Obama Veers From Bush's Climate Course
Mar 06 - USA TODAY
Even before George W. Bush can settle into his new house in Dallas, his
legacy on the environment is being dismantled by his replacement in the
White House.
In less than two months, President Obama has put on hold Bush's plans for
power-plant pollution, offshore oil drilling, nuclear waste storage and
endangered species.
The Obama administration has rolled out policies Bush officials delayed,
such as requiring higher energy efficiency from appliances.
Such moves have significant impacts and not just on the environment. They
could affect electric bills, gas prices and the time it takes to build
highways, dams and bridges.
For now, the decisions are winning plaudits from green groups -- "swift and
strong leadership," the Natural Resources Defense Council gushed last month
-- but experts such as Christopher McGrory Klyza of Middlebury College in
Vermont say the Obama team's hard work is only beginning.
The reversals undertaken "are the easiest things to move quickly on," says
Klyza, co-author of a book on presidential environmental policy.
The hard work, such as filling in the details of how Obama will keep his
campaign pledge to cut global-warming gases 80% by 2050, lies in front of
the new administration.
Christie Whitman, Bush's first chief of the Environmental Protection Agency,
knows firsthand how hard that work can be, and she says it will be even
harder for Obama. The time and political capital Obama will have to expend
on the economic crisis will "make it much more complicated" for him to
achieve his environmental and energy goals, Whitman says.
"They're hard enough anyway," she says.
Although Obama has the advantage of a Democratic-controlled Congress, party
affiliation counts less than regional politics on many of the issues he
wants to tackle. Democrats from heavily industrial Midwestern states, for
example, are less eager to sign on to legislation to combat global warming.
"Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, they tend to be concerned about
economic effects on their own states," says Reid Detchon of the non-partisan
Energy Future Coalition, which promotes renewable energy.
In the budget unveiled Feb. 26 and in numerous pronouncements by Cabinet
officials, the Obama administration has started to sketch out its
environmental platform, but details are in short supply.
For example, the president's budget does not fund the Energy Department's
plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The federal government has spent more than 25 years and $13 billion
investigating a place to store highly radioactive waste.
Yucca was not likely to open until 2020, despite a 1998 deadline set by
Congress for the government to take charge of nuclear waste. Obama's
position could further delay finding a final resting place for the
radioactive materials piling up at the nation's nuclear plants.
Some experts, such as Robert Alvarez, a top Energy Department official
during the Clinton administration, want the government to pick a new site
for storing the waste. Alvarez recognizes the political difficulties ahead.
"Everybody will just get angry if they learn their backyard might be a
candidate site," he says.
The budget assumes passage of a law to curb emissions of the gases
responsible for global warming.
Obama wants Congress to pass a bill that would set a strict cap on
emissions. Companies would be required to pay the government for the right
to emit global-warming pollutants. The budget includes revenue of $646
billion from 2012 to 2019 from such payments. Some of the money would pay
for a middle-class income tax cut, some for research on solving global
warming.
A wide spectrum of groups -- from the Environmental Defense Fund to the
Edison Electric Institute, which represents power plants -- agree on the
need to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, but there is disagreement over how to
do it.
Lawmakers, who failed to pass a bill last year, will have to decide how much
to cut emissions and how soon.
"This is going to be a very complex piece of legislation," says Rep. Ed
Markey, D-Mass., who chairs a House subcommittee key to passage of a
global-warming bill. "In the end, politics is the art of the possible."
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