Mr. President, use your bully pulpit on climate change!
To slow global warming, the president must use his speaking platform to foster a movement that drives climate change deniers out of office - by 2014.
Mr. President, use your bully pulpit on climate change!
By Michael Yudell
“We will respond to the threat of climate change knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” an emboldened President Obama declared in his inaugural address Monday. Following the disconcerting absence of climate change from campaign 2012 and limited climate policy action during his first term, the president has finally told us that not only will he act, but that we (and he) have an obligation to do so. What could be more important, after all, than acting on behalf of our children and future generations?
But the New York Times is already reporting that, even in the wake of the president’s eloquence on the imperative to act now, his path forward will be a restricted one. Instead of focusing on comprehensive legislative change, Obama will use the power of his office to administratively “reduce emissions from power plants, increase the efficiency of home appliances, and have the federal government itself produce less carbon pollution.” He can do this by directing the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, to issue regulations to decrease coal power plant emission, a move likely to face a litany of court challenges.
These types of actions build on Obama’s important but limited success on climate change from his first term. The rise in fuel standards for cars and trucks will help reduce the amount of carbon and other climate-warming pollutants spewed into the atmosphere. And the United States is on track to reduce, over the next seven years, its carbon pollution by 17% (from 2005 levels), just as Obama promised at the Copenhagen climate talks four years ago.
All of this is well and good. But it is barely a beginning, and likely isn’t enough action to avert what many scientists expect to be between a 2- and 11.5-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperatures globally by 2100, depending on the level of future greenhouse gas emissions, and the outcomes from various climate models. The effects of warming are already with us — sea levels are rising, economies are suffering, and people are dying from changing climate.
Obama’s new policy approach seems to accept both the limitations of his office and recognize the intransigence of his current opposition.
With the Neanderthal science caucus firmly entrenched in the 113th Congress, the president’s Congressional options are limited. Prodded by climate change deniers like the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, the House is likely to reject any climate change legislation.
At Monday’s inaugural, Obama called out the deniers: “[S]ome may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.” If that’s true, then the president must do more than act at the margins. Although polling indicates that a vast majority of Americans now accept that the planet has warmed the past 100 years, only 49% believe that climate change is a “very serious” problem “if nothing is done to reduce global warming in the future.”
Perhaps, then, the president’s most important job between now and the 2014 mid-term elections is to raise that number — to foster a movement that will chase the climate change deniers from office. There is one important and thus far underused tool in the president’s arsenal that can help move the public on this urgent matter: the bully pulpit.
At his inauguration, Obama seemed keenly aware of this power. His desire to be remembered as a transformational president will be for naught if he is first remembered as the leader who had the last great chance to do something meaningful about climate change and failed.
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This man isn't nearly the president so many think he is, if he's incapable of working bi-laterally with members of congress to advance his agenda, environmental or otherwise. It's a two way street here, and the Executive branch needs to tone down the rhetoric and negotiate if it has any vision of advancing its political agenda in the second term. The tone from the White House has been much more aggressive since reelection, and I think it's bad sign for those of us hoping our elected officials can solve the real, economic issues facing the country.— JCrooklyn- Another scam.— jasjfarrell
- The self-righteous desperately caring fiction of man-made climate change....man-made "global warming". 470 of the 500!Gigatons ofl CO2 emitted yearly into Earth's atmosphere derives from Mother Nature....all trees, plants, vegetation, volcanic activity, and alike. 30 GIGATONS of CO2 are derived from all man-made activities on Planet Earth ( industry, transportation, EVERYTHING that is part of our daily lives ). The USA's annual contribution to CO2 is 6 GIGATONS of the total 500 emitted from Earth. No man-made activity is the tipping point of any climate change....we are responsible for 6 / 500ths of the CO2 annually. The rest of the data and articles are fabrications.— zen
- Do you know what happens with the 470 Gigatons? It gets absorbed by the ocean and vegetation. It's the carbon cycle.
Do you know what happens with the 30 Gigatons from human industrial activity? Only about 40% is absorbed - and the rest accumulates in the atmosphere.— joeronimo - There is a difference between weather and climate. Climate change is evident in global patterns over time, and has different effects in different areas.
Of course the planet's temperatures vary over time, and always have. This does not mean that industrial activity has no effect - According to 97 percent of climate experts, human activity is indeed causing climate change.— joeronimo - Ah, zen - Don't trees take in Co2 and convert it to oxygen? Even the inner city school kids learn that.— teddybear415
- Rush emits at least a gigaton of gas everytime he does a show.— teddybear415
- It's 11 degrees today. We could use some global warming— Larry Cheswald
- Stop already, the Emporor cannot do two things at once....Currently he is busy bankrupting the country and giving it away to illegals, the lazy, the "I'm Entittleds" and those that just want a free ride...Wait till he finishes destroying freedom and then he will work on the environment...— nuggett
- We are within normal vicisitudes of climate variations. The noise, the articles, the hysteria come only from that segment of the population that is caring, compassionate, well-meaning, logical, thoughtful, courageous, unselfish, rational, guided-by-science, etc etc ad nauseum. NOT!!!! Climate change yelpers are just like rabid vocal sports fans cheering or booing for their team. We want, we want, we want. Our industries are cleaner in the USA than ever before. It all comes down to no soap radio again & again.— zen
- I'm rooting for the sea level to rise and West Chester to become beachfront property. Oterwise, I don't give a hoot about what an associate professor and a doctoral candidate think. Go get real jobs in the real world and you'll see why this subject ia like #22 on most people's top 10 list of important issues.— jimmymack
- Mr. Yudell, perhaps I will listen to you when you tell me you don't own a car, tv, computer, or dishwasher. Until then, you, sir, are part of your problem.— Mirror
Ugh. Of course there is climate change. If there wasn't, how did we have an ice age 100,000 years ago. The problem is that the term "climate change" now means "humans are destroying the planet!" Same thing with global warming. After the last major ice age, the planet warmed up (global warming), and then there was a mini-ice age about 10,000 years ago.
Start using specific terms, like "human-caused warming", if you want to have a proper argument. Because right now it sounds like a bunch of people screaming global warming when you wife turns up the thermostat.— verve- I wonder how China and India will react to the Emperor's bully pulpit? I'm sure they will take their cues from the rest of the world and ignore him.
Maybe we can come up with a way that greenhouse gases won't affect the atmosphere directly above the United States. That way all of our efforts to conduct the "War on Warming" won't be wasted....
When people don't have jobs, what makes anyone think they care about the Earth's temperature in 2100 regardless of what you think is causing it?— Wiseman6 - @ joeronimo. What do you think would happen to 97% of the climate change experts funding to study “Global Climate Change” if they said, “hey it seems like normal temperature variations over time like what we have proved has happened over the Earth’s existence.” My guess is it would dry up pretty fast, so say the sky is falling and demand money to find out why, and then demand more to come up with the fix.— jackwants2no
