Obama and the importance of Paris

Don’t listen to the cynics. If President Obama can orchestrate a climate agreement in Paris, he will go down in history as one of the U.S.’s most consequential presidents.

It takes an effort now to reconstruct the world in 2008. The economy was in freefall: the unemployment rate spiked that October at 10 percent. The future of the auto industry was in doubt. Osama bin Laden, narcissistically dyeing his hair in Abbottabad, was nevertheless the head of an active terrorist network. There was no universal healthcare. The openly gay or bisexual were barred from serving in the military, and there was no Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. Solar PV prices were hovering near $8 per watt. Scandals abounded. Presidential gaffe was a regular occurrence.

{mosads}Into this difficult breach came Barrack Hussein Obama. He spoke in exalted terms. He said, ‘Yes, we can’ a lot. Then at his victory speech in St. Paul on June 3, 2008 he raised the bar still higher:

…I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children [….] this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

Fast forward to 2015 and what’s the situation? Like all presidencies you could make a case that it’s a mixed bag. Of course there are negatives: according to inequality.org the top 1 percent share of pre-tax income is at its highest level since 1928. Syria is now as messy as Iraq ever was during the Bush years. Gun control remains at a frustrating impasse.

But the president’s successes are also considerable. The unemployment rate is now 5.1 percent. With the help of short-term bridge loans from the Bush administration, Chrysler and General Motors were successfully restructured. To all but conspiracy theorists, Osama bin Laden is dead. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed. The solar sector installed 32 percent of all new electricity generating capacity in 2014. Obama has used the presidential office not to maul the English language but for memorable speeches. As Paul Krugman recently wrote: ‘This is what a successful presidency looks like’.

Successful – to a large extent, but there remains one serious thing undone. It is that last line in the St Paul’s speech that Obama is now turning to: the healing of the planet. From November 30 until December 11 of this year, 196 nations will meet in an unprepossessing suburb of Paris. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The goal is a binding global climate change agreement.

Obama has told Rolling Stone: ‘I am dragging the world behind me to Paris.’ It’s surely the right thing to do. 3380 U.S. citizens died of terrorism between 2001 and 2013. In the same period, 406,496 people died by firearms on U.S soil.  But if we turn to climate change we are immediately confronted by dizzying statistics.

In Africa alone it is projected that by 2020 between 75 and 250 million people will be exposed to stress from water shortage. Meanwhile, in the US, warming in the western mountains is projected to cause decreased snowpack, more winter flooding and reduced summer flows. Over the next decades, climate change is projected to increase aggregate yields of rain-fed agriculture by 5 to 20 percent. In 2012, the World Bank stated: ‘The lack of action on climate change not only risks putting prosperity out of reach of millions of people in the developing world, it threatens to roll back decades of sustainable development.’ This is a problem of a different magnitude.

It is likely therefore that for all his successes, the president’s legacy will be tied to this. We might not be one-issue voters now, but our children and grandchildren will be. There will be no excuses for us – or for him.

Put simply, Paris will decide the president’s historical reputation. Obama knows this. In a tetchy interview on 60 minutes with Steve Kroft, Obama responded to allegations that Putin was one step ahead on him in Syria by changing the subject: ‘My definition of leadership would be leading on climate change.’

How successful has Obama been on this issue so far? The answer is – successful, but not successful enough. On the one hand, history may not look kindly on his decision to make healthcare, and not climate change, the legislative centerpiece of his first term. On the other, the 2014 US-China Agreement was a huge step forward committing both countries to significant carbon reductions. Obama has also achieved much by executive order: his Clean Power Plan will use the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory authority to cut power-plant CO₂ emissions by 32 percent by 2030. 

But for greatness, Obama needs Paris. In a recent paper, the Green Alliance lists the following goals for the summit: ambitious action before and after 2020, a central role for equity, a long term approach, public finance for adaptation and the low carbon transition, a framework for action on deforestation and land use and clear links to the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Obama, now no longer campaigning in poetry, but governing in prose, is careful not to raise expectations. In the same Rolling Stone interview he said: ‘For us to be able to get the basic architecture in place with aggressive-enough targets from the major emitters that the smaller countries say, “This is serious” — that will be a success.’ In reality, he is going all out. John Kerry and Susan Rice recently stated that climate change was at the top of the administration’s to-do list.
Why does it matter if Obama is a great president or not? Well, when confronted with the scale of the problem, it might be said that we need him to be a great president – now more than ever. But also because it gives us – a word that he helped to make uppermost in our minds – hope. This was a man who swore in on the Lincoln Bible. He has always aspired to the first rank of greatness. Now he has a chance to achieve it.

Jackson is a journalist based in London.