Saturday, January 4, 2014

Jonathan Chait — Obama’s Second Term Is All About Climate Change

When President Obama leaves office three years from now, the major policy story of his second term — barring some kind of unforeseen invasion — is likely to be climate change. I made this argument at feature length last year, and the evidence continues to mount. Coral Davenport reports today about Secretary of State John Kerry’s “systematic, top-down push to create an agencywide focus on global warming.”

Kerry is a longtime climate obsessive. (Ten years ago, I attended an off-the-record discussion with Kerry alongside several journalists, and our main takeaway was that he understood and cared about climate change more than any other issue.) His appointment to run the State Department is one of several Obama second-term moves that signal the high priority he assigns the issue. This is true not only of the figures Obama has appointed to posts that inherently concern climate change, like the his green appointees to run the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, but also to general political advisers, like Denis McDonough and John Podesta, both committed environmentalists who will drive Obama’s climate focus.
New York Magazine
Obama’s Second Term Is All About Climate Change
Jonathan Chait

5 comments:

mike norman said...

That's why he'll approve Keystone I guess? !@#$%^

Dan Lynch said...

Obama uses climate change as an excuse to push uranium/plutonium nuclear power. Beware of a trojan horse bearing more nuclear plants.

Ryan Harris said...

If you put yourself in the shoes of a US Oil exploration or production company and you saw that Canadian crude was abundant and getting more abundant while selling at a $30-40/bbl discount to west texas, brent or gulf crude, would you be pressuring your man, Obama/Kerry to build the keystone or stop the keystone?

A refiner might want the pipeline, to get the price lower, but I suspect most everyone else from Berkshire to BP, Sierra Club to Chesapeake, Ingersoll to US Steel aren't real thrilled about getting prices down at the Houston/Louisiana refining centers. It reduces the value of the wells, their production and their investments. That reduces drilling and production and transportation.

Just saying that the argument and divide isn't coming from little screaming kids with signs and environmentalists as the Republicans make it sound. There is big money behind both sides of the argument, the rhetoric and theatrics are a smoke screen for the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. Pipelines in Canada are being blocked in all directions, not just Keystone to the south.

If I had to bet on the global politics, I see the real arm-wrestle, as Saudi-OPEC blocking Canadian pipelines and China ineptly trying to push it through.


googleheim said...

Good analysis folks.

I just found an article by Mike Norman on Motley Fool.

The price of oil is controlled by the banks derivatives departments including morgan stanley.

The banks will decide the keystone issue and no one else.

MMT purports that the USD dollar is a sovereign currency, happily enjoying monopoly.

However, not so if the USD is conttolled by derivative markets ..

You can only make real experiential analysis if and only if you take Mike Norman's MMT forex course and see how convoluted the commodity markets really are.

googleheim said...

The vapor trails the banks will create once they suck the monies out of the Fed and Tsy to make the keystone happen .. if and when they decide ... will be evidenced by the FLOWS that we need to be watching not want the talking heads think.