A brief legislative history of climate change in the United States Congress, 102nd through 110th Congresses

A brief foray into the State of the Union addresses given by the last four incumbents of the White House – all delivered in person to the complete set of members of both Chambers of Congress (and via the media to the watching public in the US and around the world) - offers a glimpse into the evolving relationship between the President, the legislature, and the issue of climate change. While President George H.W. Bush was perhaps not the ‘environmental president’ that he campaigned to be leading up to his election in 1989 (Andrews 2006), that he signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (which was subsequently ratified by the Senate) added some substance to his assertions that the United States government “owe the generations of the future... the certainty that here at home, and especially in our dealings with other nations, environmental issues have the status they deserve”[1]. President Clinton’s rhetoric continued in a same vain. Months before he eventually signed the Kyoto Protocol, he pleaded with Congress in his sixth State of the Union address in January 1998 that “our overriding environmental challenge tonight is the worldwide problem of climate change, global warming, the gathering crisis that requires worldwide action... We have it in our power to act right here, right now”[2]. With the inauguration of President George W. Bush Jnr., though, the pleading stopped. He was ‘unequivoval’ in his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, and left the Senate in no doubt that a ratification vote would not be necessary[3]. In his only explicit references to climate change in his State of the Union addresses - in 2007 and 2008 – he made reference to ‘technological breakthroughs’ at the expense of international cooperation, comprehensive legislation, or stringent regulation. In his inaugural State of the Union address, President Obama promised to act to “save our planet from the ravages of climate change”[4]. But he was faced by an institution which had never passed minor – let alone comprehensive – legislation in the name of mitigating for climate change. It is as if whatever was said, and whichever President delivered it, the noise would rise to the top of the Capitol dome to linger and diffuse; Congress, unmoved. The following is a brief legislative history of that (in)action.

The 102^nd Congress: The dawn of international cooperation on climate change, and Congress supports it

In June 1992, 172 governments, with 108 Heads of State present, gathered to in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for a UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also dubbed the ‘Earth Summit’. President George H.W. Bush arrived in Rio as a “global environmental spoilsport” (Wines 1992)[5] and left without shaking that reputation. Throughout the negotiations, the United States promoted their vision of a world order led by Washington, in which the UN process was expected to bow to President Bush’s demands. Ultimately, however, while concessions were made, the United States did leave with a number of new commitments. They signed the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, agreed to Agenda 21 (which outlines a comprehensive plan for dealing with human impacts on the environment), and signed a new climate change treaty; the UNFCCC.

In preparation for the summit, two resolutions were passed by Congress, expressing their preferences for the outcomes in Rio. While a large range of environmental issues were up for debate in Rio – from sustainable development, to forestry regulations, to alternative energy research agendas – both these resolutions contained explicit references to climate change. H. Con. Res. 292: Expressing the sense of the Congress with respect to United States participation in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which passed in the House on March 17^th 1992, stated that the President and his negotiating team had an explicit mandate to “negotiate international agreements that effectively reduce the threat of climate change and biological diversity loss”. A couple of weeks later, an equivalent resolution was passed by Unanimous Consent in the Senate. In S. Con. Res. 89: A concurrent resolution to express the sense of the Congress concerning the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the sentiment of the House resolution was echoed, endorsing the President to “support an international convention to reduce the threat of global climatic change”. However, S. Con. Res 89 placed some important caveats on this. In particular, in Section (b), it declares that, “the President should not support any action or undertake any commitment pursuant to section (a) which he believes would have an adverse effect on the competitiveness of American industry or that would result in a net long-term loss of American jobs”. After the various wrangling by the US’ Chief Negotiator, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator William K. Reilly, concessions from the ‘rest of the world’, and complaints from the White House, the UNFCCC was ratified by the Senate on the 2^nd April 1992 without amendment, debate, or any complaint at all.

The 103^rd and 104^th Congresses: Research, not regulation

After this flurry of climate change related activity in the 102^nd Congress, the 103^rd and 104^th Congresses were very quiet by comparison. In the House, H.R. 970: Emergency Climate Stabilization and Earth Regeneration Act of 1992, was held up in numerous committees in the 103^rd, while two bills relating to environmental research were reported by Committee but never voted on. In the Senate, a bill was introduced to improve the workings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (S. 2432), but never made it out of committee.


