First published 13 February 2009; updated 16 December 2009
Several weeks ago an environmental educator and scientist who works in the U.S. sent around an email that celebrated the changes being introduced by the Obama administration. The scientist suggested that things were already looking up, what with real scientists being appointed to high places. As he put it at the beginning of his email, ‘Imagine! National scientific organizations headed by scientists again!!’
The educator was certainly not alone in looking forward to a more hopeful time. Something like a collective sigh of relief could be heard amongst most environmental educators across the globe on the day that Obama beat McCain. Obama’s victory was widely interpreted as the end of the road for what may well go down as the most ideologically-driven presidency since Nixon. Under Bush, big business was given concession after concession at the expense of a variety of local environmental concerns, but also at the expense of the increasingly urgent matter of climate change policy.
The cartoonesque image of an ostrich with a Bush-like head buried in the sand would have been appropriate were it not for the fact that there is ample evidence that the Bush administration engaged in all manner of back-room strategies to undermine the work of scientists with bona fide research—research about climate change, and also about a host of other subjects that Bush and his increasingly hard right-wing advisers regarded as being ‘politically sensitive’. Little wonder that just two years after Bush had taken office, Donald Kennedy was speaking in the Science magazine of ‘an epidemic of politics’ in a variety of science institutions (1).
Over the past few weeks, some have tried to find the silver lining in the Bush administration’s toxic cloud. For example, just this week an article in the International Herald Tribune tried to argue that ‘even those who view [Bush’s] environmental record most harshly acknowledge that he also took significant action. He improved air quality, gave renewable energy a large financial boost, left behind the largest marine sanctuaries ever established and started a dialogue that could help lead to the next international treaty on climate change’(2). This is a sweeping generalisation that is almost certainly false for that very reason. But more to the point, it is a bit like arguing that Bush deserves credit for ‘pacifying’ Iraq; not only is that not true, but its consequentialist logic misses the fundamental issues regarding the illegality of the war, the subterfuge that was employed to launch it, and its disastrous consequences for the country’s people, if not for the entire region.
There is, then, good reason to look forward to a significant shift in the new administration’s policies, and certainly there is some evidence that such a shift is already under way: witness, for example, the naming of competent officials such as Jane Lubchenco to head NOAA and Steven Chu as head for the Department of Energy. Witness also the repealing of a raft of Bush administration measures in areas such as drilling in Utah and in the operation of coal-fired plants. At least by mid-February 2009, it also seemed true that Obama was making ‘all the right noises’ in regard to the urgency of taking swift action on specific climate change policy.
After recognising these positive aspects, it is pertinent to make the case for an even greater vigilance, and more environmental activism during the Obama presidency. There are three general reasons for this. The most obvious is the extreme urgency of swift change regarding climate change policies. Dr James Hansen put the time frame starkly into perspective when he said in an interview for the UK’s Observer that ‘We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead’(3). Early today, Prof James McCarthy echoed this idea in the BBC News website (4).
There are, however, two additional, and somewhat less obvious reasons for both goading the Obama administration into action, and scrutinizing its policies more carefully than ever. The first of these has to do with the ideological consequences of what might be described as the ‘post-Bush effect’. Put simply, Bush’s administration was so driven by a right-wing ideology that it may seem that Obama has only to ‘be Obama’ to do a far better job. Such complacency is not only disingenuous, but dangerous. As the time-scale proposed by Hansen and McCarthy makes clear, nothing short of a revolutionary set of policies will address the environmental crisis; in such a context, just ‘being Obama’ is unlikely to be enough.
This leads us to another reason for being critical vis-à-vis the Obama administration’s policies. If it is true that Obama has made the right noises with respect to the environment, a careful reading of many of his policies in other areas, and the team of advisers that he has assembled suggests a president that will be willing to go a long ways in appeasing the Republicans, or rather, the alliance of lobbies that represent the interests of neoliberal institutions. Beyond the extraordinary nomination of Robert Gates as Defence Secretary, it is highly significant, for example, that Obama named Timothy F. Geithner as his Treasury Secretary. Geithner was the former president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and is reported to have played a leading role in trying to manage the financial crisis. It seems clear, on the one hand, that Geithner was not very effective in that role. But even if he was, it is revealing that, according to the New York Times, Geithner ‘largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president’(5). It would appear, in this sense, that in the U.S. as in Britain, politicians are still promoting some of the very people who were most closely associated, by action or inaction, with the neoliberal excesses in the finance sector. This seems not only disingenuous, but manifestly wrong from the point of view of potential conflicts of interest. Some might even argue that it is a recipe for the kind of corruption imputed to the Bush administration, and in Britain, to New Labour.
