Explaining the Conflict between Obama’s Climate Policy and Obama’s Energy Policy

With the Obama Administration recently publishing a frightening report on the effects of climate change, the National Climate Assessment 2014, contradictions in Obama’s orientation on climate and energy are placed in higher relief. As part of the publication of the NCA2014, Obama took the time to meet with regional weathermen to discuss the contents of the report. Apparently, Obama did not think or did not want the public to think of him and his Administration as lightly skimming over the dire warnings in the report as an afterthought.

In the meantime, we have experienced a pivotal moment in the discovery of the present and future effects of climate change, with current ice melting patterns ensuring with a high degree of certainty that the West Antarctic Ice shelf will detach and deliver anywhere from 1 to 3 meters rise in sea levels over a 200 to 500 year period or perhaps sooner. So, talk of rising seas is, to those who heed the science, given much greater weight. No one has worked out the policy implications of this still relatively distant future event, except that adaptation to climate change in or migration from the world’s very populous low-lying areas becomes a more concrete reality.



Subsequent to the NCA2014 release, speaking at a Wal-Mart in Mountain View, California, Obama was attempting to highlight Wal-Mart’s supposed “green” achievements, including Walmart being the largest commercial user of solar power in the US. Obama utilized this backdrop to announce initiatives that involve encouraging voluntary energy efficiency and some more federal investment in energy efficiency as well as somewhat higher energy efficiency standards in national building codes. Additionally there were a number of programs announced that would help commercial solar deployment, which is already rapidly increasing due to the plummeting cost of solar panels, facilitated by China’s pro-solar industrial policy. There was little in the plan that involved confrontation with entrenched interests, other than Obama’s off-hand remarks directed at climate deniers on the Right that they are the fundamental problem with US climate policy. Even there, rather than engaging in political combat on a broader stage, Obama is retreating in terms of his proposals into the executive branch of the federal government rather than engaging in open debate with climate deniers in Congress over the fundamentals of policy.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/explaining-conflict-obamas-climate-policy-obamas-energy-policy-pt-1.html

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/explaining-conflict-obamas-climate-policy-obamas-energy-policy-pt-2.html