The 105^th Congress: The Senate stamps its authority on climate change

In 1997, the roles of villain and hero were somewhat reversed from those that the President and Congress played in 1992. President Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore led an environmental executive in stark contrast to the administration of President George H.W. Bush. During his time in the US Senate, the Vice President had worked to increase awareness and understanding of climate change and global warming, and the 3^rd Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP3) in Kyoto represented an opportunity for him to continue this work beyond the walls of the Capitol. Nonetheless, the US delegation knew that returning with any treaty that did not include equivalent legally binding commitments on developing nations and economic competitors, such as China, would make ratification nigh-on impossible.

The negotiators knew this because Congress had made its position clear in another set of resolutions. While some were supportive in tone - H. Con. Res. 106 mandated the US delegation to pursue legally binding emissions limits and H. Con.  Res. 157 called for the US to show leadership of a positive nature (in contrast to that shown in Rio) – the only resolution to be adopted, S. Res. 98: A resolution expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the conditions for the United States becoming a signatory to any international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (also known as the Byrd-Hagel resolution), outlined two clear principles that must be part of any treaty for the Senate to consider ratification. The resolutions states that:

(1) the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997, or thereafter, which would—

(A) mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period, or

(B) would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States

The resolution was introduced on the 12^th of June 1997, and passed in the Senate on a 95-0 vote on the 25^th July that year. As such, a full four months before negotiations were due to start at COP3 in Kyoto, the United States delegation knew what it needed to attain were any treaty to be ratified.

The 106^th, 107^th, 108^th, and 109^th Congresses: No will, no bills

President Clinton entered his final year of office convinced that his administration could still put the US on the path “to reverse the course of climate change and leave a safer, cleaner planet”[6]. However, the 106^th Congress failed to deliver the building blocks for this goal. In 1999, climate change bills had been introduced in both chambers: S. 882: Energy and Climate Policy Act of 1999 in the Senate, and H.R. 3384: Energy and Climate Policy Act of 1999 in the House. Both were sent to committee but were never discussed or reported on. As President George W. Bush took office in January 2001 and quickly retracted support for the Kyoto Protocol or any form of legally-binding mandatory emissions targets (preferring the environmentally inferior measure of emissions intensities), the Members of the 107^th Congress took their seats again left two climate change bills to die, this time both in the Senate: S. 1294: Climate Change Risk Management Act of 2001 which was again sponsored by Senator Murkowski, and S. 1716: Global Climate Change Act of 2001 sponsored by the man who was to be President George W. Bush’s next electoral opponent, Senator John Kerry. The 108^th Congress saw the first round of Climate Stewardship Acts fail (S. 139 in the Senate and H.R. 4067 in the House). These acts would become a fixture on the Congressional Calendar for the following three Congresses.

Tensions between Congressional Democrats and what was perceived to be an obstructive and climate sceptic White House were also evident in this period. Two resolutions were introduced in the 109^th Congress which sought to shine a spotlight on President George W. Bush’s neglect (at best) and denial (at worst) of the issue: S. Res. 312 was introduced into the Senate on November 15^th 2005, and reported by the Senate Committee on International Relations on May 23^rd 2006, which called for an increase in the US’ engagement in international negotiations on climate change, while H. Res. 515 called on the President to hand over documents relating to the anticipated effects of climate change on the coastal regions of the US to the House of Representatives. While S. Res. 312 emphasised the need for US participation on the issue of climate change at the international level, it also made clear that the Senate would only accept a treaty fulfilling the same criteria (if not more stringent criteria) as were outlined in S. Res. 98 almost a decade earlier. Neither resolution was adopted in either Chamber, as S. Res. 312 timed-out and H. Res. 515 was never reported by committee.

The 110^th Congress: A Democratic Senate comes close

The 110^th Congress started off with climate change infiltrating the Congressional consciousness through various tributes to Al Gore, congratulating him on his share of a Nobel Prize for raising awareness on the issue (H. Res. 197, H. Res. 735, H. Res. 739 in the House, and S. Res. 349 in the Senate). The Senate Resolution, which was the only one adopted, thanked Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their “longstanding efforts to promote understanding of the threats posed by global warming”. In the meantime, Senators were busy trying to persuade each other that these threats required legislative action.

