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Tag Archives: Obama

We Must Act

Posted by: Peter Lehner -

“But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”  

         President Barack Obama, 2013 State of the Union

It is fitting that climate change featured prominently in the biggest political speech of the year. Our country is still absorbing the blow from 11 extreme weather events in 2012, including Super Storm Sandy, which alone cost more than $80 billion. We need presidential leadership to deal with this grave threat to our communities.

But I am just as interested in hearing what people say about climate change around their dinner tables as I am in hearing what President Obama says from the dais. It’s these everyday conversations that matter, because real action will only occur when ordinary people start demanding it.

The president knows this himself.

Earlier this week the Director of the NRDC Action Fund met with President Obama’s former Campaign Manager Jim Messina and Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement John Carson. Messina told her that soon after the election he was on vacation in Italy when the president called him back to the White House and said: “We are not done yet.”

The President wants to remain in campaign mode because the best way to achieve his goals is to build public momentum. He needs a surge of support outside of Washington if he wants to prevail in Washington. And so he has asked Messina and Carson to launch Organizing for Action, a group that will draw on the Obama campaign’s ground game and data collection to mobilize people on immigration reform, gun control, climate action and job creation.

I take this as an inspiring sign. The president recognizes that the power to make change doesn’t reside only in Washington; it sits within all of us. We can raise our voices, influence our friends, get our lawmakers’ attention, and create our own groundswell.

History shows that legislation rarely leads people. Instead, people lead legislation. Cultural shifts take place, and then the government follows. Grassroots movements in the 1960s, for instance, led to the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. The quickest way to spot a corrupt piece of legislation is to read the newspaper and realize there is no public support for it; that means a lobbyist wrote the bill to benefit a client.

But when a member of Congress opens the paper and learns that people in his or her district are writing letters to the editor, attending rallies, and organizing community groups and business sectors in favor of climate action, then they know it’s time to follow the public’s lead.

Representative Dave Reichert (R-WA), for instance, knows the majority of his constituents care about climate change, so when he had the opportunity to vote on a clean energy and climate bill in 2010, he supported it. Some top donors gave him a hard time about that vote, but he told them in no uncertain terms he couldn’t get reelected in his district if opposed climate action.

If we can make more members of Congress feel the same way, we can really get down to work. We can ensure President Obama has the support he needs to reduce carbon pollution from existing power plants—our nation’s largest source of global warming pollution. We can create incentives for renewable energy, energy efficient buildings, and clean cars. And we can even pass climate legislation in a few years.

But remember, this will only happen if the words President Obama Tuesday night are matched by public action. Educate your friends. Talk about climate change in our children’s schools, our religious groups, and business associations. Call on these networks to join you at town hall events and rallies. And always keep the pressure on your lawmakers through email, Facebook, Twitter, and local office visits.

It’s time for all of us who care about building a sustainable future to start leading while demanding our leaders do the same.

A Climate Plan is Good Politics

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

Guessing the contents of the State of the Union is a favorite Washington parlor game this time of year. I am putting my money on the issue of climate change. After President Obama devoted a chunk of his Inaugural Address to laying out the moral and economic imperatives on why we must act to curb climate change, I hope to hear his plans for moving us forward towards that goal during the State of the Union.

Many Americans are eager to hear how we can confront this crisis. Now that intense drought, heat waves, storms and other extreme weather are bearing down on our communities, many voters are calling for action. In September, the majority of voters favored candidates who agree the Environmental Protection Agency should reduce carbon pollution, according to a survey by Public Policy Polling.

The White House and other Democratic leaders are responding to the call and deepening their climate commitment. Many Republicans, however, are heading in the opposite direction.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently announced that one of its central strategies for the 2014 election cycle will be attacking Democrats for their efforts to address climate change.

That’s right. They want to pillory lawmakers for trying to solve the single greatest environmental and humanitarian crisis of our time. They want to punish them for trying to reduce pollution that is pumping weather systems with steroids and contributing to 14 extreme events costing more $1 billion each in losses in 2011 and 11 $1 billion extreme events in 2012.

This tone deaf response isn’t just bad for our nation. It’s bad for GOP candidates.

