Op/Ed: Obama and presidential actions in environmental policy

His ascension to the presidency was one of hope, one of change. Candidate Barack Obama strongly believed by uniting this country, we could overcome differences and achieve greatness. It was an addicting idea. After his initial victory in Iowa in the Democratic Caucus, he told us, “We are not a collection of red states and blue states; we are the United States of America.” Some predicted his popularity and majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate would allow Obama to push through major environmental legislation, as opposed to relying on administrative changes and executive orders like some of his predecessors.

However, hoping to overcome partisanship does not make it a reality. Sadly, much like the last Democratic commander-in-chief, the U.S. Congress blocked many of President Obama’s environmental goals. In January 2010, the New York Times noted that proponents of climate-change legislation, including a cap-and-trade agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, were already scaling back plans after the administration’s early defeat on comprehensive health care reform. Additionally, with the election of Scott Brown, the Democrats lost the “super majority” – 60 votes – in the Senate, making it more difficult to pass environmental policy through Congress. The public, overwhelmed by the “great recession,” grew incensed and took out their frustrations on Congressional Democrats in the midterm elections, making Republicans the majority in the Senate. This change in political power made it all but impossible for President Obama and Congressional Democrats to pass legislation on climate change, including emissions reductions and higher fuel economy standards.

We should not consider Obama’s environmental policy of the past four years in a vacuum. Instead, it is instructive to consider what transpired between 1970 and 2000, as well as in the first eight years of the new millennium. The American public can largely thank itself for pushing environmental policies on to the national stage. In 1970, strong public support helped gain the attention of President Richard Nixon, who declared the 1970s the “environmental decade” and passed major legislation in the early part of his presidency, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He also created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Over time, however, new presidents have altered these landmark decisions, as well as others, to fit into their own agendas.

President Ronald Reagan was the first president to have an “avowedly anti-environmental agenda,” according to environmental-policy expert Norman J. Vig, author and professor emeritus at Carleton College. Reagan saw environmental regulation as a threat to economic development, and worked to undermine past legislation and the EPA by revising regulations, appointing anti-environmental directors to key agencies, and slashing the EPA’s budget by one-third in the early 1980s. Reagan’s pro-business agenda was clearly the model for President George W. Bush’s decisions from 2000 to 2008, but interestingly, Reagan’s cutthroat approach to the environment boosted the environmental movement at the time. The effect: Reagan’s vice president and successor, George H.W. Bush, had to take a decidedly more conservationist approach during the early part of his administration. Like Reagan, Bush Sr. did use appointments to place anti-environmentalists in key positions, although some environmentalists lauded a few of his candidates for their qualifications. Despite his early success in getting the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments through Congress, Bush retrenched. His presidency ended with the United States refusing to commit to reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the 1992 Earth Summit.

With the election of Bill Clinton as president, the first Democrat in a dozen years, environmentalists were hopeful of major policy change. Vig notes that Clinton had goals to raise fuel economy standards, promote research, pass a new Clean Water Act, and revise President Carter’s Superfund program. He created a new Office of Environmental Policy and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. Despite these early successes, Clinton lacked the support Nixon had from the American public. Additionally, Congress overran his agenda, and forced Clinton to take defensive action on behalf of the environment rather than offensive. His battles with Congress led Clinton to use the powers of the president to push through meaningful change, including new and expanded national monuments and protection of 60 million acres of land by an executive order at the 11th hour of his presidency.

Taking cues from Reagan’s pro-business slant and Clinton’s use of administrative powers, the second President Bush used his eight years to boost private interests. Like Reagan, he chose directors whose fortes were more business than environment. Like Clinton, he used executive orders to push his goals, but unlike Clinton, the purpose of Bush’s executive orders was to roll back environmental protections, including provisions of the Clean Air Act. Bush pushed through tax breaks for energy producers, promoted oil and gas exploration, and withdrew the country from the Kyoto Treaty. Bush’s control over environmental policy also “frequently overrode scientific and technical considerations,” Vig wrote in a paper on presidential powers and the environment. He ignored climate-change science, particularly at the beginning of his presidency, and evidence from a Gallup poll showed that during the first five years of President Bush’s administration, Republicans believed less and less that the effects of global warming had already started. Two major environmental-policy debacles marred President Bush’s presidency: mercury emissions and rejection of a waiver for California to regulate greenhouse gases. The former is evidence of the administration’s willingness to alter scientific findings in order to pursue more business-friendly outcomes. The latter, evidence that officials appointed to environmental departments were merely puppets of the administration.

After the election, Obama made some major headway in the environmental policy arena. He ordered the EPA to reconsider the California waiver, and on June 30, 2009, the EPA approved the waiver, paving the way for California and other states to create plans to regulate climate-change gases. In February 2009, he passed an economic stimulus package with $80 billion for renewable energy and mass transit. The Nobel Peace Prize committee recognized Obama for changing the conversation in the United States about climate change.

Obama also achieved success, albeit more limited than originally sought, when Congress passed a “cap-and-dividend” plan sponsored by Senators Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, in 2010. The bipartisan bill auctions permits for carbon emissions, which firms purchase. The government then uses the money gained through the auction as a credit for taxpayers to offset increasing costs by firms that purchase the permits. While it remains difficult for Obama to push anything through the Legislature, it is successes like the cap-and-dividend bill that show it is still possible, even without a “super majority” in the Senate. However, if the President continues to be stonewalled by Congress in his second term, he may need to resort to past presidents’ administrative methods to bully through important climate change prevention measures.