The second session of the 110^th Congress saw the Senate come as close as it ever had (or has since) to passing a climate change bill. The S. 2191: Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2007 was introduced into the Senate on the October 18^th 2007. It was a cap-and-trade bill which aimed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by between 60% and 65% below present levels by 2050. The bill had some support from business as it planned to allocate, rather than auction, the initial permits. The bill was reported favourably by the Environment and Public Works Committee on December the 5^th with amendments in the form of a substitute bill. That substitute bill, S. 3036: Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008, was introduced on 20^th May 2008 and reported out of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works the very next day. From June 2^nd to June 6^th the bill was debated as Democrats sought to repel the threat of a Republican filibuster. Ultimately, they could not garner the votes to avoid this, and on June 7^th, the bill was returned to the schedule, killing it for at least that Congressional session.

This was to be the final climate change related action of a Democratic Senate legislating against the will of a now lame-duck President George W. Bush. The following year President Obama entered the White House promises a phase-shift into the US’ approach to climate change. However, numerous battles abounded in the his first term, particularly once the House of Representatives swung back to the control of the Republicans and the Democrats majority in the Senate was severely cut after the November mid-terms of 2009. Implementing a sweeping legislative agenda – which included both significant healthcare reform and comprehensive climate change legislation – became an insurmountable task. And while the spectre of the COP15 in Copenhagen was instrumental in getting a House bill (H.R. 2454) passed in the 111^th Congress. H.R. 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 contained the same emissions reductions aims as S.3036 that had failed in the Senate in the previous Congress. But the Senate’s form continued as its equivalent bill, S. 1733: Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, once again faltered in spite of the Democrats forcible legislative efforts.  


NOTE: This is meant as an introduction to some of the key legislative events related to climate change that occurred from 1992 to 2008. If there's anything you think i've missed, please say so in a comment below and i'll look into adding it. 

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[1] President George H.W. Bush, State of the Union, Jan 31 1990 - http://legacy.c-span.org/Transcripts/SOTU-1990.aspx

[2] President Cliton, SOU address Jan 1998 - http://legacy.c-span.org/Transcripts/SOTU-1998.aspx

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1248278.stm

[4] President Obama, SOU address 2009 - http://legacy.c-span.org/Transcripts/SOTU-2009-0224.aspx

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/11/world/earth-summitbush-rio-president-has-uncomfortable-new-role-taking-hard-line-earth.html?scp=4&sq=Rio+Earth+Summit&st=nyt

[6] President Clinton SOTU Jan 27^th 2000 - http://legacy.c-span.org/Transcripts/SOTU-2000.aspx

'Climate change' not high on President Obama's agenda towards the end of his first term

The analysis below suggests that as President Obama nears the end of his second term in office, 'climate change' continues to slide down his agenda. A quantitative content analysis¹ of his Speeches and Remarks from 2009 through 2011 (so far) shows that he is mentioning the phrase 'climate change' increasingly infrequently. Furthermore, when he does mention it, he often does so in speeches with a foreign policy focus, suggesting that he may have lost hope of any real success on the issue in the United States itself.

The dataset:

The data is taken from the White House Press Office’s record of ‘Speeches and Remarks’ available on WhiteHouse.gov. In total, the search returned 90 cases where ‘climate change’ had been mentioned in President Obama’s Speeches or Remarks from 2009 through 2011.

Mentions of ‘climate change’ by year:

In 2011, climate change has so far been mentioned in 20 of President Obama’s official speeches or remarks. This is down from 2010 where the number was 45, but looks set to be slightly higher than the 2009 total of 25 speeches and remarks in which ‘climate change’ was mentioned (see figure 1).

Figure 1: President Obama's 'Speeches and Remarks' containing references to 'climate change', by year

Mentions of climate change by ‘issue tag’²:

The White House Press Office assigns an ‘issue tag’ to each of the President’s Speeches and Remarks. These issue tags are not discreet: i.e. a single Speech or Remark can be tagged as relating to both ‘Energy and the Environment’ and ‘Economy’. Furthermore, not all Speeches and Remarks are tagged. Of the 90 Speeches and Remarks in the sample, there were 88 tags across 21 issue categories. The most common issue in which ‘climate change’ was mentioned was ‘Foreign Policy’ (accounting for about 30% of the total issue tags). The next two most common issue tags were ‘Economy’ and ‘Energy and the Environment’ (both accounting for about 17% of the issue tags overall). Figure 2 shows a complete breakdown of the issue tags assigned for Speeches and Remarks containing references to ‘climate change’. The ‘Other’ Category contains those issue tags that were assigned less than 3 times overall.