In the 2012 election, Americans swept climate champions into office up and down the ticket. In race after race, climate deniers and anti-regulatory candidates got millions of dollars from polluting industries, but they didn’t get the votes.  

George Allen, for instance, tried to win the Virginia Senate race with nearly $12 million from Karl Rove’s Super PACs and $4.5 million from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Allen worked as a consultant for a climate denial outfit and wanted to open Virginia’s coast to oil and gas drilling. His Democratic opponent Tim Kaine, meanwhile, told voters, “We need a national energy policy that takes immediate advantage of Virginia and America’s own energy resources to end our dependence on foreign oil.” Despite the millions spent on dirty ad blitzes, Virginians chose Kaine’s clean energy vision for their state.

A similar pattern played out in several states across the country, including decidedly red states. The National Republican Senatorial Committee plan for 2014 singled out Montana as a place where it would attack candidates’ climate action. Yet this approach ignores the fact that Senator John Tester just won reelection after running on clean energy and talking about what global warming is doing to his dryland farm in Central Montana. “History will judge us on how we deal with climate,” Tester has said.

Several newly elected Senators agree. Last weekend, I visited with Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. He told me that the people of New Mexico see what is happening to their land and the world around them and they want action.

And yet the GOP is doubling down on a losing climate strategy that will continue to alienate Americans.  Including one of the most coveted demographic groups: young people. Young people know that if America continues its climate paralysis, their generation will pay the price. John Carson, the former director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and the new executive director of Organizing for America, says that if you asked young volunteers on the Obama campaign why they got involved in politics, the largest majority answered the environment. Young voters believe they can make a difference, and so they mobilize. GOP candidates who run on climate denial probably won’t be getting their votes.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Some Republican leaders are sensing the changing demographic winds and moderating their positions. Senator Mark Rubio, for instance, supports immigration reform. Senator Mark Kirk—and NRA member—is talking about gun control. There is room for Republicans to lead on climate as well.

In the meantime, we will be looking to President Obama to set our country on a path toward climate stability. He can start by talking about it in the State of the Union Address. We will just have to wait and see if some Republicans respond by dumping the losing strategy of climate denial.

President Obama Has the Power to Act Now on Climate Change

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

Now that President Obama has officially been sworn in for a second term, speculation about his governing priorities has reached a fevered pitch. Will he reform immigration first? Will gun control be next? And with this sentence in his inaugural address, President Obama put climate change front and center in the policy priority debate: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

All the guesswork on sequence and timing ignores a plain truth: America should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. The political landscape may be fractured and contentious right now. But even in this gridlocked era, we should expect our leaders to tackle more than one challenge at once.

A handful of issues deserve immediate attention. Climate change is among them, President Obama has the power to act now despite Congressional gridlock, and this is why he must make it a top priority.

More People Will Be Put at Risk If We Don’t Act Soon

You might think 2012 will go down in history as the year of Hurricane Sandy. But that was just one of many extreme weather events to devastate our communities last year. We also had the worst drought in 50 years, the heat wave that put more than 100 million Americans under heat advisories, the freak derecho storm that left 23 dead and 1.4 million people without power from Illinois to Virginia, and the prolonged Western fire season.

The list goes on: NRDC experts found that at least 3,527 monthly weather records were broken for heat, rain, and snow throughout the United States last year. If you look behind many of these record-breaking events, you find destroyed homes, lost crops, shuttered businesses, broken dreams, and costly damage. NOAA’s National Climate Data Center reported that 11 extreme weather events reaped more than $1 billion in losses in 2012.

Extreme weather is a hallmark of climate change, and if we don’t address this crisis soon, millions more Americans will experience this kind of severe hardship.

Americans Are Providing the Political Will

A few years ago, I chose not to talk about climate change at holiday gatherings, because I didn’t want the drama that came with bring up a divisive issue. But now my family and millions of other Americans have seen what climate change could look like with their own eyes. They look out the window and see weather patterns thrown out of whack and damages reaching all-time highs. Climate change has hit home, and a growing number of Americans want to do something about it.

An October 2012 survey conducted by Yale and George Mason University found that 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is real. In contrast, the number of Americans who deny the reality of climate change dropped nearly by half to just 12 percent since January 2010.

