On Tuesday as well, President Obama made his speech on the climate crisis. It will probably come as no surprise that I consider this the most significant event of the week. The gay marriage progress is a victory for equal rights, and therefore for us all. But the actual changes it enables will not affect everyone directly.
And while the Supreme Court affirmed the right of a group of Americans to marry, it also limited the federal government from protecting the rights of other groups of Americans to vote, and the loss of those rights may well have direct consequences for the country as a whole. Nor is that theoretical, evidenced by the rush to enact voter ID laws for the demonstrable purpose of disenfranchising non-whites and poor and others who are less likely to vote Republican.
And of course the immigration bill is far from law; most predictions are that it will not pass (or possibly even come to a vote) in the GOPer House.
There are several interesting points of view on President Obama's speech on the climate crisis. Frank Rich suggests that the effect is not in the actions he outlined ("I don’t think anyone believes that he can achieve more than incremental environmental goals by executive order; the legal challenges alone will long outlast his presidency.") but "by acknowledging that governance is impossible with the current Congress and taking action, he has catapulted over Washington to the voters and strongly identified his party and presumably its next presidential candidate with policies that are in sharp contrast with what he calls the “Flat Earth Society” on the other side...Obama has put his party firmly on the side of the country’s future, not its past."
Jonathan Chait disagrees on the effect of the executive changes in his plan, which he asserts"taken together, add up to a significant climate response." And that's before the EPA standards on carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act. He thinks that together these will mean that "Obama can meet environmentalists’ near-term goal of reducing carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020 on his own," but that to do better, especially after 2020, will require congressional action.
David Roberts acknowledges that "Obama is in a highly constrained position on climate. He faces hostility from Congress and the courts alike, with no broad-based popular movement behind him to scare them into line. All he can do is use the power of the executive branch." Moreover, Roberts believes that the Obama team scheduled this address deliberately in the midst of what they knew would be a week of big news stories, so it wouldn't inspire "a pitched public battle."
Roberts says that some of the changes are potentially a big deal but that there's no way of knowing if they will actually get the U.S. to a 17% drop in emissions. He notes also the No Drama Obama rhetoric of the speech, and concludes:
"This is vintage Obama. He refuses to wage lofty ideological battles, which frustrates the hell out of people who view those battles as necessary and inevitable. He doesn’t direct a lot of energy at bashing his head into walls. He just puts the available resources to work doing what can be done. It’s not enough — it’s not even as much as he could do — but it would be a big mistake to think it doesn’t matter."
Xpostfactoid puts together Greg Sargeant's comment (similar to mine) that Obama's speech "recast the call for climate action as the centrist, common-sense solution" with Chiat's observation that "Fashioning a long-term growth strategy is, and has always been, Obama’s deepest passion," and points out: "I must add that if Obama's vision of enacting liberal policies as a means for achieving long-term growth has been left untold by certain parties, those parties don't include Obama. He has never stopped telling that story: it is the very heart and soul of his pitch to America and always has been."
It occurs to me as well that the timing of this address may also result from Obama being able to cite growth in clean energy technology, seeded in part by his economic stimulus package and other legislation passed in the early Dem majority days. It helps make the economic argument.
Roberts, who writes for Grist and has environmental cred, is right about the pressure from the enviro left--they want big dramatic speeches and proposals. One such writer I saw crowed that Obama finally took her advice and made the big speech, but though it was "a nice try" it wasn't going to amount to anything-- classic double-bind bullshit. And the right is even more extreme, beyond sanity, but some Beltway commentators think their arguments (carbon regs will kill economic growth) are still politically potent.
So given all of this, my sense that this is the most significant act of the week seems in the distinct minority. That doesn't surprise me. All the same things were said about President Kennedy's American University speech fifty years ago--his proposals for a limited nuclear test ban were too modest, and too radical; they wouldn't mean anything, they would endanger American security and hasten war. But that seed grew, and so will this one. In the end it will affect more people--and more of the planet--than anything else that happened this week.
As for "nothing new," here's what was new in the speech (separate from the actions or proposals):
An American President declared that addressing the climate crisis is an urgent national and global need.
He declared that addressing the climate crisis means addressing both the causes and the effects.
He acknowledged that even as we address the causes, we will continue to feel the effects for some time to come.
No President has said any of that before. But it is the agenda and the reality going forward into the future.
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