Figure 2: Issue tags for Speeches and Remarks containing mentions of 'climate change'

Analysis:

2010 was the year for climate change for President Obama

2010 not only had more mentions of ‘climate change’ in President Obama’s Speeches and Remarks overall, but ‘climate change’ was mentioned in reference to a far larger number of issues. While in 2011, ‘climate change’ has only been mentioned in speeches relating to 7 different issues, in 2010 it was mentioned in relation to 20 different issues. In other words, while ‘climate change’ has been largely restricted to statements relating to foreign policy, the environment, and the economy in 2011 – in 2010 President Obama was keen to make it part of many other stories; from ‘Healthcare’ to ‘Education’, and ‘Homeland Security’ to ‘Immigration’.

The amount of Speeches and Remarks that ‘climate change’ has been mentioned in 2011 so far suggest that it will feature more often throughout the year than in 2009, where the President’s attention was required in other policy areas such as healthcare, but not as often as in 2010. The mentions of ‘climate change’ were relatively low in 2009  in spite of electoral pledges in 2008 on the issue of climate change that the President seemed to abandon relatively early on in his term. Likewise, this analysis suggests that the Copenhagen climate change summit in December 2009 led to greater engagement with the issue of climate change by the President in the aftermath of its failure, rather than in the significant run-up to the summit itself.

'Climate change' is considered a foreign policy issue

This analysis also shows that ‘climate change’ is much more likely to be mentioned by the President in terms of foreign policy than anything else. While some of the cases here were Speeches and Remarks to domestic organisations, such as the Democrat National Committee, many were to foreign press-packs or joint-statements with Premier’s from other countries. This suggests that the President is far more likely to discuss climate change in the international arena (in terms of both policy and setting) where it can be framed in terms of shared duties, than at home where the issue remains controversial or non-salient.

It also suggests that the President is more likely to mention the issue when there is some implicit international pressure. It suggests that if the President’s focus is solely on domestic affairs, then climate change is far less likely to feature in one of his Speeches or Remarks. However, in the international arena the President – and by default, the United States – are forced to engage with the issue of climate change much more frequently.


Endnotes: 

1. This analysis is a quantitative content analysis. As such, it relies on the categorisations of both ‘Speeches and Remarks’ and ‘issue tags’ of the White House, not the author. Furthermore, there are limits to how much ‘mentions’ of ‘climate change’ can tell us; with some mentions obviously being more significant than others.
2. To clarify, the ‘issue tags’ are different to ‘speeches made’. For example there are 88 issue tags in the dataset for 90 speeches. This is a subtle but important difference. For instance, President Obama does not mention ‘climate change’ in reference to ‘foreign policy’ in 45% of his speeches. Instead, of the mentions of climate change in the dataset, 45% of them are in reference to foreign policy issues. I.e. it is 45% of the tags, not the speeches.

Original analysis - Climate change: Barack Obama less interested than Bush, analysis reveals

Here is my original analysis which appeared in a piece by Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian on 26/01/2011...

President Obama is continuing to abandon the environment as an issue for his administration, according to this analysis. Like the Queens speech in the UK, the State of the Union Address is an opportunity for the President to outline the ambitions of his administration for the following year. It would seem that for President Obama, the environment is not one. On the same day that Carol Browner left the EPA, President Obama’s latest State of the Union address did not mention “climate change”, “global warming” or the “environment” a single time. While he did make some reference to moving towards a clean energy economy, this is a long way away from asserting the strong environmental agenda that he promised in his election campaign. 

A content analysis of the previous three Presidents’ State of the Union Addresses shows that President Obama has the lowest average score of mentioning the environment as an issue on the most public of Presidential platforms. The results reaffirm President Clinton’s status as the greenest President of the contemporary era, but surprisingly put Obama below even George W. Bush. President Obama has an average score of only 1 mention per State of the Union (p/SoU), while President G.W. Bush scores closer to 2 p/SoU, and President Clinton a massive 6 p/SoU (see fig. 1).

