The official oral history is mostly still unreleased, but Columbia has just put out a special preview of 17 interviews related to climate and the environment. And even though, predictably, it’s full of people praising Obama’s statesmanship and humility and wisdom and so forth, it also reinforces what critics have said for years: Obama mostly did not take the climate crisis seriously until far too late in his presidency, and activists had to fight him tooth and nail on issues where anyone who cared about the fate of the planet should have been on their side to begin with. Bill McKibben, in an interview for the project, has a damning verdict: “No matter how much I liked him, it was very clear he could care less about any of this stuff at some deep level, and wasn’t willing to sacrifice—suffer any political pain in order to raise the issue.”
It became clear early on in Obama’s presidency, McKibben says, that the administration felt it only had enough “political capital” to deal with healthcare, and so climate change fell by the wayside. “I don’t think there was any real hope that we were going to see significant climate action out of at least the first-term Obama administration,” McKibben says. Frances Beinecke of the National Resources Defense Council says that “We wanted climate to be on a par, and it wasn’t,” citing a relative lack of White House effort on even weak clean energy legislation. In his interview for the project, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu confirms that “a decision was made in the first year to concentrate on healthcare. At which the president took me aside and said, ‘Look, I know I said energy and healthcare, but next year; energy is next.’” McKibben explains why this approach of kicking the can down the road on climate was so infuriating to those who understood the nature of the problem:
“The thing to remember about climate change, and the reason that Obama’s failures on it and things are important, is because climate change, unlike every other political issue we’ve ever faced, is a timed test. … [O]nce you’ve melted the Arctic, no one’s got a plan for how to freeze it again. So that was always in my mind, and my impatience with Obama and many others on this front is that I think they tended to group it with other problems that they faced, and think about it in the same way that they thought about other things, as one item on a checklist.”
Chu, whose opinion of Obama is positive throughout, nevertheless quietly admits that Obama didn’t put much effort into trying to mobilize political support on climate:
I think, in terms of talking and dealing with Congress on the energy side, the president was more hands off—in my opinion. I’m not a historian. But looking back at how people deal with Congress, I would say, LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson] is probably the most effective person. He was not afraid of browbeating people with a very strong will. And I think President Obama was almost the opposite, very gentlemanly: “Okay, I told you the facts. You’re reasonable people. You’re going to come to some conclusion.” … He was less connected with Congress than I would have hoped. … I remember this line in [the Spielberg film] Lincoln where Abraham Lincoln says, “I am cloaked in the immense authority of the president.” He wasn’t above shaking down people. He wasn’t above offering patron jobs, postmaster jobs, things like that, to get the Thirteenth Amendment. … [T]o shake down and use the power of the presidency to really garner votes was something I wish [Obama] had done more of. He was too much of a gentleman, too standoffish about that.