Barack Obama is acting very much these days like a president with no more campaigns to wage.
He intends this week to announce sweeping strategies to combat climate change, which he apparently believes is manmade.
This debate is sure to fuel even more heated rhetoric from the climate-change-denial crowd. In a way, I understand – even if I disagree with – their argument. They suggest that climate change is some kind of grand political hoax, a conspiracy designed to wreck the fossil fuel industry. Never mind the mountains of scientific evidence that suggest that the planet is warming up. To my mind, the debate should not center on whether Earth is warming, but merely why.
President Obama plans to institute some executive orders soon, starting with plans to require reductions in emissions. Given that he cannot get much done in a Congress dominated in one legislative chamber by Republicans who oppose every single initiative Obama favors, he is left to exercise his considerable executive authority. Since the Constitution grants him the authority, he ought to use it.
The political realities for a first-term president are quite different from those of a second-term president who’s just been re-elected by a fairly comfortable margin.
I totally get that climate change is one of those divisive issues that drives a wedge between big blocs of Americans. A president seeking to win a second term must consider the fierce opposition that would come his way were he tackle climate change in any kind of dramatic fashion. Now, though, that President Obama is officially a lame duck with only his legacy to worry about, he’s looking and sounding like someone who suddenly has found himself unafraid of potential political consequences.
Climate change is a big deal, even if it isn’t caused by human beings spewing too much carbon dioxide into the air. It’s a big deal because if the oceans keep rising, we keep wiping out forests, we exacerbate circumstances that melt the polar ice caps, then the very planet all 7 billion of us inhabit is in deep peril.
The leader of the world’s pre-eminent nation is seeking to throw that trend into reverse.
You go, Mr. President.