President Barack Obama announced his final Clean Power Plan on Monday, which called for a 32 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 2030.
It is not enough.
The Clean Power Plan highlights the predicaments confronting the United States and the global community as the climate crisis deepens. While leaders like Obama openly recognize the existential threat that climate change presents, their actions are limited measures driven by a reform sensibility.
Handcuffed by domestic politics and his own liberal mindset, Obama is forced to rely on executive actions that curtail the scope of action and present legal uncertainties that compromise our abilities to negotiate a global treaty as well as slow the process of change to a snail’s pace. While eager to secure his legacy, Obama appears unwilling to fully utilize the political capital bequeathed by his not facing re-election by avoiding more radical approaches to climate change.
Despite being 1,560 pages long, the majority of the plan’s reforms are straightforward. Each state (except Vermont, because it does not have significant hydrocarbon fueled power plants, and Hawaii and Alaska, because of their particular circumstances) has a particular target for reducing emissions, which is set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Each state has liberty to decide how to meet the goal. State plans are due by 2018 and they have until 2022 to start cutting. The EPA uses a formula to set each state’s targets, and like all budgeting formulas they are loaded with assumptions about costs, future use of renewables, realized developments in technology, as well as intangibles like consumer behavior and future direction of the economy.
What is important here is that President Obama’s 32 percent reduction is not an across the board cut for each power plant or each state. Instead, that is the anticipated reduction that would result if each state meets its EPA determined reduction goal. So, we have a plan that depends on 47 plans working perfectly, something we may not be able to fully judge until the 2018 deadline for plan submission, or even by the 2022 deadline for cuts to start. At that point, it will be too late to adopt “Plan B.”
Obama’s plan comes at a critical juncture for the global community, as negotiators from the world’s nations frantically work to reach a functional text for the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris this December. Consensus holds that failure to reach a robust agreement in Paris will throw the planet into dire circumstances, as it would take another decade to once again position the global community for an agreement. By that time the planet would be well on its way to a species threatening global warming. Unlike the Copenhagen fiasco, the Paris negotiations show hints of progress, especially from the firmly stated national commitments to emission reductions. Obama’s Clean Power Plan potentially contributes to that progress, assuming it survives court challenges, uneven state action, resistance from a Republican Congress, and a possible Republican presidential victory in 2016. King Coal, the big loser in the plan, will put forward every effort to stop or delay the EPA rules. Too much is a stake for a plan to have uncertain outcomes.
However, the Clean Power Plan also illustrates the challenge of transitioning out of a civilization complex that was built upon and is entirely dependent upon hydrocarbons. They are the cheapest form of energy with the highest pay-off in work efficiencies in history. Substituting hydrocarbons for an alternative energy is an immense challenge, both in terms of technology and expense. As illustrated by the shale and fracking booms, we have decided it is far easier to remain hooked on hydrocarbons then transition to a new energy source. Obama’s Clean Power Plan is testament to this predicament, a measure of how deep the real crisis has become.
Lurking deeper within the Clean Power Plan is the act of existential denial that is our collective inability to confront the core truth of the 21st Century: capitalism is meeting its end through the gravedigger of the planetary ecosystem. Obama’s plan further reveals his continued embrace of capitalism. The Clean Power Plan, ironically, appears ignorant of the laws of thermodynamics that teach us that in a finite ecosystem such as our planet, a rule-set that uses the premise on infinite growth for how it uses the ecosystem will result in catastrophic collapse. The conflict between the ecosystem and capitalist economy has only three outcomes: the death of the ecosystem, the death of capitalism, or both.
The existential denial of the Clean Power Plan, however, is a reflection of the realities we face and which drive our planetary predicament. Even if he wanted to, Obama can’t have the EPA abolish capitalism. The best that can be done is reform, which is a futile measure given the dire need for radical change. Yet, reform only brings us closer to civilizational collapse.
The lessons from the Clean Power Plan suggest to us that the midwife of change increasingly appears to be systemic collapse as against our willful action. Designed to prevent the collapse, Obama’s plan does nothing to prepare us for collapse.
It is a fool’s errand.
Glen David Kuecker is a Professor of History at DePauw University.
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2 Comments
gov’t is an instrument of the rich and powerful.
if it had the capacity to act in the interest of anyone else, it would not exist; it has been, and always is, co-opted by the powers that be, to serve their interests at the expense of all others…expecting gov’t ‘leaders’ to act responsibly and rationally is a fool’s errand…kropotkin’s revolutionary pamphlets state this clearly…i see no reason to disagree with his assessment…
the ecosystem will not die; it is, however, in the process of changing, and will continue to do so at an accelerated pace, due mainly to certain humans’ predilection for absolutely irrational energy usage far beyond that which is necessary for sustenance and comfortable living…every household in the US contributes daily to our demise, as well as that of countless other species…we blame institutions, however, rather than radically reduce our own participation in this debacle…we are blind to our own folly, and so we shall perish…the ecosystem will continue on, without humans to contribute to it, or participate in it…
civilisation itself seems the fool’s errand…none have done it responsibly; we are merely the ultimate offenders…
“At a minimum, therefore, until and unless someone makes an overwhelming and unassailable case that equity, solidarity, self- management, diversity, and other desirable values unmet by current economic institutions are either (a) incapable of being delivered by different economic institutions, or (b) impossible to deliver without bringing with them horrible ills offsetting the benefits–attaining a better economy, and, more specifically, an alternative to markets and central planning, should be very much on the agenda. Still, the only definitive final refutation of Nove’s academic denial of a third way or of Thatcher’s emotive assertion that “there is no alternative,” even when such claims are made without serious rationale, is to present an actual third way itself. ”
You see Joseph, while you at least here acknowledge that your true belief is that we will all perish, primarily because of our stupidity, an element that the late great revolutionary composer Frank Zappa claimed was in far greater abundance across the universe than the primary element Hydrogen, you lack the decency of allowing us to go down fighting by trying to offer a sensible, clear, and coherent alternative other than some vague authoritarian dystopian form of primitivism on which you never really elaborate. Just because Derek Bailey knew he was to eventually “perish”, he never stopped playing and creating.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MMTnNanbMKE