WORLDFIRE - Chapter 9, Part IV
Climate of Denial
In Chapter 9, “Climate of Denial,” we will be exploring various expressions of climate denial: 1) Fossil Fuel Industry Denial, 2) Republican Party Denial, 3) Democratic Party Denial, 4) Barack Obama’s Denial (included because he was president during my 2010 ride), 5) Donald Trump’s Denial, 6) Joe Biden’s Denial, and 7) Distraction as Denial. I have made every effort to be nonpartisan in my analysis. I hope you’ll stick with me through all seven parts - irrespective of your political views - as we objectively explore how best to dismantle these forms of destructive denial. Thank you.
Barack Obama’s Denial
It brings me no pleasure calling out climate deniers, but when humanity’s house is literally burning down, it’s no time for being polite. Returning to Joel Dyer’s more expansive definition of climate denier, it might surprise you to learn that someone who fits this definition is former President Barack Obama, the president I was working to influence on my rocket trike ride across America. Bill McKibben would later make this very point about President Obama in a 2015 New York Times op-ed titled, “Obama’s Catastrophic Climate Change Denial.” The impetus for that piece? Obama’s approval of Arctic drilling by oil giant Shell. The president’s baffling bow to Big Oil, combined with his puzzling decision to open the Wyoming Powder River basin to new coal mining, prompted McKibben to write: “This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.” President Obama would later reverse course on the Shell permit, but only after public outrage by climate activists grew too loud for him to ignore.
Eco-psychologist Zhiwa Woodbury channeled my feelings well in a 2016 op-ed where he wrote: “As a climate activist who enthusiastically supported Obama's historic run for the White House, it did not take long at all for myself or most progressives to realize that we'd been snookered. It may be hard to remember, but back then, we had a Democrat-controlled Congress, and the whole world was ready to follow President Obama's lead. He had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to exercise that mandate at the global Climate Summit in Copenhagen in 2009, weeks after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but instead… our delegation to Copenhagen included NSA spying on all other delegations, so as to control negotiations – and not for the better.” If not for whistleblower Edward Snowden, who bravely blew the whistle on the NSA for violating every American’s constitutional right to privacy, we would not have learned that President Obama’s NSA monitored the communications of other governments during and before the climate talks to give U.S. negotiators the upper hand in a summit that ended in disarray. We would not have learned that Obama’s NSA sabotaged the Copenhagen summit.
Our government not only spied on international climate talks. It spies on its own citizens, yet public outcry against this un-American invasion of our privacy is muted. Since 9/11, fear has maintained a powerful grip on the land of the free and the home of the brave, fear that has enabled dangerous erosions of our personal freedoms. What is free and what is brave about meekly surrendering our civil liberties to the intelligence community? I understand the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but in some ways, I hardly recognize the country where I grew up. To borrow a phrase from the irrepressible Michael Moore: “Dude, where's my country?” I don’t know which is worse: living in a Big Brother surveillance state or the passive acquiescence of those who seem to think this unconstitutional intrusion into our private lives is an acceptable price of safety. As one of America’s founders, Benjamin Franklin, prophetically warned, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Getting back to Woodbury’s op-ed: “Barack Obama is a smart guy – Harvard educated. He happened to be at the helm when the science became unassailable that we are in the midst of a full-on climate crisis… Obama has sufficient scientific resources at his command to know exactly what we are doing and failing to do… with scientists the world over sounding all the necessary alarms. But in pursuing an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy policy, highlighted by the figurative explosion of fracking and the literal explosions of oil trains and deep sea drilling rigs, Obama has turned the US into the No. 1 producer of fossil fuels in the world… While the window of opportunity for alleviating the anticipated suffering of future generations and stemming the toll of species extinction was closing, Obama was cementing the most lethal legacy of any US president ever, because the Sixth Great Extinction could well include humans. Sit with that for a while.” I’ve sat with that for far too long. Woodbury’s damning critique of President Obama is supported by the facts. Obama purposefully presided over the largest oil boom in U.S. history, with onshore oil production on federal lands roughly 60 percent higher at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency than at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. President Obama even approved offshore fracking in the Gulf of Mexico as the Deepwater Horizon disaster was unfolding.
I don’t deny the unique pressures of the office of the presidency that only those who have held that office can ever fully understand. Nor do I deny my gratitude and appreciation for the grace and eloquence President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama brought to the White House. In fairness to Barack Obama, he inherited a huge mess and faced staggering obstacles upon assuming office in 2008: an economy in free fall, two raging wars, and a Republican leadership team that schemed on the eve of his inauguration on how to obstruct him at every turn (ensuring the kind of government gridlock that had root canals polling higher than Congress). President Obama was also faced daily with the ugly scourge of racism. Despite all this, he had a battering ram he stubbornly refused to use after his election: a majority of the American people united behind him and control of both houses of Congress for two full years. Instead of using his bully pulpit to rally the American people to demand that Congress deliver on the climate hope and change he promised, he squandered that goodwill by pursuing the path of least resistance.
