“It was a ‘Houston, we have a problem’ moment.”
So said White House counselor John D. Podesta, one of the aides who briefed the president on how climate change had caused an alarming decline in the California mountain’s snowpacks.
The snowpacks have declined by as much as 86% in one year.
Obama announced to the eight Western governors that he was meeting with that from now on, climate change is an issue that all politicians will have to deal with. This will come as a relief to many supporters who have been disappointed by the President’s lack of focus on the environment, despite his promise at his 2008 Inaugural Address that that night was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Obama has enacted some environmental legislation, including carbon limits for cars and light-duty trucks and supporting a House bill that, had it been passed, would have limited national greenhouse gas emissions.
But during his first term, several of his aides thought that the President should focus more on the economy, which they viewed as a more pressing issue. And as the campaign for his second term grew closer, more and more feared that bringing it up would be a liability. Obama’s former Chief of Staff William Daley stated that “There was a sense that it just wasn’t the sort of thing you could tee up, with an election coming up… you might as well have taken a gun to your head and shot yourself.”
But in recent years, the environment has become more of an up-front issue due to controversy over fracking and the Keystone Pipeline, although most Americans still view it as a low priority. In January of 2014, only 45% of Americans thought that “Dealing with the nation’s energy problem” was a top priority, according to a Pew research poll.
Obama told his former speechwriter Jon Favreau to make global warming “one of the big sections” in his second inaugural. The President also has several major donors who want to see more climate change, like environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, who wants Obama to veto the Keystone Pipeline and reduce the country’s dependency on natural gas.
The President plans to launch new green energy initiatives, he told an audience at a California Wal-Mart. He stated that the Federal government would begin to use more solar energy and other renewable resources, and also promote community college environmental programs that would train workers in alternative energy.
On May 9th, the White House announced that it had 300 public and private commitments to expand the renewable-energy industry and would create thousands of jobs. This plan includes 2 billion dollars in federal investments for using clean energy in it’s buildings. Supposedly, this will end up cutting 380 million tons of carbon pollution, which the administration claims is equivalent to taking 80 million cars off the road for one year.
