President Obama's speech on the climate crisis accurately outlined both parts of the problem, the cause and the effects, and not only proposed a comprehensive range of ways to address particularly the causes, but announced meaningful efforts by his administration, regardless of congressional inaction.
He spoke in the hot DC sun, to an audience of Georgetown University students, deliberately selected because this issue will begin to seriously affect their generation and the following generations.
His rhetoric was mostly simple, though the speech cleverly turned the tables on critics by characterizing them as negative and "doomsayers" on America's potential to deal with environmental challenges and still be economically viable. He dealt with deniers in just one sentence, as akin to the Flat Earth Society.
His speech is accompanied by an even more comprehensive plan, made available in the form of infographics and a pdf detailed plan. In later posts I plan to look into the plan. In this post I want to summarize the speech. Quotes are in italic.
That science, accumulated and reviewed over decades, tells us that our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.
He summarized some of the most recent and most compelling evidence, and talked about the effects of storms, droughts and extreme weather made more extreme by global heating. And we know that the costs of these events can be measured in lost lives and lost livelihoods, lost homes, lost businesses, hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency services and disaster relief. In fact, those who are already feeling the effects of climate change don’t have time to deny it -- they’re busy dealing with it.
Having examined the science on the causes of global heating and described some of the effects, the President makes an historic commitment:
So the question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science -- of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements -- has put all that to rest. Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They've acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.
So the question now is whether we will have the
courage to act before it’s too late. And how we answer will have a profound
impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children
and to your grandchildren.
As a President, as a father, and as an American, I’m
here to say we need to act. (Applause.)
And that’s why, today, I'm announcing a new national climate action plan, and I'm here to enlist your generation's help in keeping the United States of America a leader -- a global leader -- in the fight against climate change.
He described some of the progress made, and acknowledged the opposition that has meant that the challenge he gave to Congress to act ("or I will") has gone unmet. So he will.
But this is a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock. It demands our attention now. And this is my plan to meet it -- a plan to cut carbon pollution; a plan to protect our country from the impacts of climate change; and a plan to lead the world in a coordinated assault on a changing climate. (Applause.)
Cutting carbon pollution is to be addressed in three basic ways. This plan begins with cutting carbon pollution by changing the way we use energy -- using less dirty energy, using more clean energy, wasting less energy throughout our economy.
He talked about the Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 by Congress with one dissenting vote in the House and none in the Senate, and signed into law by a Republican President. The principle of regulating to preserve the environment and therefore the health and safety of Americans was established, and the pollution that the EPA is now required to regulate includes carbon, by a recent Supreme Court decision.
So new rules will be made and enforced to regulate the currently not-regulated-at-all carbon emissions of both new and existing power plants. That's probably the major news from this speech, because regulating existing power plants was not thought to be in the cards for the near future.
He notes that critics will say this will crush the American economy, as they have before every major step to regulate harmful pollutants etc., but that the "doomsayers" were always wrong. American ingenuity always rose to the occasion, and so did business.
The old rules may say we can’t protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we’ve always used new technologies -- we’ve used science; we’ve used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete.
Besides using less dirty energy, he advocated for more clean energy. He spoke about successful efforts to expand clean energy, and announced new efforts to expand it further.He spoke in favor of natural gas as a less carbon polluting fuel that can bridge to a more complete clean energy future.
A low-carbon, clean energy economy can be an engine of growth for decades to come. And I want America to build that engine. I want America to build that future -- right here in the United States of America. That’s our task.
He spoke more generally about not wasting energy, but pointed out once again that energy conservation is one of the easiest ways to address the climate crisis, and one that adds immediately to jobs and the economy.
In all three categories he noted what had already been done or was being done--by states, cities and corporations. He noted that in some efforts the federal government would be playing catch-up.
Then he turned from causes to the effects--and to the fact that many advocates for action would not themselves face until recently: that global heating is going to continue, and it is going to have effects, even if we do what must be done to blunt the catastrophic effects of climate cataclysm in the farther future.
So using less dirty energy, transitioning to cleaner sources of energy, wasting less energy through our economy is where we need to go. And this plan will get us there faster. But I want to be honest -- this will not get us there overnight. The hard truth is carbon pollution has built up in our atmosphere for decades now. And even if we Americans do our part, the planet will slowly keep warming for some time to come. The seas will slowly keep rising and storms will get more severe, based on the science. It's like tapping the brakes of a car before you come to a complete stop and then can shift into reverse. It's going to take time for carbon emissions to stabilize.
So in the meantime, we're going to need to get prepared. And that’s why this plan will also protect critical sectors of our economy and prepare the United States for the impacts of climate change that we cannot avoid.