Nor am I denying that President Obama made some positive climate moves during his first term. His 2009 $90 billion stimulus included tens of billions for renewables and tens of billions more for efficiency and conservation measures, including $5 billion for our nation’s long-standing Weatherization Assistance Program. He also nearly doubled fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks by 2025 (even if “flexibilities” reduced the actual mileage results). But he then undercut these initiatives by championing an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy he knew was leading us to climate disaster. At a 2012 press conference in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president bragged: “Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.” It was at that same press conference that Obama ignominiously fast-tracked the construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
It wasn’t until his second term, in the summer of 2013, that President Obama even got around to proposing a climate action plan. Unfortunately, what Obama presented on a sweltering summer day in Foggy Bottom was more PR than plan. True to form, he rolled out his initiative with an eloquent speech. It opened with a poetic tribute to Project Apollo, a gutsy generational mission championed by his predecessor, President John F. Kennedy. But that is where the comparison ends. At the moment in history when the urgency of the climate emergency demanded a moon shot, Obama gave us a cloud shot by calling for the federal government (not the U.S. at large) to “consume 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources within the next seven years.” Imagine that if instead of challenging America to land a man on the Moon in less than a decade, President Kennedy had announced to Congress the goal of flying part of a rocket 20 percent of the way to the Moon and back. His words, and the rocket, would have crashed to Earth with a resounding thud. But that is not what Kennedy said. He said, “We choose to go to the moon!”
With the destruction of civilization looming, the best response the leader of the free world could manage for his climate action plan was a rehash of his "all-of-the-above" energy strategy, and too many big green groups–groups that make it their business to know how severe the climate crisis really is–applauded his empty words. Instead of calling out the president on his hollow rhetoric, big green groups–some with deep ties to the Democratic Party establishment and the Obama White House–fell over themselves congratulating him on his Georgetown speech. One even went so far as to produce a TV ad thanking him. Is it any wonder so much of the public does not yet believe there’s a climate emergency?
After waiting more than four years for the Obama White House to get serious about the worldfire sweeping the globe, I was apoplectic. I get being personally invested in a candidate you supported, but I have never understood giving that person, once they’re in office, a free pass when they hang you out to dry. We saw this play out time and again with Obama’s base just like we saw it play out with Trump’s. We never seem to learn. President Obama knew we had just reached the grim milestone of 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and were speeding towards dangerous and irreversible climate tipping points, yet instead of courageously calling for an all-hands-on-deck emergency mobilization to combat this mortal threat, he delivered a pretty speech.
What burned me the most was disappointment. I stood in the stadium stands when Barack Obama was nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. I was so excited about having our first Black president, I even attended his historic Inauguration in Washington, DC. I naively took candidate Obama at his word when he told us “if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment… when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Well, a lot of us worked for it, fought for it, and believed in it, only to now have to tell our children that this was the moment we let them down, for they–not us–are the ones who are going to pay the terrible price. Destructive policies are destructive policies, regardless of who implements them. When President George W. Bush did some of the same things President Barack Obama did while in office (like warrantless surveillance of American citizens), Bush was excoriated by Democrats. Yet because Obama had a “D” behind his name (like President Bill Clinton before him), he was largely given a pass by Democrats for his political transgressions. This is putting party fealty over principle.
Not knowing how else to constructively channel my ire, I penned a lengthy response in the Huffington Post titled, “Obama’s Climate Action Plan: Not Even Close.” My point-by-point critique dissected the president’s speech, pointing out that buried in the prose was the promise of climate chaos made worse by methane fracking, mountaintop removal mining, tar sands exploitation, and offshore and Arctic oil drilling, with the specter of even more radioactive nuclear power plants.
This incident explains, as well as anything, my disillusionment with so much of the “environmental” movement today, a social movement I strongly identified with for most of my adult life. My university degree is in Environmental Conservation, after all. But these days, too many mainstream green groups too often act like extensions of the Democratic Party. Not so much their members, but the bureaucratic institutions themselves. In her best-selling book, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein pinpoints the problem as green groups having gotten too “comfortable with their access to power and generous support from large, elite foundations” that prefer incremental change to systems change. What began as a grassroots bipartisan people’s movement in the 1970s has become too much of an elite, partisan insider’s game when what is needed most right now is a post-partisan citizens movement not beholden to either political party. It is not enough to give the Republican Party hell for its climate insanity. The Democratic Party must also be held to account for its climate inanity.
