The issue of climate change played almost no role in the 2012 US presidential campaign. US President Barack Obama barely mentioned the topic, nor did then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It was not raised in a single presidential debate.
However, as Obama prepares to leave office, his own aggressive actions on climate change have thrust the issue into next year’s campaign. Strategists now say that this battle for the White House could feature more substantive debate over global warming policy than any previous presidential race.
On Monday, Obama unveiled his signature climate change policy, a set of US Environmental Protection Agency regulations designed to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s power plants. If the plan survives legal challenges, it could lead to the closure of hundreds of polluting coal-fired power plants, freeze future construction of such plants and lead to an explosion in production of wind and solar energy.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, most of those changes would unfold under the next president: US states would not submit final plans detailing how they would comply with the rules until 2018, and the plan would not be fully implemented until 2022.
That means next year’s candidates face a much more specific question on climate change policy than any of their predecessors have: What would they do with Obama’s climate change legacy?
“There’s no question that the decision of a sitting president on something like this insinuates these issues into the middle of a campaign,” said David Axelrod, a political strategist who advised both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. “The president is taking a significant step and now it’s a natural question to ask candidates: Would they embrace those steps and carry them forward, or would they not?”
The answer to that question is already a litmus test for the deep-pocketed political donors who are set to play a major role in the outcome.
On the left, billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, the largest single donor in last year’s midterm elections, has made it clear that forceful support of climate policies — including implementation of Obama’s plan — is essential to win his financial backing. On the right, the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have made it clear that their support is set to require a candidate’s full-throated opposition to Obama’s climate policies.
Over the weekend, potential Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton was quick to respond to a preview of the announcement.
“The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan is a significant step forward in meeting the urgent threat of climate change,” she said in a written statement. “It’s a good plan, and as president, I’d defend it. It will need defending because Republican doubters and defeatists — including every Republican candidate for president — won’t offer any credible solution.”
Clinton has pledged to strengthen and expand on the plan, and to elevate the issue of climate change throughout her campaign, hammering Republicans for their opposition. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, is a former senior White House official who was the architect of Obama’s climate policy.
Clinton’s focus on climate change represents a distinct shift from Obama’s re-election strategy in 2012, when his advisers viewed climate change as an issue that did not resonate with voters. Now, however, Clinton’s advisers are looking at polls showing that a majority of US voters support action on climate change, and the campaign views it as a winning issue, according to Clinton campaign officials.
A January poll conducted by the New York Times, Stanford University and Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research organization, found that two-thirds of US citizens said they were more likely to vote for political candidates who campaigned on fighting climate change.
The Republican presidential candidates savaged the new regulations, calling them an example of government overreach and overregulation and accusing Obama of conducting a “war on coal.”
Speaking on Sunday at an Orange County, California, gathering of Republican political donors hosted by the Koch brothers, US Senator Marco Rubio explicitly attacked Obama’s plan, designed to encourage states to adopt cap-and-trade programs in which they place a cap on carbon pollution and then create a market for buying permits or credits to pollute.
“It will make the cost of electricity higher, for millions of Americans,” Rubio said. “So, if there is some billionaire somewhere who is a pro-environmental cap-and-trade person, yeah, they can probably afford for their electric bill to go up a couple hundred dollars. But if you’re a single mom in Tampa, Florida, and your electric bill goes up by US$30 a month, that is catastrophic.”
Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush called the rules “irresponsible and overreaching” in a statement on Sunday afternoon.
“The rule runs over state governments, will throw countless people out of work and increases everyone’s energy prices,” Bush said.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz offered a more explicit pledge to block the rules if elected.
“The president’s lawless and radical attempt to destabilize the nation’s energy system is flatly unconstitutional and — unless it is invalidated by Congress, struck down by the courts, or rescinded by the next administration — will cause Americans’ electricity costs to skyrocket at a time when we can least afford it,” he said.
While the Republican candidates were united in their opposition to Obama’s plan, none has offered a specific policy proposal to undo it. The Environmental Protection Agency has put forward the new regulations under the authority of an existing law — the US’ 1970 Clean Air Act. Thus, legal experts said, it might be difficult for the next president to undo the rule entirely, without passing legislation to amend the existing law.
The chief challenges to the policy are set to come in the courts. Already, more than a dozen US states are preparing to file lawsuits against the plan in disputes that are expected to end up before the US Supreme Court, where the justices are set to have the final say over whether the regulations live or die.
However, experts said a new Republican president could simply stop implementing the regulations.
“We’ve had lots of administrations that just stopped rules from previous presidents dead in their tracks — the [former US president Ronald] Reagan administration did that with rules from the [former US president Jimmy] Carter administration,” Harvard University environmental law program director Jody Freeman said.
“They could delay the rule, or withdraw it indefinitely,” she said. “They’d get sued, but they could drive a delay through a whole first term. It’s a rope-a-dope strategy.”
Additional reporting by Ashley Parker
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