Judging by a sampling from print and online media, President Obama's two big January speeches defined the US outlook for climate technopolitics over the next few years. Now the president has nominated the physicist Ernest Moniz to lead the Department of Energy and Gina McCarthy of the Environmental Protection Agency to lead the EPA. News articles are showing that what the inauguration and state-of-the-union addresses foreshadowed is beginning to take shape.
Consider this opening paragraph from the Economist's report on the nominations:
"If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will," Barack Obama said last month in his state-of-the-union speech. "I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."
The Washington Post article "EPA, Energy Department can tackle climate change on several fronts" listed important measures that could be taken under executive authority: capping greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, stricter federal rules for natural gas methane emissions, tightening vehicle emissions, setting new energy efficiency standards, reducing global hydrofluorocarbon emissions and promoting clean energy.
The Economist piece suggested that the two nominations show the president "looking for more politically adroit ways to promote his energy policies than a straight fight." The administration might, for example, play opposing interests against each other by simultaneously approving the Keystone XL pipeline and adopting limits on power-plant emissions.
Adroitness to avoid a "straight fight"? Certainly some of the reporting and commentary foresees compromises and political progress, but some of it sees rancor.
A Wall Street Journal article announcing the nominations began by calling the pair "Washington veterans" nominated "in hopes of avoiding...rancor." But weeks earlier, a WSJ editorial had charged that the inauguration speech showed a president "less interested in bipartisan accommodation than in aggressively pursuing...progressive goals." With obtrusive scare quotes, it emphasized, "One of his most passionate moments was even devoted to addressing 'climate change,' of all things." To sum up, the editors insisted that the record must show that the president himself had set the tone "if his second term does break down into more partisan gridlock and rancor."
More recently, the WSJ editorial "Carbon power politics: The next EPA chief and next phase of the Obama green agenda" called the McCarthy nomination evidence that the president "intends to make good on his vow of 'executive actions' if Congress doesn't pass cap and tax." It also saw evidence that he "has given up getting Congress to agree to his anticarbon agenda." The "real climate fight now is over the shape of forthcoming rules," the editors wrote, "and a brutal under-the-table lobbying campaign is now underway." They charged that the "main target, as usual, is the U.S. power industry, which accounts for 40% of U.S. carbon emissions and about one-third of greenhouse gasses." The editorial closed with bitterness: "Ms. McCarthy has been integral in abusing laws that were written decades ago in order to achieve climate goals that Congress has rejected, all with little or no political debate. Someone should ask her about her antidemocratic politics at her confirmation hearings."
In a January column, the WSJ's Kimberley Strassel predicted an EPA "power grab" and a "big climate agenda" in the second Obama term. After the nominations, she characterized Moniz as "exactly the sort of true-believer environmentalist that one would expect," and as "a huge supporter of throwing taxpayer dollars at renewable energy projects," and as having "the potential to be a bigger thorn in conservatives' sides" than his predecessor.
The Washington Post's front-page story on the nominations, emphasizing climate politics, foresaw continued bitterness: the "administration is determined to maximize its executive authority without having to seek the approval of a bitterly divided Congress." The New York Times advanced the rancor theme in the headline of an editorial about Moniz and McCarthy: "Two enlistees in the climate wars." The Times's front-page article "Cabinet picks could take on climate policy" began by emphasizing the president's "threat to use the powers of the executive branch."
That article explained that the two cabinet picks could work together to use executive powers:
[T]o make a real dent in the nation's emissions, the [EPA] must...devise emissions limits for existing plants, a hugely controversial project that could force the shutdown of dozens of older coal-burning power plants, cause a steep drop in domestic demand for coal and trigger a sharp rise in energy prices.
No matter how carefully written—and Ms. McCarthy is an expert on federal air quality law—any such regulations would be subject to intense opposition in the courts, and in Congress, which could seek to overturn the regulations.
David Doniger, the director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the big issues before the Obama administration were the budget, immigration, gun control and climate. "Climate change is the only one of these where he has the authority to take significant action under laws the Congress has already passed, principally the Clean Air Act, and the energy efficiency laws that Moniz will be implementing," Mr. Doniger said.
"The two agencies can work together," he said. "We think these two appointees both very seriously get climate change."
