Barack Obama
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Fossil fuels keep getting the breaks
Leaders at G20 vowed to phase out oil subsidies. They might as well have vowed to end world hunger, because that is one huge rock to push up the hill
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Are environmentalists responsible for climate failure?
Environmentalists and their allies have expressed “disappointment” at the failure of the Senate to cap carbon pollution this year. A few bold voices have even suggested, gingerly, that President Obama might bear just a teensy bit of responsibility for this failure by not aggressively lobbying the Senate to take action or launching a consistent public campaign for action. Meanwhile, the White House isn’t shying from putting the blame squarely on environmentalists.
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What are the prospects for comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation in the coming years?
The chances for either an economy-wide shrinking cap on greenhouse gas emissions or a major push on clean energy investment over the next several years are not large. The best one could plausibly hope for in the next Congress, assuming only modest Republican gains, is some sort of weak cap on utility emissions, though that would still require Obama to do what he refused to do under more favorable political circumstances -- push hard for a bill.
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How Reid's parliamentary maneuvering could doom reforms to the oil industry
The Sen. majority leader may block amendments to an oil reform bill, endangering a bipartisan priority in order to prevent efforts to sideline the EPA
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Why did the climate bill fail?
With the climate bill officially dead, there's already a trickle of "who's to blame and what they should have done differently" pieces. Most of these pieces will focus in the wrong places. Were I doing an autopsy on the death of the bill, here are the causal factors I'd single out.
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The blame Obama game
Obama has received much of the blame, despite Congress being a separate branch of government. But so it goes in the age of outsized prez expectations.
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The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 1
Obama's legacy -- and indeed the legacy of all 21st century presidents -- will be determined primarily by whether we avert catastrophic climate change. And if Obama is not going to use the biggest fossil fuel disaster in U.S. history to push for serious climate action when he has the biggest Democratic majorities he is ever going to see, why on Earth would he try under far worse political conditions?
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Bloomberg News Refuses to Correct Blatantly False Drilling Ban Story
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the answer is no. On Thursday I documented a blatantly false Bloomberg news story designed to mislead readers about the level of support for President Obama’s temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling. Bloomberg’s poll (PDF), which the story was based on, asked the following (bottom of page five): “Do […]
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How Obama can wean the country off oil without help from Congress
Obama could kick off the “Big Green Buy.”Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThis article is part of a special issue of The Nation magazine about green energy, “Freedom From Oil.” In the wake of the BP oil spill, some captains of industry have begun calling for government leadership to spur a clean-energy revolution. In June, billionaire software mogul […]