Another October survey from the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans agree climate change is a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” problem. Eighty-five percent of Democrats say there is “solid evidence” of climate change, while nearly half of Republican do—a jump of 37 percent from 2009. A decade ago, these numbers were higher, but the fact remains:  the majority of Americans rarely agree on anything, but they agree on the threat of climate change.

More significantly, they want action. In September, the majority of voters living in swing states said they favored candidates who think the Environmental Protection Agency should reduce carbon pollution—the main cause of climate change—according to a survey by Public Policy Polling.

This majority helped shape the 2012 election cycle. Voters overwhelmingly chose candidates who support clean energy and climate action up and down the ticket. In Maine, for instance, Senator Angus King was able to paint his opponent Charlie Summers as extreme and out of touch because Summers doesn’t believe in climate change.

The recent polls and election outcomes show Americans will stand behind climate action. Now it’s time for our leaders to tap that support and put solutions in place.

We Know How to Solve It

Some Congressional leaders have said they would introduce climate legislation. Yet given the current stalemate on Capitol Hill, I don’t expect to see a bill hitting President Obama’s desk any time soon. The good news is that the White House doesn’t need to wait for Congress. It can act now using authority Congress granted it when it passed the Clean Air Act, overwhelmingly, 40 years ago.

NRDC released a groundbreaking proposal showing how, under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency can set limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants—the nation’s biggest source of global warming pollution. In the process, it would save thousands of lives and drive a surge of new investment in clean energy.

It would also help ease some of the regional tensions that arose when the House of Representatives passed climate legislation in 2009. NRDC’s proposal offers a unique federal and state partnership that recognizes the differences in how power is generated across the country and gives maximum flexibility for states and power plants to meet emissions standards the EPA would set for each state.

It’s time for President Obama to set these carbon limits in motion. He can begin now—even as he pursues additional priorities—knowing the majority of Americans want to tackle the threat of climate change.

 

The Latino Vote Reflects the Latino Experience

Posted by: Adrianna Quintero -

An estimated 24 million Hispanic-Americans were eligible to vote in this election (an increase of more than 4 million since 2008), and over 12 million actually went to the polls a 26% increase over 2008.  Turnout was key for all of us working with Latino voters since for our community, this election carried high stakes and we turned out in droves.

We voted early and voted our conscience and our experience. While many will attribute the results to immigration, this oversimplification misses the point that a majority of Hispanic voters nationally simply believed that President Barack Obama was better able to deal with the country’s problems than his Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Why? Quite simply most Latinos had first-hand experience with the problems that the talking heads were simply talking about: Latino unemployment remains high, the economic downturn hit Latinos hard, healthcare remains a priority with many Latinos—many of whom are uninsured, education is critical for our youth, and our communities are still bearing the brunt of pollution and global warming. And there is, of course, the issue of immigration.

For all the Spanish language ads targeted to Latinos, there was no disguising the fact that the GOP aligned itself first with the fossil fuel industry and polluters, as they stood arm in arm with the creators of the most extreme anti-immigrant policies like SB 1070, the Arizona anti-immigrant profiling law.  As Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio said, “They took on the most extreme position and alienated Latinos.”

But even beyond immigration, what was clear was that the Latino experience was not reflected in the republican agenda.  For Latinos health remains a big issue. Many Latinos are uninsured or underinsured and face significant threats to their health daily. Sadly, many of these come from preventable sources of pollution. As I’ve written in the past, for people who have to live and breathe the pollution spewed by coal powered power plants (who are often disproportionately minority communities)—protecting our air and water is not as funny as it seemed to be for Mr. Romney. For Latino, Asian and black communities (as well as a number of increasingly poor white communities), the rates of pollution-related illness are alarming: one in six African American kids struggles with asthma, compared with one in 10 nationwide; while Latino children have higher levels of mercury in their bodies compared with non-Hispanic white children, and 43 percent report living or working near toxic sites like coal fired power plants(up from 34 percent in 2008).