In addition to the E.P.A., the Energy Department has a strong role in the government's climate change efforts, said Dan W. Reicher, who served in two assistant secretary positions at the department while Mr. Moniz was an under secretary during the Clinton administration.
The Times columnist Timothy Egan suggested, though without rancor, that Moniz and McCarthy are the wrong picks. Because "agricultural life will be unrecognizable within a generation's time," he wrote, it might be best "if a farmer led the cause against climate change." The problem with nominating the two "cautious and qualified insiders" is that "they come from the same general neighborhood. Just as every justice on the Supreme Court is an Ivy Leaguer, top government posts are thick with people from the same provinces of success."
But the Moniz nomination has also gained some praise. The Huffington Post expressed gladness that "unlike outgoing Energy Secretary Steven Chu," Moniz is "well-versed in the ways of Washington." To emphasize Moniz's versatility as a scientist in politics, they quoted him: "Physics sometimes looked easy compared to doing the people's business."
An online article at Science magazine emphasized that point. Unlike the "seemingly reserved and occasionally prickly Chu," Moniz was known when he was in Washington for "a breezy, jovial style that mostly played well with politicians and staff." A Nature article put it this way: "Both Chu and Moniz are respected physicists with a passion for energy, but the resemblance ends there. Chu came to Washington as a policy outsider—and sometimes struggled with relationships on Capitol Hill. But Moniz is primed for the post" by Washington experience. Nature also noted approvingly Moniz's emphasis on hydraulic fracturing technology's origins in Energy Department research.
Some gladness also appeared in a Houston Chronicle editorial that began by expressing disappointment that the president did not follow the editors' advice to select his next secretary of energy "from among Houston's energy leaders." Those editors wrote:
Moniz has testified before Congress to support natural gas as "one of the most cost-effective means by which to maintain energy supplies while reducing CO2 emissions," and has referred to natural gas as a "bridge to a low-carbon energy future." Does Moniz have a Houstonian as a speech-writer? Because we couldn't put it better ourselves.
Similarly, a USA Today article reported gladness about the Moniz nomination from USEC, a firm seeking federal help to build a major nuclear facility in Ohio. And a commentary at Forbes.com portrayed the nomination optimistically, expressing gladness that "Moniz has said that fracking—more accurately called smart drilling—is a 'game changer.'"
Whether or not hydraulic fracturing can be accurately reframed as "smart drilling," Moniz's view of it as a temporizing bridge to a clean-energy future has drawn widespread positive attention. In a Washington Post blog posting, Brad Plumer even cited a recent technical paper: "Climate consequences of natural gas as a bridge fuel," published in the journal Climatic Change. A Post editorial scolding certain environmentalists for extremism had this to say about Moniz and the natural gas bridge:
Mr. Obama should also ignore the complaints about Ernest Moniz, [who] favors renewable sources of electricity—but also nuclear power and natural gas. That's a sin among some in the environmental movement, although it should not be. Mr. Moniz was right, for example, when he argued that natural gas can help cut the nation's carbon emissions over the next couple of decades, because burning it produces half the emissions of burning coal. What's needed is not knee-jerk opposition to natural gas but, rather, sensible regulations to ensure that communities near well sites are safe and that the country sees the most emissions benefits from its use of the fuel. Mr. Obama so far has taken that course, and we hope his appointment of Mr. Moniz means that he will stay on track.
Gina McCarthy has drawn positive coverage too. A Washington Post piece described as a "career environmental administrator and veteran of Republican administrations in Massachusetts and Connecticut" who "has devoted much of the past four years to shepherding through air regulations that have protected public health—but also have helped close power plants emitting greenhouse gases linked to climate change." The article quoted Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists: "What she's tough about is the science-based standard."
But even Science, the Washington Post and Nature can't stick just to science and policy when Moniz's hair is in the picture. Of Science's paper edition's mere three sentences on the nomination, the middle one cited not only the nominee's "wild, wavy locks" but a Washington Post gossip blog's musing about "the most iconoclastic hair in Cabinet history." A Post news article began by wondering whimsically whether the president chose Moniz because his "long wavy mop of mostly-white hair might distract people who have been obsessed with Michelle Obama's bangs." A Nature article joined in: "Equipped with a disarming smile and a trademark over-the-ears hairstyle, Moniz can address science, engineering and public policy in plain English, on the fly and under a spotlight."
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
