Will Obama be Remembered for Environmental Efforts?

With everything facing Barack Obama as he enters gets ready to enter office in January, it seems that environmental will continue sitting on the backburner for someone else to deal with even farther in the future. When Obama enters office, he will inherit two wars and the worst economic crisis since the great depression. With these overwhelming tasks in front of him, it will be difficult to make environmental protection legislation a priority, but not attending to environmental issues is one of the worst decisions that Obama could make. After seeing how much the earth has changed with energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions still on the rise, Barack Obama needs to make it a priority of his administration to tackle this problem that will only continue to get worse if not dealt with sufficiently. Whichever President is the first to make a substantial effort to restrain our influence on the warming climate, will be remember as a great pioneer. If Barack Obama were to be that President as well as the one to confront all the other issues, he would undoubtedly be remembered as an American legend in the same standing as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The world markets have taken great hits in the past months and there is still much speculation about how to fix the situation. All of the debate about whether or not to bail out certain companies has everyone asking, “Is it worth it?” Repairing not only the American economy, but also the world economy will not only take a lot of funds from the government, but also a great focus to iron out all the details. This will certainly keep environmental issues from taking a priority, but it will also reduce the ability for government to provide incentive for companies to make the change to energy efficiency. This is crucial in a time when businesses are already tightening spending and don’t want to invest in new technologies that are costly in the short-term.
Obama must also deal with are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He will work to move troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan to concentrate on the Al Qaeda there while transferring more power to the Iraqi government. With the economy as his number one priority coming into office, this is a close number two. Creating and implementing the plan to achieve these goals will take up a large part of the focus of his first one hundred days in office. As the President of the United States this is a major responsibility of his, and he must act quickly to address it.
With all of these obstacles facing him, how will Obama make time for the environment? He must first realize that the long-term goal of sustainability is just as important as; if not more important than, the other issues that he is being face with. While, in the short term the question of which issues to address most vigorously seems very easy, the long term safety of our world must also remain a priority. The major problem with global warming is manifested in the nature of the problem. The sad truth is that no one wants to take action when the earth’s temperature has only risen about one degree Celsius in the last one hundred years. While this is projected to continue to increase at an even faster rate, extreme effects have not yet been felt and there is no immediate motivation to take on this problem.
The facts tell us that a one degree temperature change in only 100 years is 20 times faster than any temperature change prior to human’s increase in release of carbon dioxide. Despite this public figures like Sarah Palin refuse to acknowledge human impact. Writing off the changes as the natural climate cycle makes it seem like the problem will naturally fix itself and thus takes away motivation to sufficiently address the problem. Fortunately Barack Obama was elected into office, and not Sarah Palin. The damage of downplaying global warming still has had a negative effect on just how climate change is being dealt with.

Obama is poised to make the changes we need, and since his election, has even addressed the severity of the issue and need to take action. In this clip he links our release of carbon dioxide to dependence on foreign oil and thus a weakening economy and threat to national security. He breaks down the carbon emission goals into levels needing to be met my 2020 as well as 2050. There will no doubt need to be more explanation as to how these goals will be met as well as additional intervals with goals to be met, but Obama is on the right track. However, simply talking about achieving goals in the future is not enough. There needs to be accountability and a real drive to motivate the people as well as the big businesses of the United States.

This negative attitude is not helping in the drive to help make our future a sustainable one. Even if the globe does not experience the catastrophic scenarios that some have predicted, it's still worth the risk to fight for because that catastrophe is still a large possibility. Ultimately what this whole argument comes down to is whether or not America as a people are motivated to take a stand and try to fix this great problem we have been dealt. The worst thing that could be done is to just wait around and hope things get better. Barack Obama has the oppurtunity to make that commitment to avert disaster and he must act on it.

A previous example of the necessary accountability and drive to reach a goal was John F. Kennedy’s push to land a man on the moon during the 1960s. This was a seemingly impossible goal that Kennedy wished to accomplish, but was nonetheless met due to the proverbial American drive and ingenuity. While this achievement was a great moment in American history, and it bears many similarities to the goal of carbon emission reduction, this task will be even more challenging for the people of the United States because it will involve the effort of everyone. The government cannot just create a program that will achieve the goal for us like NASA, but that only makes the goal that much more enviable. What Obama can do is put regulations in place to make all Americans more motivated to become more energy efficient and less dependent on combustion fossil fuels.
Not only will Obama need to impose penalties if emission levels are not met, but he will also need to encourage Americans to meet these expectations by providing incentives to invest in cleaner technologies as they become available. The government must take the first step in guiding the people of America toward a better future, not just for Americans, but for the whole world. For too long the United States has been lagging behind other powerful nations in its willingness to make a real commitment to cutting its dependence on carbon dioxide emitting fuels, and now is the time to change that behavior.
To do this Barack Obama needs to first hold the big businesses of America to much higher standards. During this economic crisis it seems that that would be the worst thing to do because with stricter regulations in the United States companies would send only more jobs overseas. This does not need to happen, though. There must be government-provided incentives that make companies want to become more environmentally friendly. Energy efficiency alone is already a big factor to do so because of the resulting lower costs for operation, and only a relatively small incentive would make businesses want to invest in achieving these low costs. Also importantly, this would keep many jobs in the United States helping the economy as well. So, not only is there upside for the environment in this situation, but there is also benefit for the economy.
Businesses are not the only ones who can partake in the effort to reduce carbon emissions, but individuals can too. Every person should also have incentive to invest in cleaner technologies just like businesses should. There are already tax breaks in place for investing in these clean technologies, but a more significant incentive should be offered to increase the effort. Also motivation should be provided for households to reduce natural gas and electrical consumption with respect to their past consumption. This would mean tax breaks for significantly reducing use of these resources and penalties for increasing use, exceptions would be made for expanding the household, for example a new child and possibly other circumstances that would require more energy.
Ultimately the decision to make energy-limiting legislation a priority comes down to whether or not Obama wants to take responsibility for the United States in the long-term or just the short-term: does he want to be remembered hundreds of years from now as the president who made a vigorous commitment to future generations to live on our earth or is he simply concerned with having a good approval rating right now during his tenure in office. We will see what is going to happen, and hopefully it is sooner than later that a real effort is made using some of these tactics. Obama’s legacy will be affected by whether or not he puts this issue off or is the President to make a stand and put a stop to the outrageous energy consumption of the United States. This is larger than just his legacy, though, and the American people and the world should not have to find out the full effects of global warming in the future when there is still time to make changes now.