Writing about the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster (an underwater gusher that riveted the nation for 87 days), former Green Jobs Advisor to President Obama, Van Jones, recounts in his book, Rebuild the Dream, how activists blew it during the early years of the Obama administration: “There are few moments when the world is riveted by a cause, when the public and political elites might listen to arguments afresh. It is political malpractice for social-change advocates not to seize those moments… that failure highlighted a lack of healthy independence on the part of the environmental community. It mirrored a similar weakness throughout the progressive movement. People were so enthralled with Obama that very few progressive leaders, organizations, or institutions were willing to challenge him publicly, even when the health of the planet was at stake.” I respect how Jones then adds this brutally honest mea culpa: “I include myself in that indictment.”
In 2014, Brad Johnson, Executive Director of the group Climate Hawks Vote, proffered a different diagnosis for the Obama administration’s climate policies: climate schizophrenia. Obama is far from the only Democrat suffering from this condition, but Johnson’s blog focused on him: “The first law of climate policy is that global warming won’t stop until we stop burning fossil fuels. As long as our policy elites attempt to address global warming while appeasing the fossil-fuel industry, all they can achieve is the appearance of insanity. We are now entering the era of climate schizophrenia… President Obama is the most prominent climate schizophrenic today. His self-defeating climate policy describes global warming as an existential threat to be solved by increasing fossil fuel production.” That same year, Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, went so far as to honestly declare “climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” only to then turn around and promote policies he knew would fail to disarm that weapon of mass destruction. Johnson is not the only one to use this term. James Hansen in 2015 similarly described U.S. climate and energy policy as “schizophrenic, if not suicidal.” Exhibit A was President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, where he bragged that “America is number one in oil and gas,” before declaring that “no challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.”
Days after the Paris climate accord was adopted in 2015, President Obama signed into law a bill repealing a 40-year ban on crude oil exports, paving the way for a 750% increase in oil exports and opening the floodgates to more fossil fuel burning worldwide, all while his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was busy promoting methane fracking to the world. As reported in The Guardian, Obama’s U.S. Export-Import Bank “signed almost $34bn worth of low-interest loans and guarantees to companies and foreign governments to build, expand and promote fossil fuel projects abroad… about three times more financing than the taxpayer-backed bank provided during George W Bush’s two terms, and almost twice the amount financed… under the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton – combined.”
Again, giving credit where credit is due, the president issued an executive order in 2015 to “cut the Federal Government’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 40 percent over the next decade… and increase the share of electricity the Federal Government consumes from renewable sources to 30 percent,” which was not nothing. Other actions taken during his second term included imposing higher fuel-efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks and issuing a host of executive orders, including one to prepare the U.S. for climate impacts and another to improve our resilience to flooding. He also awarded tens of millions of dollars to workforce development projects to help workers and communities in coal country move beyond coal. He took his biggest swing against the carbon economy with his 2015 Clean Power Plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 32% by 2030, but few seem to remember this was mostly about replacing coal plants with plants run on the even more potent greenhouse gas, methane. Lest you think I am being overly critical, climate guru James Hansen described Obama’s Clean Power Plan as “practically worthless.” In 2017, he opined: “The Clean Power Plan will be Obama’s legacy – a tiny short-term dent that at best encouraged widened use of natural gas. Some legacy! Obama blew the enormous opportunities that he had, both early and late.”
Nor does Barack Obama seem to have been cured of his climate confusion since leaving office. When Obama was asked during a 2018 event at Rice University what he most wants people to remember about his presidential legacy, the three policy initiatives he cited were Obamacare (which Biden famously, and appropriately, called “a big fucking deal”), the Paris climate accord (which we will analyze later in this book), and record levels of fossil fuel production: “You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas – that was me, people." Mere weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its bombshell report warning the world that only 12 short years remained to slash fossil fuel emissions to avert climate catastrophe, our former president was still bragging about everything he had done to ramp up those emissions.
I share this history because America has a notoriously short institutional memory and an even shorter attention span. There is a reason why we are sometimes called the United States of Amnesia. I share it because we wasted eight precious years hoping President Obama would change, while the climate did change–for the worse–leaving us in greater jeopardy than when he first assumed office. I offer it as a cautionary tale to remind us that we will never get to where we need to go without an honest appraisal of where we have been. I share it because too many “environmentalists” are too easily lulled to sleep when a Democrat is in the White House. It serves no one to pretend that President Obama was a climate leader. He was nothing of the sort. The most generous description of Obama’s climate legacy would be failure to act.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.