Obama’s
bid to save the world
It’s no accident the
president rejected the Keystone pipeline before he seals a global
deal to combat climate change.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
11/7/15, 3:56 PM CET
Fire up Air Force One.
President Barack Obama’s headed to Paris to try to save the world.
He’s trying to get big
countries to agree to big concessions.
After a year of
quiet diplomacy ahead of next month’s 190-country climate change
conference, Obama took the most public, contested step yet in his
second-term transformation into the greenest of U.S. presidents:
rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline.
The project, which
waited seven years for a verdict, assumed outsize importance for both
sides, Obama said. It wouldn’t do the environmental damage that
greens warned of, but it also wouldn’t do much to build American
jobs or change the country’s energy resources math, as proponents
argued.
But by the time he
was wrapping up his remarks Friday morning in the Roosevelt Room,
Obama pivoted away from chiding environmentalists and Republicans to
argue that Keystone XL was important in a different way: “Approving
this project would have undercut our global leadership on climate.”
The president and
his aides repeatedly talked about the decision Friday in terms of
global leadership. That global leadership, Obama confirmed after
months of speculation, is going to take him to France right after
Thanksgiving for the Paris climate talks, where he will try to seal
what would be the biggest, most significant international agreement
on combating carbon emissions and climate change — arguably bigger
and longer lasting than anything else he or anyone else has ever done
in office.
“If we want to
prevent the worst effects of climate change, the time to act is now,”
Obama said. “Not later. Not someday. Right now.”
There’s a clear
connection between the Keystone decision and Paris, White House press
secretary Josh Earnest added later in the day.
The United States is
uniquely positioned to convince other countries to take steps to
combat climate change.
“It seems obvious
to me that the authors of this report were mindful of the upcoming
international meeting to discuss climate change,” Earnest said.
Asked whether the
president sees himself as saving the world, Earnest suppressed a
laugh.
“I think what the
president sees himself trying to do is continue to mobilize the
international community to respond to the urgent threat that is posed
by climate change,” Earnest said, adding that “this is one of
those situations [where] … the United States is uniquely positioned
to convince other countries to take steps to combat climate change.”
Nothing Obama’s
done yet as president compares in scale to the climate talks. The
Iran nuclear agreement is a landmark achievement, but it’s focused
on one unhinged regime threatening one region of the world. The White
House spent the last day being pummeled for admitting the obvious,
that it wasn’t actively pursuing an Israeli-Palestinian peace
process during the rest of Obama’s term, but those are just two
countries. Obamacare’s changed the health of millions of people,
but that’s millions, not billions, and just in the United States.
Climate change
affects everyone, everywhere, and that’s how they think about it in
the White House. Securing real movement to stop it would make Obama
not just a world leader, but a leader of the world. This is securing
the planet, and redirecting the course of billions of lives, and
Obama’s been talking more and more in those kind of bigger terms
and the position that puts him in.
Not insignificantly,
if Obama gets his way, he’ll also reverse one of the most
embarrassing moments of his own presidency, when he rushed to
Copenhagen in March 2009 for an eleventh-hour speech urging the world
to sign an agreement at the last big climate conference, only to have
the speech knocked for its halfheartedness and the talks collapse
right after he gave it.
Not this time. The
Keystone XL pipeline, a State Department official said, was “a test
of U.S. resolve” that will make an agreement in Paris now easier to
get. The pipeline itself isn’t a big deal, the official said, but
rejecting it will encourage countries all over the world to cut short
their own projects.
“It’s absolutely
true that the perception of U.S. leadership on climate change, the
perception of what this president and this administration have been
doing and the resolve they’ve been showing, has been enormously
important to the U.S. posture internationally,” the official said.
Paris has been a
constant and growing theme for the White House over the course of
this year, part of all the domestic conversations about new
environmental executive actions, a topic on the table every time
Obama’s traveled abroad or welcomed a world leader to the White
House. He’s trying to get big countries to agree to big
concessions, and little countries to believe that they won’t get
shafted by the big countries making promises and not following
through.
“We view this as
an opportunity,” a senior administration official said at the White
House late last month. “This is a significant undertaking, and
obviously the president is devoting a lot of his time and energy and
political capital to this issue.”
What happened in
Copenhagen is still a sore topic for White House officials, but what
they like to stress is that the agreement that they’re hoping to
get now is both bigger and better — and might actually get done:
forward-looking, with a more specific framework, and starting with
China and the United States on close to the same page.
To secure all of
that, the administration official said, “the United States was
going to need to act domestically in a way that was seen as credible
and as commensurate to our role in the global economy and our role in
addressing this issue.”
What will actually
come out of Paris isn’t clear. Obama, Pope Francis and other world
leaders — with cooperation from major players, including the
Chinese president, Indian prime minister and German chancellor —
have helped create enough momentum that most people expect the talks
to produce at least some kind of agreement. But officials involved
have already gotten squishy in talking about how binding it would be,
how much in emissions it would actually cut, what kind of progress
would count as success. Few expect anymore the original goal of an
agreement to guarantee that would reduce global temperatures by 2
degrees.
Even the absolute
best case, of course, would only be an agreement, with follow-through
that won’t be clear until long after Obama’s out of office.
The worst case isn’t
out of their minds at the White House either. Unlike Copenhagen,
Obama’s going to Paris for the beginning of the conference — that
way he can have the spotlight of urging the world to action but keep
the insurance policy of being safely back in Washington in case the
talks collapse again.
In the scale of what
the White House is hoping to achieve, the political attacks that came
in over the decision didn’t add up to much.
“This decision
isn’t surprising, but it is sickening,” said House Speaker Paul
Ryan (R-Wis.). “If the president wants to spend the rest of his
time in office catering to special interests, that’s his choice to
make. But it’s just wrong.”
The people involved
in the decision didn’t seem too worried.
“It is a critical
time for climate change,” the State Department official said. “The
test of U.S. resolve is most clearly when decisions come down the
pipe that are hard ones.”
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