Figure 1: average scores, by President

Perhaps more worryingly for environmentalists, President Obama is now showing a downwards trajectory, suggesting that the environment is becoming a less salient issue for his administration as he comes towards the end of his first term, rather than becoming more important towards the end of the previous two President's two terms (see fig. 2).

Figure 2: aggregate mentions of 'climate change', 'global warming' and the 'environment' in the State of the Union address over time*

The next few months will be significant, as President Obama seeks to replace Carol Browner, and continues to negotiate with an unfriendly and partisan Congress. This evidence suggests that, for now at least, President Obama is giving up on the environment as an issue for his administration.

* The best fit lines have been removed from figure 2 after a number of comments suggesting (rightly, in hindsight) that the correlation is not strong enough to justify them.

Congressional climate change bullies: The new Republican majority are picking on an easy target

Barely had the derrieres of the members of the 112^th Congress touched down on its prestigious benches before climate change felt the force of the latest brute in town. It was as if a prize fighter was warming up for a title shot by picking on Girl Scouts. The Tea Party juggernaut took little time to begin punching its way into the littler issues on the Congressional agenda, and climate change looks set to be one of the very first casualties.

The Republicans are putting forward three proposals that would seriously dent the significant if little-praised progress that President Obama and his once-friendly Congress had made beginning to address climate change. 

The first proposal would declare greenhouse gas regulation outside the remit of the Clean Air Act; America’s principal bastion against air pollution. This would prevent the executive agency responsible for America’s environmental wellbeing, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), from doing anything about the ever-increasing national greenhouse gas emissions rate. The proposal was put forward by a Republican representative from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 which decreed that in fact, constitutionally, the EPA can have such power. 

The second proposal uses an economic stick to beat environmentalists. Proposed by Republican Ted Poe of Texas, it would block funding to any government agency associated with cap-and-trade. Given the relative ineffectiveness of cap-and-trade mechanisms for mitigating emissions thus far in the US, this would not necessarily be such a disaster. However, given cap-and-trade’s relatively popular status among politicians in comparison with other mechanisms, it would chronically blunt the policy-tool that was most likely to bring consensus. 

Finally, the third proposal would see a two-year delay in EPA regulation of carbon dioxide and methane emissions. Introduced by Republican Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, it would seem extreme in isolation but in this context appears as the proverbial towel to throw into the ring before climate change is completely done-for.

The project of dismantling climate change regulation piece by piece sits particularly well with the new Tea Party incumbents since it fits with both their populist views on small government and deregulation, and more broadly with their committed suspicion of what they see as ‘liberal’ science flying in the face of their ‘traditional’ moral principles. It looks like the Southern slugger is set to give the lean strategist with nimble feat from the North-East a right old bruising. In particular, there are four reasons why - one way or another - the Republicans should win this particular fight:

Firstly, the effects of climate change are long-term, which to a short-termist movement like the Tea Party is a dream come true. It essentially means that whatever they do now won’t be properly felt by the current crop of voters. Or the next.  Or the next. Or even the next. By which time they’ll either have taken America into the Promised Land of small government and traditional values with them, or collapsed in upon themselves with nothing remaining other than the sound of their empty rhetoric floating gently in the wind. The temptation of such an immediate political victory is no doubt too strong to resist for a movement that the world didn’t realise was a proper movement until November and now has its own Congressional caucus with an astonishing 52 members. 

Add to this the fact that Republicans are generally ambivalent towards climate change as an issue (at best), and that plenty of Democrats are openly anti-climate change and there emerges a second reason that this fight won’t be strenuous for those 52; they have a pre-made bi-partisan smokescreen already in place. At a time where the Democrats are talking up bi-partisanship like it was a constitutional requirement, the Republicans can throw them a hollow bone by pointing to those names with a ‘D’ suffix in the ‘nay’ column of the most recent climate change failures in Congress. Unless those Blue Dog democrats speak out, the Tea Party will have their bi-partisan agreement. They won’t, of course. Not when it means surrendering the economic well being of their constituencies premised principally on mining coal.

