What Can the New President do from Day One on Global Warming?
This is a question that will probably get asked more and more, especially as the election season heats up and campaigns like 1Sky, Green for All, and a new entry: OnDayOne, launch. But the question has enormous ramifications, particularly in the wake of the Bali climate conference, where it was so obvious how the power of the presidency can shape foreign policy, even in the face of a hostile Congress. The question is wrapped up in questions of political capital, whether the winning candidate campaigned on global warming and has a ‘mandate’, or what the actual limits of legal authority the executive branch has on these issues.
However, as soon as you start thinking about what a new president can do, especially in light of the executive activism from the Bush Administration on the behalf of Big Coal, Big Oil, the Nuclear Industry, and the most reactive voices of industry …. a plethora of options become obvious. A new president could reverse the rule change that allowed coal companies to continue mountain top removal mining and to dump their waste in mountain streams and valleys. A new president could follow Speaker Pelosi’s lead and sign an executive order calling for the federal government to go carbon neutral and green the world’s largest building and vehicle stock in the world. Heck, the post office could raise rates on junk mail and reduce it dramatically overnight. A major issue would be granting California the waiver under the Clean Air act, that they requested and were denied under shady conditions to reduce greenhouse emissions from cars and trucks.
While all of these measures would be wonderful, the three major things the president can do are much more far reaching.
- Under the Masschusetts vs. EPA Supreme Court Decision, under existing law - the president is required to come up with regulations on global warming pollutants. [Note: The best resource on the web for this is Warming Law, bar none.]
- The President can direct his negotiators to engage in the UN climate process and stop blocking efforts by the EU and China from making progress in building a global agreement with teeth.
- The President can finally use the power of the presidency and the Bully pulpit to finally end our oil addiction. [Note: see section of David Sandalow's book - "Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States' Addiction to Oil"]
While there are a number of other worthy ideas out there, such as Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s call for big investments in clean energy, major green jobs programs, and the establishment of a Connie Mae for conservation financing, those will all require a larger deal with congress to fund that and can’t be started on Day One. Our political system is different enough in the US that unlike Australia, a new president will not be able to sign the Kyoto Protocol immediately, but there is plenty to do here to get started!
Side Note:
I will write more about this later, or another contributor will, but for more information on how to do this - there is an excellent book written on this topic - titled “Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States’ Addiction to Oil” -it has a terrific rundown of how the president could take action immediately to prepare the nation to act. If you are in DC and are interested in a copy, please contact me.
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What Can a New President do from Day One on Global Warming?” What a stupid question! Drive all the hybrids you want (I’m not against hybrids), use all the new age light bulbs you want (I’ve been using them for years), but you can do nothing to stop the pollution coming from China, India or the destruction of the rain forest in South America. C02 is very minor compared to other forms of pollution from burning (yes the burning of dirty coal in China and India and the forests). But that does not matter to you leftist who want taxes on everything and government control of everything. The black soot on the ice of the Arctic area from Asia causes much more ice melt than a very small increase in the global mean temperature (if you studied statistics you might know that a mean may mean nothing.) AGW is the new communism, yes the socialism that Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini wanted.
It is very unlikely that mankind will cut emissions so fast and drastically that either abrupt climate change or runaway global warming will be avoided. Therefore, any feasible planetary rescue plan must include a method of removing excess CO2 from the air.
A new President has to call for a low cost, technically feasible, and highly scalable way be found to remove some of the CO2 from the air, lowing the elevated level in the air, because if it isn’t lowered soon, our climate will rapidly return to the hothouse of 55 million years ago when most life died.
I suggest biosequestration (aka global gardening). Perhaps seed a GMO into the ocean.
To summarize, a new President could put the US on a war footing to cut emissions, but it would probably be too little too late, and all those resources would have been expended wastefully. Instead, the new President ought to call for massive “Manhattan projects” to come up with an energy source cheaper than burning coal, and a method of removing CO2 from the air both inexpensively and rapidly.
If either of those two proposed projects were successful, we will have solved global warming and saved billions of people alive now plus countless future generations.
Hey Richard,
The one initiative that I know that’s looking at this question on climate is the Presidential Climate Action Partnership (http://www.climateactionproject.com/). They’re pulling together a significant collection (i.e. 200+) actionable policies by the next administration on climate as well as the background policy analysis, budget requirements, etc. necessary to implement them.
Evan
Oh, and I’d love a copy of the David Sandalow book.
i looked through the table of contents of “freedom from oil” and it only looked to address fuel issues (for cars?). but what about plastics, asphalt, aviation, agriculture, trains, int’l trade, military equipment (can the military really go carbon neutral? and is this desirable?)? these don’t seem to be addressed even though these are all reliant upon oil… what am i missing?
Normally I don’t respond to trolls, but I just want to make one point very clear. China needs our help to decarbonize and they know it and they want it. They need to start manufacturing energy efficient technology for our market and their domestic market. We need to invest in the industry to export to China more than decommissioned coal plants. In Bali, the Chinese government - which has banned this site for overly frank discussions of their pollution/political problems - came with constructive proposals. The USA did block them, because ideologically they want to block action on global warming. Oh, and I agree with this statement by you “AGW is the new communism, yes the socialism that Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini wanted.” - exactly, that is why the left and right have to join together to fight it, build a strong bright green economy, and face Global Warming with the same determination we did Fascism and militarism with an Apollo project on the scale of the Manhattan project.
Evan P., thanks for the link and give me call to get the book.
Evan W., those are all really good points, I think in absolute volume transportation is huge, which is why it is so focused on it. Most fertilizer is natural gas, etc. But as I have said before, oil is too valuable to burn.
Thanks Richard, it’s important for us to realize what the executive position is capable of. Now is the right time for us to educate ourselves and decide what we want to encourage the next President to achieve. Now is also the right time to ask ourselves — What are we willing to do to make sure the next President fights and negotiates for what we want?
Seriously, if we all think about our strengths, and what we are willing to do, this movement will explode and be unstoppable.
I’m a proud “troll” and a proud skeptic of C02 caused AGW. I believe that the AGW crowd is over looking environmental factors because they want to feel good about themselves and they think they can change the world by using a different light bulb. It is quite possible that the huge amount of carbon soot, Nitrous Oxide (296 X the warming potential of C02), and deforestation in China is a much larger problem than C02 from my Escalade. Soot from Asia may contribute up to 1/3 of the air pollution in California, and black soot from Asia has made it to glaciers in the Arctic and Greenland. According to Dr. Lindzen, of MIT, in studies C02 has a rapid rate of diminishing returns, a doubling in the atmosphere may result in a 1 degree c increase in temperature. Another 1 degree c will need an increase of 4X. [Editor's Note: There is a devastating expose of Dr. Lindzen's errors, underwriting from the oil and gas industry, and simply funny flip-flops here. My favorite: "Richard Lindzen will indeed accept a bet (that he is right) - but only if offered odds of 50:1 in his favour!"]
All these examples and explinations, they’re way to idealistic. I’d like to ask you all to take a step back and look at the physical and practical implications of all these “ideas”. You want the president to completely change America, taking it off fossil fuels and going the extra mile to clean the atmosphere. Our government would never allow this. Even if you found a president that completely supported the green movement, he’d have to deal with a congress of old encumbants who wont be so quick to change. Our system was designed to keep America from falling victim to radical ideas like the ones you’re preaching here. Its all about using conflict to achieve balance, when the hippies (thats you guys) argue with the practical consevatives (thats me) a compromise is reached and a solution is found. But if America were to get off of fossil fuels, we’d have to be weened off it, slowely and deliberately. Their wont be a “sweeping revolution.”