Once again, he was able to describe efforts in this regard already underway in cities and states, including those with Republican governments. (He'd previously noted that 75% of wind power generated in the U.S. is in Republican states.) This is another way he was able to undercut critics who say all this is radical and (in the immortal phrasing of John Banal) "crazy."
The last part of his speech was about the U.S. leading international efforts, not only to meet the Copenhagen goals for 2020 but to go beyond them in following decades by bringing in the developing nations.
What we need is an agreement that’s ambitious -- because that’s what the scale of the challenge demands. We need an inclusive agreement -– because every country has to play its part. And we need an agreement that’s flexible -- because different nations have different needs. And if we can come together and get this right, we can define a sustainable future for your generation.
We’re going to need to give special care to people and communities that are unsettled by this transition -- not just here in the United States but around the world. And those of us in positions of responsibility, we’ll need to be less concerned with the judgment of special interests and well-connected donors, and more concerned with the judgment of posterity. (Applause.) Because you and your children, and your children’s children, will have to live with the consequences of our decisions.
President Obama said that addressing the climate crisis must once again return to bipartisan efforts, because this is a responsibility to the future.
Our founders believed that those of us in positions of power are elected not just to serve as custodians of the present, but as caretakers of the future. And they charged us to make decisions with an eye on a longer horizon than the arc of our own political careers. That’s what the American people expect. That’s what they deserve.
And someday, our children, and our children’s children, will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world? And I want to be able to say, yes, we did. Don’t you want that? (Applause.)
He called upon citizens to persistently make their voices heard on this issue:
Americans are not a people who look backwards; we're a people who look forward. We're not a people who fear what the future holds; we shape it. What we need in this fight are citizens who will stand up, and speak up, and compel us to do what this moment demands.
That means insisting that communities, corporations, governments and individual office-seekers take responsibility:
Convince those in power to reduce our carbon pollution. Push your own communities to adopt smarter practices. Invest. Divest. (Applause.) Remind folks there's no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth. And remind everyone who represents you at every level of government that sheltering future generations against the ravages of climate change is a prerequisite for your vote. Make yourself heard on this issue. (Applause.)
And in the year that is the 50th anniversary of so much involving President Kennedy--Berlin, his American University speech on the nuclear test ban, his Civil Rights speech the next day, and of course his assassination--President Obama contrasted the goals of this effort from the "clear moment of victory" of the Apollo program. And he did so with rhetoric that more than in any other part of the speech comes closest to Kennedy's:
I understand the politics will be tough. The challenge we must accept will not reward us with a clear moment of victory. There’s no gathering army to defeat. There's no peace treaty to sign. When President Kennedy said we’d go to the moon within the decade, we knew we’d build a spaceship and we’d meet the goal. Our progress here will be measured differently -- in crises averted, in a planet preserved. But can we imagine a more worthy goal? For while we may not live to see the full realization of our ambition, we will have the satisfaction of knowing that the world we leave to our children will be better off for what we did.
“It makes you realize,” that astronaut said all those years ago, “just what you have back there on Earth.” And that image in the photograph, that bright blue ball rising over the moon’s surface, containing everything we hold dear -- the laughter of children, a quiet sunset, all the hopes and dreams of posterity -- that’s what’s at stake. That’s what we’re fighting for. And if we remember that, I’m absolutely sure we'll succeed.
I'll end this post with one more comment. I remember President Kennedy's American University speech, and a lot about the JFK years. The historic importance of that speech of course could not be fully known right away, but at the time the response was mixed. It, too, was partially driven from headlines by other events, including JFK's own Civil Rights speech the next day. And even today it is not appreciated for its historic role, but it was a pivot point in history, accomplished in part by his rhetoric and his arguments, that grew more powerful as time went on.
Given all that has happened and has not happened for the past 20 years I've been participating in this debate, President Obama's speech was comprehensive, forthright, strong, clear, rhetorically adept and eloquent. He delivered it in his low key common sense persuasion mode. (I'm not sure about the "optics" of the hot glare of the sun, wiping sweat from his brow frequently, practically smothered in American flags, but I'll be interested in what others saw.)
That he did what I've become a broken record advocating for a decade--that true and realistic leadership must address both the causes and effects, the "stop it" and "fix it," or what the wonks call mitigation and adaptation (unless I have them confused and reversed again)--leaves me with a feeling of great relief. Maybe tomorrow I can even exhale.
The other headline of the speech came with an interpolation--that the tar sands oil pipeline will not be approved if it is found to contribute significantly to greenhouse gas pollution. That decision is still a couple of months off, they say.
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