 About the Series:
Environment: Over the past century, we’ve swung between periods where the government used a strong hand to address environmental problems … and other periods where we’ve preferred to let market forces have more sway. Since the 1980s, that market-oriented approach has pretty much dominated. In this installment of KPLU’s election series “Looking Back to Look Forward,” Liam Moriarty looks at whether – during this presidential election -- a new sense of urgency about global warming could swing the pendulum the other way.
It pretty much began with Teddy Roosevelt …
Roosevelt: I am not leading this fight as a matter of aesthetic pleasure.
At the dawn of the 20th Century, President Theodore Roosevelt moved to protect the country’s dwindling wild lands from the often rapacious timber and mining industries of the day.
Roosevelt: I am leading because somebody must lead, or else the fight would not be made at all.
Roosevelt made conservation a major public issue. Using new laws that gave him unprecedented power to set aside public land, he put more than 230 million acres into national forests, wildlife refuges and national monuments, including the Grand Canyon ... After World War One – during the era of economic growth known as the Roaring Twenties – the mood of the country put the economy above environmental concerns. President Calvin Coolidge famously said,“the chief business of the American people is business.”
During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created federal programs to conserve soil and to build public parks. But, in many ways, the environment was pushed to the margins by the larger historical forces of economic collapse, World War Two, and post-war reconstruction ...
By the late 1950s, popular worries about industrial pollution and toxic chemicals were increasing. In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson’s best-selling book ‘Silent Spring” -- an indictment of widespread pesticide use – got people seriously thinking about the damage we were doing to the planet. The next year, President John Kennedy signed the Clean Air Act ... President Lyndon Johnson enacted a raft of major environmental legislation. In this 1965 speech, LBJ updated and expanded on Teddy Roosevelt’s theme of “conservation” to include action on a broad spectrum of modern environmental threats.
Johnson: Poisons and chemical pollute our air and our water. Automobiles litter our countryside. These and other waste products of progress are among the deadliest enemies that natural beauty has ever known.
This more muscular federal role continued through the 1960s and 70s. It was fed by public concern as Ohio’s badly-polluted Cuyahoga River erupted in flames and an oil spill near Santa Barbara, California burned into the public mind images of oil-blackened birds drowning in a sea of goo. After more than 200 homes were destroyed by seeping toxic waste in Love Canal, New York, President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund cleanup law ... But Carter’s signature issue was energy. In 1979 -- standing on the White House lawn -- he announced an ambitious renewable energy program as he pointed to a new solar water heater on the roof.
Carter: A generation from now this solar heater could either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken. Or it could be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people … harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.
By the end of Carter’s term, the political pendulum was swinging back. With inflation squeezing the economy, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that government was the problem, not the solution. In 1980, as he accepted his party’s nomination, Reagan blasted Carter’s focus on solar power and conservation. He vowed to expand conventional energy sources.
Reagan: Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores untouched, because the present administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, more taxes and more controls than more energy.
Under Reagan, many of Carter’s energy initiatives were sharply rolled back. The budget for solar research was slashed. The tax credits that many homeowners had used to insulate their houses were allowed to expire. And that solar heater Jimmy Carter put on the White House roof was removed; it’s now on display at Carter’s Presidential Museum ... President George W. Bush has continued in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps, putting industry executives and lobbyists in charge of regulatory agencies and creating an energy policy focused mainly on fossil fuels.
The current presidential race may signal another swing of the pendulum. When it comes to the environment, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama actually agree on a lot of the basics. Global warming? Here’s Obama.
Obama: Every scientist all across the world – except for maybe a couple in the White House – has determined that the climate is changing, weather patterns are changing, and that over the long term it will have a significant effect on the world economy and on the US economy.
And McCain …
McCain: Instead of debating the precise extent of global warming or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring.
And their main approach to tackling climate change is similar, as well.
Obama: There is a way of dealing with the issue be setting up what is called a “cap and trade system” …
McCain: A “cap and trade” policy will send a signal that will be heard and welcomed all across the American economy.
Under a “cap and trade” system, the government would set a limit on carbon emissions, then allow companies that emit less carbon to sell credits to other, more-polluting companies. By ratcheting down the cap over time, it creates a financial incentive to reduce use of fossil fuels.
KPLU invited a diverse group of voters into our studios to hear recordings of presidents over the past century as well as the current candidates. Listening to McCain and Obama talk about growing an economy based on renewable energy got several of our roundtable participants thinking of Jimmy Carter’s failed efforts to do that nearly three decades ago. Lisa Domke is a Presbyterian minister and Obama supporter who lives in Seattle.
Domke: I just can’t help but think, oh, y’know, what could we have done? And that can be helpful, to look back and say, “What could we have done if we’d started back then.” But we have to start right now.
That sense of urgency was shared by a number of the other people in the room, including Andrea Faste, a retired Seattle city worker.
Faste: I mean they didn’t have to worry about the polar ice cap melting when Teddy Roosevelt was talking, but now we do.
The way University of Washington senior and McCain supporter Tom Walker saw it, environmental advances will come not from government regulation but from innovation in a free market.
Walker: I would say I agree with the presidents that acknowledge reality, that acknowledge that there is a push and pull between the economy and the environment and you can’t just regulate and have the results you want, it just doesn’t’ work that way.
Both McCain and Obama say technical innovation and entrepreneurship are key to their plans for growing a green economy. And while McCain’s rhetoric leans toward market forces and Obama’s envisions a more robust federal role, even McCain is calling for what amounts to a more forceful government hand in guiding America’s energy and environmental future than in any administration since Jimmy Carter’s.
McCain: Our government must strike at the source of the problem with reforms that only Congress can enact and the president can sign.
The current economic upheaval – coupled with the urgent and global nature of climate change – appears to be pushing both parties beyond the dichotomy of government vs. market. There’s a growing sentiment that by investing in green technology and thinking long-term, we can have both a strong economy and a healthy environment.
Liam Moriarty, KPLU News
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