Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

By Steve Horn - DeSmog Blog, June 5, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

On Friday May 30, just a few days before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced details of its carbon rule proposal, the Obama Administration awarded offshore oil leases to ExxonMobil in an area of the Gulf of Mexico potentially containing over 172 million barrels of oil.

The U.S. Department of Interior's (DOI) Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) proclaimed in a May 30 press release that the ExxonMobil offshore oil lease is part of “President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy to continue to expand safe and responsible domestic energy production.” 

Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell formerly worked as a petroleum engineer for Mobil, purchased as a wholly-owned subsidiary by Exxon in 1998.

Editorial - Socialist Worker, June 5, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s. The IWW is not affiliated with the International Socialist Organization.

THE CLIMATE crisis got some long-awaited attention from the Obama administration on June 2, when the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) released its plan to limit carbon pollution at power plants.

But while conservatives and the energy industry loudly denounced them, the administration's actual proposals--which among other things rely on states to decide how to meet new goals for lowering carbon emissions--aren't even close to what's necessary to start reversing the effects of burning fossil fuels.

"This is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose--we're glad the president has finally turned the water on, but it's just not enough to get the job done," said Kevin Bundy of the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute. Several environmental groups also criticized the plan as inadequate, including 350.org, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

That Obama's EPA did anything at all--after five and a half long years of inaction from the man who promised to make the environment a priority when he campaigned to become president--is because of increasing pressure from a sea change in public opinion about climate change and the devastating ecological crisis that is unfolding. An April poll by Yale Project on Climate Change Communication showed that those surveyed supported strict limits on carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired plants--"even if the cost of electricity to consumers and companies increases"--by a nearly a 2-to-1 margin.

The wider public concern about climate change has never been more urgent. But Barack Obama's emissions plan is nowhere close to what's needed--neither to meet the expectations of people who believed Obama would honor his campaign promises, nor to make significant progress against greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, Obama is content to largely leave the energy industry bosses the room to decide.

THE AIM of the administration's 645-page plan is to cut carbon pollution from power plants--with a particular emphasis on the country's 600 coal-fired plants--by 30 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030. This goal is supposed to make good on its promise at a 2010 United Nations climate conference.

But is that enough of a reduction? And is 2030 fast enough?

In May, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released its third National Climate Assessment and found further signs of the devastation that climate change is already causing. For instance:

• Sea levels have risen by eight inches since 1880, and it's estimated they will rise one to four feet by 2100.
• Flooding from climate change could cost as much as $325 billion by 2100, including more than $130 billion in Florida alone.
• 2001 to 2012 was warmer in every part of the country than any previous decade for a century.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," concluded the scientists who authored the report. But despite the immediacy of its own study, the latest proposal for emissions cuts goes slow.

"This plan is all about flexibility," said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. The 50 states will all have their own individual targets to meet, and they will be able to decide how meet them by choosing from a menu of some 50 options. So, for instance, state governments can close a coal plant and open a solar or wind facility--or they can choose the cap-and-trade system.

Carbon trading leaves decisions about how to limit carbon emissions up to the corporate polluters themselves--whose solutions unsurprising prioritize their bottom line. The practice of offsetting, for example, allows power plant operators to avoid reducing their own emissions if they can pay a forester or farmer to reduce their emissions instead.

The outcome: As Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter and Institute for Policy Studies Climate Policy Program Director Janet Redman wrote, "Power plants keep polluting, and the families living in their shadow continue to breathe toxic emissions. Communities near the polluters don't see any benefits from the supposed reduction in pollution taking place elsewhere."

So while Obama is claiming that his administration is finally getting tough on polluters, the plan will give state governments the leeway to accommodate the coal industry.