Withering Hope
His was a candidacy of promise and hope — of change from one of the most anti-environment administrations in decades.
But more than two and a half years into his term, President Obama’s record on conservation has left more than something to be desired.
Defenders’ President Rodger Schlickeisen takes a look at the Obama administration’s record — and how it needs to be improved.
“Candidate Obama consistently said that dealing with environmental problems—especially climate change, the number one threat to protecting the rich biological diversity that supports all life on Earth—would be one of his top priorities. Believing that, the House of Representatives acted quickly once President Obama was in office to approve comprehensive climate change legislation and send it to the Senate. The House bill curbed greenhouse gas emissions and set up a mechanism to help protect wildlife and biological diversity. But the President failed to put his political muscle into pushing the Senate to act. Then the long drawn-out battle over health care followed by his party’s loss of numerous House and Senate seats in 2010 doomed any chance of enacting climate change legislation for the foreseeable future – a missed opportunity that will result in considerable unnecessary environmental damage.
Unfortunately, climate change is not the only issue affected by Obama’s timid legislative approach. The explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago dramatically underscored the need for stricter regulation of offshore oil drilling to protect our oceans and coasts and the people and wildlife that depend on them. But is the White House fighting for tougher new laws to assure that nothing like this event that triggered the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history will ever happen again? No. Obama did appoint a stellar commission that made thoughtful and important recommendations for stronger offshore drilling regulation, but he has yet to push for reform legislation – and each passing week whatever opportunity there is to win needed reforms grows smaller. Although a few stalwart environmental leaders have introduced reform bills, others in Congress have interpreted the administration’s congressional inaction as an opportunity to promote more unsafe drilling in more places. These places include Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, where marine ecosystems are even more fragile and vulnerable to devastation from oil spills than in the Gulf of Mexico.
Not only has the President failed to push for desperately needed legislation, he supported his Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who, with no consultation and no warning, adopted the Bush administration’s plan to remove federal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies based on political boundaries rather than the science required by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). When conservationists sued and a federal court overturned his illegal action, Secretary Salazar actively encouraged Congress to enact legislation removing federal protection from Northern Rockies wolves, ignoring the court’s decision. And the White House did nothing to stop it.
For the first time in the nearly 40-year history of the ESA, Congress—with the complicity of the Obama administration—has intervened to remove all protection from a listed species. If, as many fear, this turns out to be a precedent for additional legislation blocking protection for endangered species, the damage to our ability to safeguard imperiled plants and animals essential to the web of life will be incalculable.
Obama’s record to date gives us no reason for optimism on forest protections and energy development guidelines. His administration’s conservation record falls far short of what it promised, what was expected of it and – most importantly – what we need. Our major environmental problems, especially those caused by climate change and loss of species and habitat, are huge and growing and will cause future generations great anguish and difficulty if our political leaders fail to lead. Unfortunately, President Obama’s instinct seems to be to avoid tough battles, relying on the argument that even as his record falls short, his administration is better on conservation than the previous one and better than any likely to succeed him should his re-election effort fall short.
That argument simply isn’t acceptable. Avoiding serious action, or–to use one of the President’s own phrases–“continuing to kick the can down the road” to another administration, will only result in our most serious environmental problems continuing to grow faster than society’s capacity to solve them. The dangers are too great to give the President a pass on environmental leadership. Those of us who care about the fate of the planet and generations to come must demand real progress that promises to solve our very real problems. For conservation, the future has to be now.”
