Should Environmentalists Vote for Barack Obama?

This coming national election should environmentalists vote for Barack Obama? Obama’s campaign is counting on green voters to support him this time around, as they did in 2008.  The Obama campaign has, predictably, set up a website, Environmentalists for Obama, that touts the environmental work that the president has achieved. The President even makes an appearance on his own environmental behalf.

It is true that the administration has set forth extremely high gas mileage standards. By 2017 cars will need to have an average mileage of over 50 miles per gallon. Given the current state of technology this is doable, and the administration deserves credit for pushing for it.

            And yet there are so many areas in which the administration has fallen flat when it comes to protecting our air, water, and land. Regulations that were loosened during George W. Bush’s time on the White House that gave the mountaintop removal coal companies an almost completely lawless free ride in Appalachia have not been changed by the Obama administration. And as I noted in a previous blog, the Obama administration wants to ease the protections for endangered species.

            And now the administration is turning its back on the polar bear. Because the CO2 that comes out of our tailpipes and factories is melting the ice on which the polar bears live, their survival as a species has become quite dicey. No polar ice = no polar bears. But the administration has issued a new rule that exempts activities outside the range of the polar bear from any restrictions that may protect the bear, even though those activities have been shown to harm the habitat of the bears.

Polar bears in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Photo credit: Susanne Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, April 17, 2012 

OK, I admit that there are lots of complications to this. Restricting greenhouse gasses and thus protecting the bears here in the United Sates may not have any bearing on what India, China, or Uruguay does. We could do a very fine job of protecting the polar bears, and because the rest of the world, or at least a portion of it, continues to pump CO2 into the atmosphere polar bears will go the way of the passenger pigeon.

            The oil and gas industries, which are most likely the forces behind the new rule, appeal to a type of environmental isolationism, saying that it “makes no sense to require someone building a bridge in Florida to compensate for threats to polar bears at the top of the globe.” I would be a little sympathetic to this outlook had these same voices made similar arguments to that someone in Florida when it came to supporting or fighting in a war in Iraq, which is at the other end of the globe, too.

            The Fish and Wildlife Agency may have a point that regulating CO2 to protect the bears could lead to a flood of lawsuits, but we don’t know that for certain. I admit that I don’t like to spend a whole bunch of time inside a courtroom. But what would you rather have, a full docket of lawsuits or melting ice sheets and drowning polar bears?

            So for environmentalists, what do we do at the polls this November? Barack Obama’s record on the environment is mediocre at best. But there doesn’t seem to be any push for the environment coming from Romney. As a matter of fact, the GOP, with Newt Gingrich calling for the elimination of the EPA and Romney walking back his earlier acknowledgement that we are warming the planet, seems to be actively hostile to the environment. Is that our choice? Mediocre or bad?

February 3, 1973 Richard Nixon signs the Endangered Species Act. If we only had presidential candidates like Nixon today.