Document1/Obama is not saviour of the world. He's still an American president
Annette
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Obama is not saviour of the world. He's still an American president
The reality is that this man must represent the contradictory
interests of a country still way behind on climate change
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o Jonathan Freedland
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 December 2009 21.30 GMT
o larger | smaller
For the second time in just over a week, Barack Obama is on his way to
Scandinavia, his mission once again to confront impossible
expectations with a cold bucket of reality. Last week he was in Oslo
to pick up a Nobel peace prize, apologetically explaining that in the
real world away from Norwegian dreams he was a war president who had
just escalated the US presence in Afghanistan. On Friday he will touch
down in Copenhagen, this time required to offer his regrets that,
despite the hopes he stirred round the world a year ago, he will not
be able to pull out his pen and, at a stroke, sign the deal that saves
the planet.
This is fast becoming Obama's role on the world stage: managing
disappointment. The gap between what international opinion demands of
him and what he can deliver widens with each passing month, and it
falls to him to explain why. If he could be completely frank, he might
well tell the climate activists in the Danish capital that, were it
purely up to him, he would give them everything they desire. After
all, he is the same man whose stump speech two years ago used to open
with a declaration that "the planet is in peril". But it is not purely
up to him. He has to represent the multiple, complex and contradictory
interests of the country he now leads. His job is not saviour of the
world. As the climate adviser to a 19-strong group of African nations
puts it ruefully: "He's still an American president."
And America did not become a different country simply by electing
Obama. It is still the nation that is at the heart of the climate
problem – having contributed an estimated 30% of all the CO2 already
in the earth's atmosphere – and therefore of any viable solution. But
it is also the country that, for a variety of stubborn political,
economic and cultural reasons, might well be the hardest to shift. The
world desperately needs America to be a leader on climate change, but
the glum reality is that it is all but hard-wired to be a laggard.
Obama will do his best to put a shine on that truth, and he has some
decent polish.. Some of it does not even need saying. He will be in
Copenhagen: what were the chances George Bush would have turned up? He
is there with a strong team, including a string of cabinet
secretaries, with a serious operation in the conference hall – a
contrast, says USA Today, with the Bush era when the US presence at
environmental meetings consisted of "a lone US official handing out
pamphlets". Official US policy now accepts that global warming is real
and that man is the key cause.
Obama can point to more than a change in attitude. His administration
moved fast to extract a 30% increase in fuel efficiency from the car-
makers, while a tenth of the stimulus – some $80bn – has been set
aside for investment in clean energy. He has recently struck bilateral
deals with both China and India, undertaking joint research projects
on clean coal and electric cars. Perhaps most substantial is this
month's ruling by the US Environmental Protection Agency that carbon
dioxide and five other gases endanger human health – thereby allowing
the agency to regulate emissions without waiting for the nod from
Congress. That could see the US executive cracking down next year on
car emissions, as well as those generated by coal and chemical
plants..
So Obama at least has a story to tell. But he arrives in Denmark
limping from the multiple ball-and-chains around his ankle. They are
the impediments that would hold back any US president, no matter how
noble his intentions.
Start with the political system. The US team in Copenhagen is haunted
by a spectre that many of today's US negotiating team saw first hand:
call it Gore in Kyoto. As vice-president in 1997, Al Gore made fine
promises about future US emissions, only to find that the US Senate
would swallow none of them, rejecting Kyoto 95 votes to zero. The
Obama team have vowed not to repeat that mistake. They will agree to
nothing they cannot sell to the Senate.
That places enormous limits on what they can offer. As Michael Tomasky
explained on these pages on Monday, the Senate is fast becoming a
dysfunctional body, insisting on a near impossible supermajority of 60
votes for any measure of substance. If that has turned relatively
modest healthcare reform into a year-long battle, imagine the
obstacles in the way of a bill, packed with sacrifice and cost, to
reduce carbon emissions.
Sitting in Britain, or any other western democracy for that matter,
this can be hard to fathom. Gordon Brown has an automatic majority in
the Commons and can almost always get his way. In a Guardian interview
today, Brown's opponent, David Cameron, promises that if Copenhagen
yields a real deal, he'll give it his full support..
Obama has nothing like that room for manoeuvre. Not only are the
Republicans lockstepped in ideological opposition, with at least one
senator describing global warming as a "hoax", but the Senate
Democrats are just as unreliable, with at least 10 wobbly on the
issue. The original Obama plan was to come to Copenhagen with a Senate
bill under his belt. But the chamber has not been able to pass even
the fairly weak measure that cleared the house in June. The result,
according to the Earth Institute's Jeffrey Sachs, is that "the last
great holdout" preventing agreement in Copenhagen may well turn out to
be neither Beijing or Delhi, as once forecast, but Capitol Hill.
We could blame Obama for this, believing that the die was cast once he
made healthcare reform – rather than global warming – his key
legislative priority. The reality of the US system seems to be that
there is only enough capacity for one large change at a time.
But the problem goes deeper than that. The men and women of the US
senate are, after all, only reflecting the people who vote for them.
The latest BBC World Service global poll showed US concern about
climate change among the lowest in the world, with just 45% of
Americans regarding it as "very serious", nearly 20 points below the
23-country average. A Gallup survey found 41%of Americans believed
projections of global warming were "exaggerated". It is hardly
surprising that those who live in the 25 American states that produce
coal are wary of controls, which they believe will kill jobs and raise
their energy bills.
What's more, there is a deep strain in American thinking to which
everything about Copenhagen looks wrong. It fears all international
arrangements smack of "global government", designed to rob Americans
of their sovereignty. It believes such plans are hatched by secret
conspiracies, into which the climategate emails scandal – which has
run very big in the US – feeds perfectly. We speak often of European
anti-Americanism, but less often of American anti-Europeanism.
Nevertheless, such a thing exists: remember how John Kerry was
rubbished for the crime of speaking French. To this vein of US
political culture, a global deal on carbon emissions signed in Denmark
is something to fear, not pursue.
This is the reality that Barack Obama has to deal with. He is not the
president of the world, even if millions dreamed that that was the job
he was elected to 13 months ago. He is the president of the United
States – and his problem is that the two are very, very different.
• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009