June 25, 2013
In announcing his new Climate Action Plan today, President Obama acknowledged that “we have a moral obligation to future generations to leave them a planet that is not polluted and damaged.” The President’s Climate Action Plan announces an array of steps the administration will take to cut carbon pollution, protect our children’s health and help vulnerable communities prepare for and respond to severe climate impacts. The majority of these steps are both necessary and vitally important; but they are simply not sufficient to address the climate crisis before us today or to meet the moral obligation that the President has recognized.
On a national level, measures to set carbon pollution standards for new and existing U.S. coal plants, if fully implemented, will make a significant contribution towards addressing the threat of climate change. These are clearly warranted measures that have long been within the President’s authority. He should be commended for his commitment to fully, if belatedly, exercise that authority. Similarly, the President signaled that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline will not be approved if its net effect is to significantly exacerbate climate change.
The President calls for continuing to expand on the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel both at home and abroad without saying how long that bridge is or what is on the other side of it. This points to the fundamental weakness of the President’s Climate Action Plan: its troubling lack of ambition and its lack of vision. Far from setting an ambitious new goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the plan simply repeats the goal he announced in 2009–to reduce emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. The goal was inadequate then, and it’s inadequate now. It’s particularly telling that the President has not set a more ambitious goal even though the shift away from coal and towards natural gas has made accelerated action more possible.
Even more troubling, the President also calls for significant new investments in fossil fuel technologies instead of making a clean break from dirty energy. This creates deep inconsistencies in the plan. For example, the President commits to reduce public finance for new coal fired power plants overseas, yet does nothing to address the United States’ expanding role in exporting dirty energy and dirty energy technology. In fact the plan calls for increasing investments in that role.
At the international level, taking action on non-CO2 greenhouse gases is a vital and important step, as are measures to protect and conserve the world’s forests. However, the President’s plan offers little detail on what the United States will commit to achieving inside the UNFCCC, which remains the primary forum for global climate negotiations.
The President’s plan announces an intention to secure free trade in environmental goods and services. While encouraging trade in these technologies may have important benefits, what countries more urgently need is the ability to develop, promote and use clean energy without undue interference from trade rules already on the books. As a first step, the President could commit that the US will stop bringing such disputes against legitimate climate measures by other countries.
Nowhere is the gap between what is pledged and what is needed more apparent than in the plan’s lack of major new commitments to global climate finance. The plan acknowledges that the cost of climate-related weather disasters in the United States alone exceeded $110 billion last year. These costs tell us the true value of climate investment and the scale of climate effort that is needed. Yet he touts US contributions to global climate finance of only $7.5 billion dollars over a period of years. These international contributions are dwarfed by the scale of the problem and the extent of the need. Ultimately, these measures do not demonstrate the real climate leadership the world needs right now.
This is a time for heroic measures and leadership, not incrementalism. In his speech today, President Obama observed that someday our children and our children’s children will ask us whether we did all that we could to fight climate change when we had the chance. We need a better answer than this plan provides.