The Winter of Our Discontent
originally posted 1/29/09
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lowered about our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
To complain that President Barack Obama is not serious enough aboutclimate strikes most U.S. environmentalists as strange, almostincomprehensible behavior. This is a time for celebration and newbeginnings and any small doubts we harbor are easily assuaged by ourconfidence in the man who is president. Those who are not swept up inthe new optimism seem small -- either nit-pickers of detail who missthe big picture (what did he mean by "harness the sun and the winds andthe soil"?) or the Gloster's of our victory -- cramped and parsimonious in spirit, prone to petty grievance.
Our feelings now are in accord with our conduct over the lastdecade and more. We are always optimistic, it is our nature. Whenpoliticians send mixed signals we embrace the positive and accept thetroubling as pragmatic, necessary concessions. When offered half a loafwe take it and proclaim ourselves full.
But this is no compromise to be swallowed, is it? After eight yearsin the wilderness, we look out onto a playing field dominated byPresident Obama, House Speaker Pelosi, Senator Boxer, and CongressmanMarkey, and we see immense promise. In Obama's majestic inauguraladdress we heard climate mentioned, then mentioned again, and again,and, "he gets it!" we thought. This is what we endured for, this iswhat we campaigned hard for, and the sweetness in the D.C. air is moreglorious than we had imagined.
Except for three things:
- The time-line for climate action has been cut to four years.
- The Democratic plan of action is utterly inadequate.
- Climate is a second-tier problem for President Obama.
Were any one of these things not the case, we would face a verydifferent prospect. If we had more time (enough to aim for fundamentalchange in a second-term Obama administration), if we had a true,functional, global solution on the table to advance, or if PresidentObama defined the paramount objective for the nation and his presidencyby staving off global cataclysm, then U.S. environmentalists would havea point of leverage and reason to admit a small measure of optimism.
To expect that President Obama will address the crisis, but neithercome to terms with the climate time-line, re-design the solution, orfocus the nation on this single risk, is a willing suspension ofdisbelief, turning politics into a movie where presidents have powersas fantastical as movie kung fu.
It is our job to define the terms of conflict within whichpoliticians maneuver. If we are to do this -- the only other option isto wait until climate impacts become severe, which is certainly toolate -- we must first break our own way out of the three-sided box ofself-reinforcing, self-deceptive policy. That can only occur bymounting a serious challenge to orthodox thinking within our majororganizations and the private foundations that underwrite climateprogram. There is no time to build an alternative institution, nor cancurrent approaches be simply bypassed by faster campaigning. Theworldview of incremental change, accommodation to immoral behavior, andmoderation in the face of fossil-fuel blitzkrieg must be demolished.