The Mirage of a Green President
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- Category: Jeremy Addis-Mills
- Published on Wednesday, 28 July 2010 18:57
- Written by Jaddis-Mills
Last week, Senator Kerry reported that any movement of comprehensive energy policy was all but dead. Not soon after, my email lit up with comments from my progressive, environmentally-minded friends. The comments ranged from irritation with the Obama Administration’s clear lack of interest in protecting the environment to the acceptance that healthcare was more politically savvy and a necessary policy solution for President Obama to take on. I then began to ponder whether one should be surprised that the President was never really out in front on comprehensive reform of U.S energy policy and why he is not really out front today?
With most things during the 2008 election, President Obama had a way of hedging his policy positions. Same-Sex Marriage was Civil Union and leave it up to each church. My favorite and the most applicable to this conversation was his support for alternative energies that included the pipe dream of Clean Coal and Carbon Sequestering, which any environmentally-minded activist or climate scientist will tell you is the wrong direction to be going with energy reform. It is too late to consider such out-of-date, carbon-heavy transition technologies.
During a town hall meeting in September of 2008 in New Hampshire, Obama beat the drum of prioritizing Natural Gas and Biodiesel, and during a campaign rally in Lebanon, VA held on September 9, 2008, he then beat the drum on clean coal. This stop in Lebanon, VA produced an almost famous rallying cry for clean coal and has been turned into advocacy footage for the energy industry in support of clean coal technologies. During this same campaign rally, President Obama equated clean coal technological to that of putting a man on the moon. It is as if he considered it a reasonably smart solution to climate change. This continued well into his administration. On March of this year, Obama called for more funding for clean coal and opening up of more offshore drilling. Unfortunately for the administration, this was only weeks before the blowout and failure of the Transocean BP oil platform that has resulted in one of the most economically and environmentally devastating oil spills in U.S. history.
After adding all this up, I would not call President Obama a true green President. In his defense, President Obama is not the only thing that killed comprehensive reform on the U.S. energy policy. The economy has nailed the coffin shut on energy reform. The special interests in favor of the status quo have done a great job in the last year attaching carbon limits, energy reforms, and environmental protections to job killers. The last thing that moderate Democrats and President Obama want to go into the 2010 general election with is the narrative of “Obama the job killer.” The key to getting strong, environmentally-based energy reforms passed is to convince the general public that it is good for jobs and hope the economy gets better.
