Obama Just Ordered the Nation to Prepare For Climate Change

We might not be able to stop climate change, but at least we can try to prepare for it. That's the grim logic behind President Obama's latest executive order on global warming. It's intended to help “prepare the Nation for the impacts of climate change by undertaking actions to enhance climate preparedness and resilience.” To do so, Obama has created two new agencies—the Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, and the Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience.

The first group includes pretty much every Federal agency; the second is made of up state, local, and tribal leaders. Both are tasked with making sure the United States is ready to bear the brunt of the myriad ways climate change is expected to affect the nation in coming years.

Yes, President Obama’s next step in his quest to smite climate change is more councils, task forces, and interagency pow-wows, producing more reports and non-binding recommendations. Throughout the document, you get the sense that the President is telling the nation that we won’t be able to stop climate change or even slow it much, so let’s get prepared to take a full body slam.

Several sections of the order bear close scrutiny though. For anyone taking a holistic view of the situation, there are clear implications for energy policy, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and reform of fossil fuels subsidies. There’s room to reassess past actions in these areas and decisively change course, provided that we can stiffen the national resolve to tackle the problem head on.

Section 2 of the order iterates the need to "identify and seek to remove or reform barriers that discourage investments or other actions to increase the Nation's resilience to climate change" and to "reform policies and Federal funding programs that may, perhaps unintentionally, increase the vulnerability of natural or built systems, economic sectors, natural resources, or communities to climate change related risks."

So how do we that? How do we remove some the barriers that discourage investments or other actions that would increase the nation’s climate resilience? For one, we need to get rid of the massive tax supports, subsidies, and preferential treatment given to the fossil fuel industry. Plus we need to make sure that full-cost pricing is employed, so that polluters don't keep just passing off the costs of cleaning up their messes (including the climate mess) on the public. Doing so will give renewable energy a much-needed boost. It’s already rapidly becoming cost-competitive in many places, even in the face of hand out after hand out to hugely profitable fossil fuel companies. Getting rid of these hand outs will only further speed along the clean energy transition.

The Keystone XL for one; and support of tar sands in general. Support of fracking and shale gas, which on a full lifecycle basis has far, far higher emissions than conventional sources of natural gas, not to mention significant pollution issues for water. US agricultural policy that props up large industrial farms, dependent on a few large cash crops, depending on significant amount of fossil fuel inputs and water, also serious increases climate vulnerability. The lack of Federal support for public transportation projects also needs to change.

Meanwhile, Section 3 proclaims that "agencies shall, where possible, focus on program and policy adjustments that promote the dual goals of greater climate resilience and carbon sequestration, or other reductions to the sources of climate change."

Which opens the scope of what both the Council and the Task Force rightly ought to consider in their assessment. It allows for a wholesale review of Federal energy policy, farm policy, transportation policy, even military policy. The issuance of such an order, from the office of a President whose environmental and energy policy has been, with a few shining exceptions, lackluster, disconnected, and disappointing, is a hopeful sign. The first test will be if the President, the Council, and the Task Force take an appropriately broad view of the situation, and then Congress follows through on the recommendations, the data, and the information created.

The window to act on climate change closes more and more each passing month. Acting on whatever recommendations come out of all this needs to happen quickly—or it all may be for naught.