens could be the best strategy in an era of federal abdication to fight climate change. The common denominator uniting these various tools — cap-and-trade, mandates, shareholder demands and citizen protests — is the assignation of a negative financial, legal or social value on excess carbon.
“If the true cost of production is taken into account, cleaner sources of fuel, such as solar and wind, will be more competitive,” says Tom Erb, national field organizer for the pro-carbon tax campaign Put a Price on It.
CONNECTING ACROSS THE AISLE
How can more bodies be added to the weight of the masses trying to clamp shut the carbon vents cooking the world? Michael Livermore, the executive director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, says the answer for environmentalists lies across the partisan chasm.
“The most important actors out there,” he says, “are people who care about climate and are Republicans.”
Meyaard-Schaap, of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, had a revelation about that too.
He listened as language used by many on the left to convey the urgency of climate action turned to static on the social frequencies attuned to by his loved ones. So he looked to the American evangelical tradition for a solution: Stories of personal transformation can connect where scientific data does not.
He says his own family is an example. Not too long ago, Meyaard-Schaap’s parents and grandparents were “suspicious” about climate change, he says. Since he testified to them about his change of heart, they now donate regularly to his nonprofit. So far, YECA has engaged more than 10,000 people across the nation in the fight against the warming of the planet.
“When it comes to climate change, you’re not going to get anywhere unless you affirm the values of your audience,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is bear witness to the fact that this doesn’t have to be such a divisive issue.”
“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.”
Contrary to what you hear from political candidates, cap and trade isn’t just a theory anymore. Its implementation won’t cause rolling blackouts or “catastrophic” spikes on energy bills, as naysayers like Sen. Marco Rubio warn, nor will it “throw countless people out of work,” as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush predicts; in fact, it will probably lower your electric bill.
Coast to coast, from California to New England, several states have already established working cap and trade models that successfully cut pollution without stifling economic growth. As the Environmental Protection Agency rolls out its final Clean Power Plan, which requires a 30 percent reduction in a state’s carbon footprint by 2030, even more parts of the country may join.
Back in 2009, a group of 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states joined together in the first regional, market-based program to reduce large power plant carbon emissions. Known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (or RGGI, pronounced “Reggie”), the states account for one-sixth of America’s population and one-fifth of its gross domestic product. The consortium sets a limit on the carbon dioxide that can be emitted into the atmosphere — the “cap” — then auctions off the rights to pollute — the “trade.” It’s the same model brokered between conservationists and fiscal conservatives to deal with acid rain under President George H. W. Bush.
How has RGGI fared? Far better than expected. Over the past six years, emissions from electricity usage are down 40 percent from 2005 levels. According a third-party report (funded by four private foundations advocating sustainable energy), RGGI created $1.3 billion in economic benefits just in the last three years, primarily from customer rebates, efficiency improvements and 14,000 new jobs.
Not everyone is sharing the wealth, however. Power plant owners are expected to lose $500 million in revenue through 2025 from lower demand and the price of buying carbon allowances. These effects are partly attributable to a nationwide pivot toward renewable energy, shale gas replacing coal and general mindfulness about waste, but RGGI’s decline in emissions far outpaces the rest of the country, says Katie Dykes, a deputy commissioner for Connecticut’s Department of Energy & Environmental Protection.
“The centerpiece of RGGI’s program design, we auction the majority of our allowances for carbon. The proceeds from those allowance auctions are distributed among all nine states” — one dropped out — “then each state can invest the proceeds in a variety of programs that benefit customers,” Dykes tells NationSwell. “It accelerates this virtuous cycle. Taking these caps, we are generating proceeds and reinvesting in projects that are going to further reduce carbon emissions.”
Historically, economic growth was tied increased emissions: smoggy skies meant wider wallets. But RGGI’s proved those don’t need to be linked. In the Nutmeg State, for example, the Calabro Cheese Corp., a family-owned mozzarella, ricotta and grated parmesan manufacturer in East Haven, got a cut of the allowance proceeds for its 74,000-square-foot facility. Retrofitted lighting, replacement refrigeration motors and evaporator fans, repairs and better insulation all led to an annual reduction of 149,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough power for about 13 homes — and monetary savings of $96,000 every year.
Trading within a larger regional market increases efficiency, Dykes adds. Plus, it’s a more accurate reflection of the way climate change works. Pollution from a coal-burning plant doesn’t hover above one building’s smokestacks; it diffuses into the atmosphere and alters the temperature of the entire globe.
Politics still prove to be an obstacle. Just look at Chris Christie, the Republican governor and presidential candidate from New Jersey, who withdrew his state from the program in late 2011. “RGGI amounted to nothing more than a tax on business that failed to achieve its goals,” a spokesperson for Christie tells NJ Advance Media. Critics “may look at that failed program as a missed opportunity to tax our state’s job creators and yearn to spend more of their money, but that’s simply not acceptable to this governor.”
Christie’s opponents are still furious that the state missed out on millions in savings. But with the EPA’s rules set for implementation, the Garden State and others may have a second chance at improving the air and their economies.
High-speed rails: We’ve seen animations of what they might look like, and heard politicians talk about them. What we have yet to see is an actual high-speed train flying along the rails. But that may change soon enough in California.
Although support at the federal level for funding has died down, according to City Lab, the state has been able to find money for the new venture through cap-and-trade revenue.
Cap-and-trade, which basically taxes big business for polluting the environment, could bring in between $3 and $5 billion dollars every year towards the transportation project. This is a huge boon, not only because it’s steady, annual income, but also because it allows for the project to take out larger loans — whether they be from the federal government or private investors.
In a blog post about California’s high speed rail, Robert Cruickshank said, “this is perhaps the best news California HSR [high-speed rail] has had in over five years.”
Although a debate on the building of a high-speed rail continues, two things are for certain: California is now a lot closer to having the transportation of the future — and it’s all thanks to a program that promotes the environment. MORE: Could Los Angeles Become The Next Pedestrian-Friendly City?
If you want to improve your health, perhaps you should seriously think about investing in an electric car.
Sure, that might seem a bit extreme, but did you know that half of the toxic pollutants in the air are caused by petroleum-chugging motor vehicles?
We all know that electric cars are much better for the environment, and now we’re learning that they provide incredible public health benefits as well.
The Atlantic published findings from a recent report by the Environmental Defense Fund and the California chapter of the American Lung Association that analyzed California’s ongoing efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The report found that California’s cap-and-trade program (which has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to levels of what they were back in 1990) and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) that requires petroleum-based fuels to reduce the carbon intensity by 10 percent by 2020 has already shown remarkable progress. MORE:Why New Farm and Construction Equipment Will Improve Air Quality and Save Lives
“By 2025, the health benefits of the LCFS and [cap-and-trade] will save $8.3 billion in pollution-related health costs such as avoided hospital visits and lost work days,” the report said. “In addition, these policies will prevent 38,000 asthma attacks as well as 600 heart attacks, 880 premature deaths, and almost 75,000 lost work days — all caused by air pollution.”
Simply put: Electric cars = less air pollution = happy lungs = longer lives. Now, just imagine how the whole country would benefit if more people drove plug-ins. ALSO: What the Demise of Car Ownership Means for the Planet
If you believe that you can’t afford a plug-in, think again. The heavy price tag of e-cars is actually a popular misconception. CleanTechnica does a good job of debunking that myth, listing several electric cars that actually cost less than the average new car, including the Nissan Leaf, Fiat 500e, and Ford Focus Electric.
With climate change showing no signs of abating, going electric sounds like something that physicians should start prescribing alongside healthy eating and exercise.