The Republicans are safe from another political pitfall too; the allegation of being the ‘party of no’. This is simply because the proposals are well enough constructed that they don’t explicitly rule out the existence of climate change or deny Congress’ responsibility to deal with it. They simply say that now is not the right time to for government to be intervening on this issue. It’s not a case of ‘no, never’; more a case of ‘maybe later’. This is what is explicitly stated, anyhow, even if the implications of this position are considerably more intractable. 

Given these three defences, the fight in the House should be all but won. However, in the event of the Democrats showing the grit and determination that Senator Barbara Boxer insists her colleagues in that particular Democrat-controlled chamber will, it is at best uncertain as to how many of them will actually show for battle. Ultimately, climate change is an issue which is easily judged not to be salient enough to risk getting one’s political lights knocked out over. If such calculations are made, it will leave Babs against the Caucus. And 52 on 1 seems likely to be fight that even this great Boxer can’t win.

For Obama, the midterms were a shellacking, but not a bloodbath...

Originally published on The Collective Review on 04/11/2010:

As the dust settles on the US Congressional mid-term elections, President Obama appears through the haze. He’s bruised, but still standing. The Republicans did most of what they promised to do; they wrestled control of the House from a Democratic party they saw as profligate and misguided, and damaged the reputation of a President that they have long since accused of being all style with little substance, but in the Senate they fell just short. Come November 15th, the man sitting at the helm of that chamber remains a Democrat, and he will cast he eye across the floor and see marginally more blue ties than he will red.

In the end, the House race wasn’t even close. If this was baseball, they would have enacted the mercy-rule. As many as 70 Democratic politicos have now been released back into the wilderness, many having been mauled by their hungry Republican counterparts. The new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, called this a victory for America and is promising to “restore trust” in Washington. It remains to be seen if either of these sentiments will hold true.

The Senate race, by contrast, brings the only positive headlines for a Democratic party that must now at least show itself to be humbled. They lost 7 seats, retaining a slim majority of 6. With 2 seats still undecided, this margin could become even slighter. Nonetheless, key party figures were returned such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who managed to win a contest that he described as ‘not close’ – though many others would disagree – and Senator Barbara Boxer of California, winning her eleventh straight election victory. This will provide some stability to a party that is currently rocking without the help of any Presidential ballast.

First and foremost, this election was a vote against President Obama. His voter-approval ratings have plummeted since he rocketed into office in 2008 fuelled with hope and promise, and this result was simply a confirmation of that feeling. It would be easy to put all the blame on Obama’s election strategy of high rhetoric and vague promises, but this would be to ignore recent history. It has become something of a tradition to give presidents a bit of a kicking come mid-terms. Not so much out of malice, or even genuine disdain, but as a means to keep them on their toes, batting for the team rather than their party.
For sure, there is disagreement with some of his policies. The health care bill – smartly dubbed ‘Obamacare’ by his opposition – was mis-pitched. Had the President and his Democratic Congressional counterparts chosen to stress the economic necessity of stealing back health care from the profit-driven insurance industries in order to return it to the increasingly desperate Americans who need to keep cash in their pockets now more than ever, then it may have found more success. But this is just one of many examples where Obama’s gift as a communicator deserted him.

Instead of framing the health issue as one of economic need, he and his party tried to use it to keep the momentum of 2008 going – painting Obama as the harbinger of real change – in spite of the fact that by the time it was bungled through the Senate it was already too late. He would have done well to listen to the campaign-mantra of the last Democratic President to get a mauling in the mid-terms, President Clinton: ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. Especially during a recession, stupid.

Perhaps more worrying for Obama, though, is that this was not just a vote against him by conservatives scared of what they see as the imminent nationalisation of America’s public services, but by a number of those constituents who voted him into office in 2008. One of his great advantages was that the young and vibrant loved him back then, and this in turn made Obama look young, vibrant and full of promise. But as enthusiastic as the young and vibrant are, they are also impatient. Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect major change within two years, perhaps candidate Obama really did mean “change you can believe in… but not overnight” (as he tried and failed to point out on The Daily Show last week), but it is pure folly to promise the young something great and not deliver on time. They will move on, and are doing so. Obama, though, must work hard to ensure that this is but a phase of adolescent pique, rather than a permanent phase-shift away from himself and his party.