As NRDC president Frances Beinecke wrote: President Obama’s reelection is a victory for all Americans who want to breathe clean air, drink safe water, and protect treasured landscapes. So while hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisements tried to convince us that we needed to pollute our way to prosperity, 72% of the Latino vote yesterday went to a president who made clean energy and environmental protection a cornerstone of his first term.

This echoes what recent polls have shown, that Americans support a clean-energy economy. Among Latinos, the support is even stronger with ninety percent of Latino voters strongly supporting clean energy over fossil fuels and 83 percent of Latinos agreeing that coal plants and oil refineries are a thing of the past.

Now it’s time to get to work. For Latinos this means bringing leadership to bear on Washington. Amplifying the voices of the millions who want progress on carbon and global warming and showing our leaders that we will hold them accountable: on immigration, on health, on the economy, and on the inextricably critical issue of a healthy, clean environment.

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The Only Presidential Candidate Who Calls Climate Change a Threat

Posted by: Frances Beinecke -

In a year of sweltering heat, withering drought, some of the worst wildfires on record and catastrophic hurricanes that have ravaged our Gulf coast and Mid-Atlantic states, we have one presidential candidate who thinks climate change is a political punch line. The other rightly calls it a threat to our planet.

Climate change puts us all at risk – the 47 percent, the 99 percent and the 1 percent – whether our state is red or blue. We need a president who understands what’s happening to our world and will act – and has acted – to address this grave and gathering threat.

When it comes to our energy future, the candidates have laid out a clear choice as well.

President Obama wants to invest in energy efficiency, promote renewable power and protect our health. He’s led the country forward toward each those goals.

Mitt Romney would bet our future on the fossil fuels of the past.

This is a choice between responsibility and recklessness – and the choice is ours to make.

We can continue to move forward with a clean energy revolution that reduces the carbon pollution that is warming our planet. Or we can turn back the clock on needed change – and turn our backs on thescience and extreme weather before our very eyes.

In his first term, Obama secured a historic agreement with the automobile industry that will nearly double the gas mileage of our cars by 2025. It will save consumers $100 billion a year at the pump. It will reduce our oil consumption by 3 million barrels a day – nearly half our oil imports. And it will cut our carbon pollution from new cars in half.

Obama has proposed standards to reduce carbon emissions from new coal-fired power plants. In a second term, he could do the same for existing plants.

He has promoted important gains in the energy efficiency of our homes, workplaces and the appliances we use daily.

On his watch, wind turbines have grown to provide 4 percent of our nation’s electricity, with the help of a modest tax credit that is supported by Obama, along with many Republican members of Congress. Romney has pledged to end the credit.

Romney claims these important gains in renewable fuels and efficiency have come at the expense of domestic fossil fuel production. The facts, though, tell a different story.

At 6.2 million barrels a day, U.S. domestic oil production is up 24 percent since Obama was elected. Natural gas production is at an all- time high.

Part of the reason, though, is that we are drilling in shale, using an industrial technique called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

This dangerous and often destructive process has put our communities, ranches and farms at risk. It threatens our water, wildlife, air and lands. And it is racing ahead across the country at a rate that has outpaced the public safeguards we need. Obama has begun to put measures in place to protect our waters and land; Romney has pledged to give states control of oil and gas development on federal lands.

We’ll continue to produce oil and gas at home, no matter who sits in the White House the next four years. The question is whether we’ll insist that it be done responsibly or let the oil and gas companies do it their way.

We have a long way to go to address the challenge of climate change, embrace the opportunities of a clean energy future and ensure the health of future generations. Obama, though, has made a good start.

We never expected his work would be completed in a few years. We need to rally around the chance to advance our progress in a second term.

This election season has taken its toll – on all of us. The condescension, pandering and incessant spin. The outrageous levels of corporate spending. The disappointments, distortions, deceptions and lies. I’m as tired of it as anyone else.

Now, though, is no time to falter. This is no time to lose heart.

This election matters, and matters greatly, especially to those of us who care about what happens to our environment, who care about the kind of world we will leave to our children.

We have a choice on Tuesday between two men for president. Barack Obama is the best choice for our future. We hold within our hands, each of us, the political power to make that choice. That is the miracle of American democracy. It begins, for us all, with a single vote. Stand up this week and make it count.

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