No question about it, the environmental implications of Tuesday’s election on environmental policy are huge, given the stark contrast between the two candidates.
Remember, defeated challenger Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, had promised to put control over energy development on federal lands in the hands of the states; he said he’d end what he called a “war on coal,” by seeking to reverse new federal rules on air pollution and mining; and he mocked the president’s concern about global climate change at the Republican national convention, while flipping back and forth on the issue and in the end, calling for more debate.
President Obama and his family last night. Credit: Getty Images.
The re-elected President Barack Obama never really made the environment a big issue in his campaign and certainly stopped talking much about climate change. And environmentalists have not warmly welcomed the president’s embrace of new natural gas drilling techniques, called fracking, that are fundamentally changing our energy future by making natural gas more abundant, and cheaper than coal, while potentially risking water quality.
But Obama, who has pressed for cleaner air from power plants and has taken aggressive and controversial actions to reduce water pollution from Appalachian coal mining, had the support of many environmentalists. Reaction to his victory this morning shows he’ll have their continued support, even as some of those policies are challenged by industries and governors including Kentucky’s Steve Beshear, and argued in the courts.
Gov. Mitt Romney at last-minute campaign event. Credit: Getty Images.
“Americans have returned a clean energy champion to the White House, but they didn’t stop there,” writes Heather Taylor-Miesle, director of the NRDC Action Fund, in a blog posting this morning. ”All the way down the ticket, voters overwhelmingly favored candidates who support clean energy, clean air, and strong public health safeguards.
“This is victory for everyone who likes to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and it is a resounding defeat for polluters and the dirty agenda they tried to sell to voters.”
Regarding climate change, the results of the election keep in office a president who, while giving up on major climate legislation during his first term, has pushed the country toward reduced climate pollution through rule-making. Obama enacted stringent fuel-efficiency standards and the EPA is poised to make it impossible to build new coal-fired power plants without an efficient strategy to manage carbon dioxide emissions, such as capturing them and injecting them deep into the ground for permanent storage.
Fred Krupp, president the Environmental Defense Fund, congratulated the president and said:
We look forward to working with them to solve our country’s most pressing environmental problems, including global climate change. As the President declared last night, ‘We want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.’
He went on to say that Superstorm Sandy, with the $50 million in destruction it caused in the days leading up the election, “demonstrated that doing nothing about climate change is much costlier than taking action,” adding that “this issue clearly should be a top priority for our leaders in government.”
To be sure, the climate change science on Sandy is not certain, but it’s just one more example of another extreme weather event coming at a time when scientists warn us that global warming will only bring us more extreme weather.
While the environment rarely is seen as a decisive issue in a presidential race, this election clearly is a reminder that elections matter, even as many people like to complain there’s no difference between our two major political parties. Those people often don’t look close enough at the issues like the environment, which used to have much more bipartisan support but now has become something of a political litmus test.
