Will Climate Change Get Cold Shoulder in Obama's 2nd Term?

As President Barack Obama prepares to take the oath of office for the second time, he has promised that climate change will be a priority in his second term. The chances that significant climate action will actually happen, however, remain slim, policy experts say.

"I always have hope, but it is sometimes hard to see how real progress, substantial progress, is going to be made with the fact that the Congress is so polarized," said Travis Franck, a policy analyst for nongovernmental organization Climate Interactive.

After his re-election, Obama told Time magazine that his daughters inspired him to think long term, particularly about issues of climate change. And in his first news conference after the election, the president told reporters that he planned to shape a climate change agenda, but gave no details on what that agenda might look like — though he did say that a tax on carbon emissions was likely a non-starter.

These statements took place before the massacre at Newtown, Conn., which pushed gun control to the forefront. And climate change will surely have to vie for attention with other divisive issues, such as an upcoming congressional battle over the nation's debt ceiling. While Obama may be able to take some executive action to tighten environmental regulations in certain sectors, such as fuel-efficient vehicles or clean energy, experts say, a gridlocked Congress is unlikely to cooperate with the administration's global warming agenda. 

"From my point of view, being an observer from Europe, I think it's more likely this sector-by-sector approach is implemented than a national climate policy," said Niklas Höhne, the director of energy and climate policy at Ecofys, a renewable energy and climate policy consulting firm. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

An urgent call for action

Obama's second term comes at a time when climate scientists are making increasingly urgent calls for action to mitigate the effects of a warming world. In November, University of Bern, Switzerland, climate researcher Thomas Stocker warned in the journal Science that every year of delay makes it harder to keep warming below levels that would severely disrupt the planet.

A cap of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of warming, the most conservative goal discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, is already out of reach, Stocker wrote. After 2027, the world can no longer hope to keep warming below 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C), which is the number currently at the center of international climate negotiations.

The World Bank also issued a report in November, calling for global action on climate change. And in January, a study published in the journal Nature found that the biggest determiner of whether the world would successfully tackle climate change is not tech savvy or hoped-for green development, but the timing of political action.

Public opinion appears receptive to climate change as well. About 73 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 33 percent of Republicans say they are somewhat or very worried about climate change, according to a September 2012 survey of Americans by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Support for action was higher. Three-quarters of independents, 93 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans said global warming should be at least a medium priority for the president and Congress. Severe weather such as the summer's wildfires out west may have shifted these opinions, as the same numbers in March 2012 (before the fires) were 9 points lower for Democrats and 7 points lower for independents. Republicans held steady between March and September.

Challenges in Congress

The party schisms seen in the polling data are more pronounced in Congress, where representatives routinely deny the scientific consensus that climate is changing and that greenhouse gas emissions by humans are the main driver.

"I'm not going to bet the U.S. economy or the Texas economy on a theory that is not proven," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) told the Dallas Morning News this month. "Climate has always been changing." [Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Attitudes like Barton's are why climate policy specialists expect little in the way of climate legislation in the upcoming four years.

The administration can make some progress on its own, said Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Climate Interactive. In Obama's first term, for example, the administration ordered new fuel standards for lightweight vehicles and coal-fired power plants, and there was money included in the economic stimulus for public transportation and clean energy. Similar efforts in the second term could move the country toward lower carbon emissions, Sawin told LiveScience.

"Anything is better than nothing," she said.

But a piecemeal approach is less likely than an overarching plan to succeed in slowing warming significantly, Franck, the policy analyst for Climate Interactive, said. Moreover, a failure to act nationally puts the administration in an awkward spot in international negotiations. The 2011 climate talks in Durbin, South Africa, set a plan for a new international climate treaty to be prepared by 2015.

"We've lost a lot of credibility in climate change negotiations, because we've been kind of paralyzed," Franck told LiveScience. "If [international negotiators] bring home a treaty or agree to something, when does it get ratified by the Senate? Will we have domestic legislation already? Will the Senate pass it and then we'll have to pass domestic legislation?"

If the Obama administration is stuck with instituting piecemeal regulations, it will be a "major challenge" to communicate this progress to the international community, Höhne told LiveScience.

"The international climate negotiations really depend on the U.S. bringing something forward," he said. "If the U.S. doesn't bring something forward that is considered by most players as something new and something ambitious, then the new international agreement in 2015 will not be ambitious."

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Is Obama's Commercial Space Plan for NASA About to Take a Wrong Turn? (ContributorNetwork)

One of the warmest supporters of the Obama commercial crew program has sounded the alarm that it may be about to go off the rails. Clark Lindsey, a blogger who champions commercial space, had this to say:

"Unfortunately, there are signs that NASA management may find its own way to undermine the commercial crew program. The statement from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation this week hints that there are moves within NASA to run CCDev not in the commercial services approach taken with COTS, and to a great extent by the USAF with the EELV program, but in the standard NASA top-down, sub-contractor procurement mode. This will bring in a huge array of rules and procedures that will drive costs up and up."

Lindsey goes on to speculate in the comments section of his post that entrepreneurial companies such as SpaceX may want to pull out of the commercial crew plan altogether rather than have to operate under NASA rules.

The statement that Lindsey quotes, which urges a more commercial approach to acquiring space launch services, does seem to hint that NASA may be considering a more traditional NASA/contractor regime to manage the commercial crew program. This would defeat the purpose of doing a commercial space effort, turning SpaceX and other entrepreneurial space companies into another Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

Lindsey's warning is just the latest wrinkle in the debate over the Obama approach to commercial space, which expanded the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems program, by offering massive subsidies, starting at almost six billion dollars, but perhaps more if necessary. However, if Lindsey's scenario pans out, the old adage that those who accept government money, also has to accept government rules will once again be proven.

One of the reasons for this seems to stem from who in the Obama administration are making the decisions. In contrast to the previous Bush administration, the current regime has a conspicuous lack of people with actual business experience. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and even NASA Administrator Mike Griffin all had run businesses and met payrolls. They knew how businesses work and how the government could either help or stifle them. Neither President Obama, Science Czar John Holdren, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, nor NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver has any experience running a private company.

Inevitable the Obama people have reverted to the mind-set that government knows best and that it can direct business rather than taking a hands-off approach and allow the commercial sector to do what it does best, provide goods and services at a good price.

One of the other problems with the Obama approach is that there seems to be a lack of encouragement to the commercial space sector to nurture private markets for human space launch services. I, in contrast to the approach taken to build the EELV family of rockets, this is by deliberate design. Obama's people fear that just as a lot of private markets did not materialize for the EELV, private markets for commercial crew, such as space tourism or servicing private space stations like the one planned by Bigelow Aerospace, will not come to fruition. Thus the government is the primary investor and the sole customer for commercial space under the Obama plan.

One possible way out of this is to pass an idea called "Zero Taxes, Zero Gravity" that creates an enterprise zone in space in which goods and services created there would not be taxed. Thus would private markets be created and the commercial space sector would not be so dependent on the government for income.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.

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