Most of all, this election highlights the difference between campaigning and governing. Obama is a maestro at the former, but is currently floundering with the latter. This same problem will challenge none more than the newly empowered Republican establishment. They have, in their midst, a grassroots movement to make Obama’s look like it’s been sprayed with weed-killer. The Tea Party train rolls on, all the way into Union Station, with figureheads such as Rand Paul riding out front to ‘take the government’ back for the disaffected. What they may find when they arrive, though, is an institution so stuck in its ways that it would take the entire AmTrak fleet to make it budge. Congress is the home of deliberation and compromise, and promising to change it radically with tactics that are anything but compromising is a non-starter. Many and better have tried previously and fared poorly.

That will suit the Democrats and President Obama just fine. If the Republicans try to force change by blocking every initiative the President puts forward, they will quickly be branded the party of ‘no’. If they sit down and compromise, the divisions within their own party will make the disagreements across the parties seem trivial. Furthermore, they will struggle to find a Presidential candidate who can capture both the centrist swing-voters and hang-on to the Tea Party activists. They will need to select well, which automatically rules out Sarah Palin, because if there’s one thing we know Obama is very good at, it’s Presidential campaigns.
This election was, as President Obama rightly points out, a right “shellacking” for him and his party. But it wasn’t the bloodbath it could have been. He must and will do better. The first and possibly only item on his agenda from now until 2012 has to be the economy. He has started well by offering an olive branch to the newly victorious Republicans. This has put the ball in their court. Either they start to play and the economy grows to everyones benefit, or they bicker and stall allowing Obama to prey on them in 2012 just as they gorged on his Democratic colleagues yesterday.

Either will do for a President who is down, but whom it would be foolish to count out.

The plug is not the end, it's just the beginning...

Originally published on The Collective Review on 17/09/2010:

On the 20th April, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 people. Early estimates of the extent of the spill were appealingly optimistic; starting at ‘no oil leak at all’ before sharply increasing to a manageable 1000 barrels a day. Before long, though, the real extent of the disaster became apparent. No longer was it 1000 barrels of oil but anything in the region of 35,000 to 60,000 barrels seeping its way into the fragile ecosystem every 24 hours. Numbers such as this barely do justice to an event that President Obama himself described as ‘the greatest environmental disaster of its kind’ in American history. Now, almost six months on from the explosion, the leak is reportedly hours from being plugged. It seems that even with BPs greatest minds working around the clock on all manner of imaginative solutions and a full-time governmental Nanny, General Thad Allen, leading from the front, little could be done to stop an estimated 5m barrels of crude oil funnelling forth into the vulnerable Gulf. Despite appearances, the plug is not the end, though; it is merely a punctuation mark in a continuing story of struggle between Americans and the environment they inhabit.

In the short-term, there are the local communities that depend on their livelihoods to consider. Residents of this part of the world are now battle-hardened, having had to endure it all after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region in 2005. That, though, was a faceless natural phenomenon, as much unfortunate as it was unexpected. This time, it’s different. The former-CEO of BP was a Brit who paid for his company’s carelessness, as well as his own astounding lack of tact, with his job. The new American incumbent, Bob Dudley, would do well to learn from his predecessors mistakes and treat the residents of this most unfortunate piece of America with the same amount of care and respect that Tony Hayward markedly did not. Needless to mention that BP should, and surely must, bear the brunt of the considerable investment needed to get the local economy running again.

No less urgent but considerably farther reaching than the economic redevelopment of Louisiana is the far greater issue of America’s national energy policy. In the medium term, the spill represents a genuine opportunity for political change. President Obama used every opportunity he could to voice his continued desire to cure America of its oil-addiction while being careful not to further upset the BP employees who rely on that very same resource for their income and, as Bob Dudley rightly pointed out, are woven into the fabric of the Gulf community. Before President Obama can address that particular elephant in the room though, he must deal with another great political elephant; the Congressional Republicans. With Tea Party climate sceptics fighting themselves into winning positions in the Republican Congressional primaries, and the Democrats bracing themselves for an unfavourable mid-term appraisal at the hands of the electorate, the President must try to use the memory of this catastrophe for good and persuade his Congressional party that clean energy is not only the right strategy, but a winning one.

