By
Mark Hertsgaard, cross-posted from
his website
[
Mark ghostwrote this editorial for The Nation]
“If he didn’t mean it, he shouldn’t have said it.” Referring to
President Obama, environmental activist Bill McKibben was saying this a
lot during the sit-ins he recently led outside the White House to urge
Obama to block a climate-killing tar sands pipeline to run from Canada
to the Gulf of Mexico. Two weeks of protest resulted in 1,253 arrests,
making it the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of US
environmentalism. It concluded September 3, one day after Obama made one
of the most fateful—and shameful—decisions of his presidency: ordering
the EPA to delay new regulations on ozone emissions because the rules
pose undue “burdens” on corporate polluters.
McKibben was urging Obama to live up to his 2008 pledge that in his
presidency the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet
begin to heal. Of course, some might claim the standard to which
McKibben is holding Obama is politically naïve. Candidates for president
routinely make promises they don’t keep. But voters aren’t stupid. What
matters is why a candidate breaks a promise: is it because he won’t
deliver, or he can’t? If a president falls short because of
circumstances beyond his control or insurmountable opposition, voters
can understand and even forgive—if the president puts up a fight. But if
a president fails because of mistakes or weakness—if he is not seen as a
strong leader—it leaves voters confused, demoralized and open to
alternatives.
Obama has thirteen months to persuade voters that they should blame
not him but the GOP for his presidency’s shortcomings. He has much less
time to convince the thousands of activists nationwide—who do the grunt
work of getting out the vote—that he’s worth their sweat and sacrifices
one more time.
It’s no secret that Obama is far from closing either deal, and the
tar sands pipeline and ozone regulations demonstrate why. Yes, the
president has done some good things on the environment; the fuel
efficiency standards he pushed through this year, for example, will
significantly lower air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. But he
has done bad things as well, including opening vast tracts of the West
to coal mining and providing much more funding to nuclear and fossil
fuel than to green alternatives.
Obama’s ozone decision, however, has provoked particular outrage, for
four reasons. First, by ordering the EPA to delay the promised ozone
regulations, the president repudiated science; the independent panel of
experts advising the EPA were unanimous in recommending the tougher
regulations, which would reduce incidence of child asthma and avoid
12,000 deaths a year. Second, Obama’s order was possibly illegal. The
Clean Air Act expressly forbids the government to consider the economic
impacts of its regulations; public health is the sole criterion (a
stipulation upheld in 2001 by the Supreme Court, with none other than
archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia writing the opinion). EPA
administrator Lisa Jackson, who has described the existing regulations
as “not legally defensible,” has now been undercut by her boss, raising
questions about whether she—the administration’s strongest environmental
voice—will resign. Third, in making his announcement, Obama channeled
the antigovernment mantra of the Chamber of Commerce, citing “the
importance of reducing regulatory…uncertainty,” thus buttressing the
discredited argument that regulation costs jobs. Fourth, Obama blatantly
double-crossed environmentalists, who were suing the EPA over these
regulations when Obama took office. His aides persuaded them to drop the
suit because Obama’s EPA would soon strengthen the regulations.
Overriding the EPA in this manner sets an ominous precedent for the
tar sands decision, which Obama is scheduled to make by year’s end. Bear
in mind, as the president likes to say, that both decisions are his
alone; he can’t blame Congress for tying his hands. The EPA has twice
lambasted reports by the State Department that absurdly claim that the
Keystone XL pipeline—projected to transport the dirtiest fossil fuel on
earth across 1,700 miles of North America, including the crucial
Ogallala aquifer—would have “no significant environmental impact.”
Citing the EPA’s estimate that the tar sands in Alberta, if burned,
would emit 82 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional fossil
fuels, McKibben has called the pipeline “a fuse to the second-largest
pool of carbon on the planet,” behind Saudi Arabia. The claim that the
tar sands will reduce US dependence on petro-dictators is just as
dubious. One of the refineries the pipeline will supply in Texas is
half-owned by Saudi Arabia’s state oil company.
Mainstream voices tell progressives unhappy with Obama to grow up:
your whining threatens to elect a Republican in 2012, who would be much
worse. But they are the ones who aren’t savvy. Fear of the dark side
will cause most of the Democratic base to give Obama their votes, but it
will not be enough to persuade them to give up their evenings and
weekends to get out the vote for him, to sway independent and undecided
voters. It’s a normal reaction. If Obama approves the pipeline, explains
Courtney Hight, his Florida youth-vote director in 2008 who was
arrested in the protest outside the White House, “it is just human
nature that the resulting disappointment will sap the enthusiasm that
drove us to work so hard last time.”
Obama still has time to bring his message into line with the stirring
vision he conveyed in 2008. Perhaps, however, he thinks he can win
without a strongly motivated base, relying instead on the powers of
incumbency, not least the enormous amounts of money he is raising. If he
chooses that course and it fails, spare us any prattle about
unsophisticated progressives being at fault. A defeated Obama will have
no one to blame but himself.
