Obama’s record on the environment

Al Gore recently criticized Barack Obama — among many others — for the federal government’s record on climate change. In the pages of Rolling Stone, Gore commends some of Obama’s early moves, such as making the case that environmental security is inseparable from national security, but he concludes that the president has “failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change.”

Gore’s criticism challenges Obama’s environmental record heading into campaign season. To slightly tweak Ronald Reagan’s famous question to voters in 1980, are we greener than we were four years ago?

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This article originally appeared in Slate.

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There’s no easy answer, but a glance at three major areas of environmental concern — climate change, air pollution and protection of wild spaces — can provide some perspective.

Climate change

The good news is that, for the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane declined. By the EPA’s measurements, the total was 6.1 percent lower in 2009 than in 2008. That’s an enormous drop, considering that greenhouse-gas emissions had been increasing by 0.4 percent annually since 1990.

Unfortunately, the change is unquestionably a temporary dip rather than the beginning of a trend. The recession decreased energy demand, and a spike in coal prices drove electric utilities to natural gas, which emits less carbon per kilowatt-hour. These changes have little to do with the president’s environmental initiatives.

As Gore argues, the president’s record on climate change includes a smattering of substantial but not game-changing successes, plus one major failure. After the House passed cap-and-trade legislation, the president abandoned it as a long shot in the Senate, where opponents needed to muster only 41 votes to block the measure. As a result, Congress once again failed to systemically address carbon emissions. In June, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. Still, the EPA (an executive branch agency, though technically independent) has delayed regulating emissions for years, perhaps waiting for Congress to make a move.

The president has bragging rights to some piecemeal climate-change initiatives. The nation’s wind- and solar-power capacity increased 39 and 52 percent, respectively, from 2008 to 2009. Some of that is probably due to his decisions to extend tax credits and create a new grant program for residential renewable energy as part of the stimulus package. The administration also approved the nation’s first offshore wind farm.

The president raised fuel-economy standards for cars, and these regulations finally extend to light trucks. The rules don’t begin to take effect until 2012, so there’s no immediate impact on greenhouse-gas emissions. But the standards are expected to ease carbon emissions from cars by 21 percent by 2030 compared with what they would have been under the old rules. An agreement reached last week will create even stricter requirements by 2025.