Regardless of the outcome of that particular conflict, though, the way in which this disaster must live in the memory in the long-term is as a story of nature biting back. Environmentalists have a unique opportunity, served up by the fantastic unpredictability of nature, to drill home a much deeper message; we are residents of this planet, not its proprietors. We hold this planet on a lease, and nature has the right and ability to revoke that at its will – just as it did on that tragic April day. As businesses are rebuilt, and energy policies are debated, what must remain in the mind at all times is that for all the products we mine from the earth, we ourselves remain a product of it. Ultimately, that should be the legacy of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; albeit plugged.

The Ash Cloud: A Victory for Computer Modelling - Now why can't we apply the same logic to climate change?

The ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano has caused havoc, millions of dollars in corporate losses, and untold hilarity at its mispronunciation (it's pronounced AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul according to the Icelandic embassy in Washington, apparently - http://phreakaholic.com/news/iceland-volcanos-name-eyjafjallajokull-pronunciation/). All this, based on a computer model that has an informed but nonetheless imperfect idea of its whereabouts and density, combined with widely varying estimates as to the damage it will do to the aircraft that would probably/possibly/almost certainly encounter it. Fortunately I wasn't planning on flying anywhere, which means I am something of a bemused spectator to the media ruckus that occurs every time the cloud 'moves' (I don't like 'move' as an adjective for clouds, it makes them sound too athletic; clouds 'drift' or 'saunter' or 'meander' in a manner that is vaguely whimsical and for the pleasure of those with time to cast an eye to the sky on a warm summer evening with a glass of cider in one hand and rapidly melting strawberry-split in the other, surely). What does interest me though, is that the authorities have taken what appears to be relatively immediate and drastic action on the basis of modeling estimates that tell them they probably should - estimates that are precisely the same in nature as our best sophisticated forecasts on climate change. Yet on the latter issue, they continue to do nothing.

Why, in actuality, are governments and associated federations willing to penalise and annoy British Airways and Ryanair but not BP and ExxonMobil (ignoring the fact Ryanair is run by a obnoxious self-publicising man from the British Isles who has a penchant for unsubtle and ill-advised comments in the face of major crises, oh wait...)? BAA claims that the restrictions on flights cost it £28bn, the city of London supposedly saw £100m lost from reduced tourism, and even little East Midlands Airport claims the cloud cost it £1m in revenue (BBC News). These are not insignificant amounts, and represent a good hack off the profit margins of those who rely on flights and tourism for their businesses. Yet, while making decisions on climate change - a problem that will cost considerably more to confront than the ash cloud and increases significantly the longer we wait - those with the power insist on delay in the face of corporate opposition. Loathe am I to describe the until-recently-unheard-of Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) as 'brave'; but it seems that this is precisely what they were. In the face of a natural challenge with immediate consequences and very apparent costs, they chose action in the name of safety rather than inaction in the face of market opposition. Yes, Mr Bureaucrat in your grey suit and unnatural interest in air pressure, yes you; take a bow.

The ash cloud example shows us something more, though, than just how officials can act on the best information available to them if they so choose. It shows us how the public will respond when - grounded, stranded, and grumpy - they are presented with no other option. Yes, they will whinge, moan, question the decision and blame everyone 'foreign' (to the point where poor old Iceland were forced to put what can only be described as a year-7 papier-mache art project model of a volcano filled to the brim with baking powder in front of them while performing on Eurovision in the hope of garnering some empathy/sanity when the votes came in). But, ultimately, they will relent; they will understand and intelligently question, rather than belligerently disobey. After all, when there is no other option, what can Little Sammy stuck abroad really do other than accept that his fate is in the hands of nature, and that by being born on this planet he implicitly agreed to abide by Mother Nature's occasional whimsy.

The worst is over; the decision was made, the immediate effects were felt, and the fallout has all but passed. People have now accepted that if they want to fly abroad then they have to account for the small risk of an angry Scandinavian mount spewing its guts. Corporations have started to go quiet realising that no-one unnecessarily dieing is probably more valuable to their long-term financial security than their immediate quarterly losses. And the CAA - bless them - have dismounted thier shiny white horses, taken off the chainmail, and returned to grey-suited drudgery; happy that tomorrow will involve spreadsheets rather than press releases. I can't help but feel that if the equivalent officials showed the same faith in the science of climate change as the CAA did in the met-office - and, frankly, had some kahunas - then we would be much closer to radical and effective action on the greatest problem of a generation, any generation, than we currently are.