One of the central pledges of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign was that the United States would finally take its global environmental responsibilities seriously, and confront the growing problems associated with climate change. What we’ve actually seen from the Obama presidency, however, has not yet matched the Obama campaign’s glowing promises.
In the spring, Barack Obama collaborated several times to insert money for coal into legislation in the Congress, even placing such items in the House’s dominant climate change bill. That legislation promotes the expansion of the burning of coal for years to come, before any technology is put in place to reduce coal burning’s emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, if any such technology ever can be invented. In the Senate legislation to fight climate change has been delayed, and then delayed, and then delayed. It probably won’t even be considered this year.
Given such insufficient environmental action in Congress, Obama could have put his energy elsewhere, to take immediate Executive action to reduce climate change, or at least mitigate its impact. No push for such action has come from the White House, however. Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program, which claimed to be designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, actually encouraged an increase in such pollution, through the production of new cars, often not very fuel efficient, to replace old cars that were not at all past their prime. Obama could have opened the way for widespread regulation to reduce climate change by accepting the status of polar bears as a threatened species, but he chose to block such regulation instead.
In fact, Obama’s record on endangered species protection, which can lead to more general environmental protection, has been little better than George W. Bush’s. Over Bush’s time in the White House, an extremely low number animals or plants were newly listed as threatened or endangered, although many living things became threatened and endangered during his presidency. President Bush illegally ignored the petitions filed on behalf of these species. President Obama has done little to clear this backlog.
The Obama Administration’s own review of its endangered species record so far is not positive. Although there are 249 species identified as in need of review for protection, the Obama Administration has only provided protection for one species, a plant in the President’s home state of Hawaii. One species per year is even lower than George W. Bush’s record of an average of six species per year.
“The Obama administration has not substantially improved the dismal record of the Bush administration in providing protection to the nation’s critically endangered wildlife,” says Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.