By way of an aside, it is remarkable to note how consistently most of the media are trying to either downplay, or reconcile the presence of such ancien régime figures with Obama’s signature call for change. To quote just two examples in the New York Times, the paper argued in its background information pages that the new Commerce Secretary, Judd Gregg, was ‘chairman of the budget committee from 2005 to 2007 and is known as a fiscal conservative. He could help President Obama by capitalizing on his relationships with fellow Republicans as well as his contacts in the business community(6). Ken Salazar, the new Interior Secretary is concerned, was described by the Times as follows: ‘A few environmental groups may fault him for his pragmatism, and some within the oil and gas industry may disagree with his cautious stance, like favoring a phased approach to opening Colorado’s Roan Plateau to drilling’(7). Again and again, the presence of such figures is represented as a kind of show of strength on the part of Obama, a kind of ‘broad tent’ approach that is able to include, rather than exclude, the opposition. Perhaps it is true that, at least to start with, Obama can simply not afford to ignore the ‘coalition of the right’ in the US and beyond. But the suspicion has to be that the presence of people like Gates, Geithner and of course Gregg may yet be proven to be a sign of Obama’s own conservatism—a conservatism acutely analysed by Gabriel Paquette in the Guardian [8]. More generally, it may also be a sign of the continued hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of this term, of the neoliberal lobby groups that have apparently already ensconced themselves in the new administration.
Far from having consequences for commerce or the economy alone, this ‘broad tent’ approach may mean that Obama will be as prone as the Clinton administration to engaging in the kind of political compromise that arguably led the U.S. to drift further and further to the right, and further and further into the ‘grey’ during the pre-Bush years. The paradox is that, however much Bush was (and remains) a hate figure amongst most if not all environmental activists, there was a terrible clarity about most of his policies, a clarity that more often than not made it possible for environmental activists to smell an environmental rat a mile away (apologies to Muroidea lovers). This did not always make it possible to stop the policies, but it did mean that environmentalists did not often have to spend a lot of political energy trying to unmask dynamics of ideological dissimulation.
With Obama, the situation may be reversed; it may be more feasible to stop some policies, or at least to mediate them, but their implications are likely to be far less obvious, and so potentially just as damaging if and when the neoliberals get their way. For this reason, environmental activists and environmental educators will need to fine-tune their critical faculties, and prepare for what is likely to be a four—or perhaps an eight—year struggle with Obama advisers who are apparently already proving effective at whispering sweet neoliberal nothings into Obama’s ear.
By way of a postscript: If this seems unduly pessimistic to liberal readers on either side of the pond, they might care to reflect on the misguided reception many Britons gave to New Labour, and to Tony Blair during his first years as prime minister.
Update, February 12, 2009, 22:25 GMT: news just in, Judd Gregg has declined the honour of being Obama’s Commerce Secretary. Is the ‘broad tent’ collapsing? Hardly—there are plenty of neoliberals amongst the Democrats. Is this a sign that perhaps Obama is less conservative than this blog has made him out to be? Let us wait and see who is next on Obama’s list of prospective Commerce Secretaries.
Update 16 December 2009
Nearly a year after this post was published, its warnings and predictions seem, if anything, naively restrained. The ‘environmental’ Obama that we have seen in action in the last months has not only proven to be conservative, but is now actively muddying the waters of climate change policy in Copenhagen. Obama is on his way to going down in history as the velvet claw of neoliberalism. He is to George W. Bush and Reaganite neoliberalism what Tony Blair was to the Thatcherite variety of neoliberalism.
References
1) See Science, 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, No. 5607, p. 625. Article available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5607/625, accessed August 24, 2007.
2) International Herald Tribune, February 7, 2009, ‘Obama sorting Bush’s environment legacy’, at http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/07/america/enviro.4-424718.php, accessed February 11, 2009.
3) The Observer, January 18, 2009,‘We have only four years left to act on climate change – America has to lead’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-climate-change, accessed February 11, 2009.
4) BBC News online, February 12, 2009, ‘Obama “must act now” on climate’, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7885036.stm, accessed February 12, 2009.
5) The New York Times, February 9, 2009, ‘Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout’, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/business/economy/10bailout.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Timothy%20Geithner&st=cse, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.
6) The New York Times, ‘Jud Gregg’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/judd-gregg, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.
7) The New York Times, ‘Ken Salazar’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/ken-salazar, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.
8] The Guardian, January 26, 2009 ‘Obama the Conservative’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jan/26/obama-conservative-progressive-agenda, accessed January 26, 2009.
