An environmental agenda for Obama

...To be sure, Obama must not let the conversation on issues such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be steamrolled by insipid chants of "Drill, baby, drill...

...She later introduced H.R...

...Ken Conca is professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland...

...In the international sphere as in the domestic, a start can be made simply by enforcing the law: when Congress passed the Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act, which directed the administration to make water a priority in foreign-aid funding, the Bush administration pointed to water-infrastructure projects in the scandalplagued "reconstruction" efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan as evidence that it was complying...

...Obama can win much praise, and do much good, simply by enforcing the law and stopping the shenanigans...

...As we make the transition to a new energy economy, don't let the process of making solar and wind power much bigger turn them into a twenty-first century version of Big Oil...

...others could be, with stronger U.S...

...Although bearing the escape clause "to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law," the order provided an entry point to press demands for environmental justice...

...Nevertheless, treaties play a crucial role in creating governance frameworks on a host of global issues, from the commerce in hazardous waste and the trafficking in endangered species to controlling persistent organic pollutants or chemicals that destroy the ozone layer...

...CLEANING UP THE MESS In the waning days of the Bush administration, much media attention went to a last-minute push for regulatory changes that weakened environmental standards or allowed the exploitation of resources on public lands...

...Its formal position is that if political rights are guaranteed, socioeconomic rights will take care of themselves...

...Water activists have been pushing hard for an international convention on the human right to water, and in 2006 the UN Human Rights Council appointed a special expert to report on the matter...

...Despite the "we're all in this together" imagery so often used in the fundraising campaigns of green organizations, the truth is that pollution disproportionately harms the poor and minorities, while environmental protection efforts in America skew white and rich...

...And even if cap-and-trade will work for large stationary emitters like factories and electric utilities, how will the transportation sector be brought under the cap...

...Are such targets possible without weaning the economy from coal, which accounts for almost half of U.S...

...A major challenge for green advocates, thus, will be to minimize the inevitable whittling away and corporate capture as these programs move from budget authorization to project implementation and to prevent escape clauses rationalized by (largely unfounded) claims that they will deepen the recession...

...nineteen have set greenhouse emissions targets...

...There is certainly opportunity here: Obama's stimulus-minded budgeting could be a lever for rethinking the political economy that has pushed us into this dual economicecological mess...

...Exhibits 1 and 1A are the refusal to grant California a waiver allowing tougher vehicle-emission standards and the federal court battle against several states over whether EPA had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas...

...One important don't is to avoid confusing the better and baser natures of American environmentalism...

...Most of America's critical environmental legislation was passed in the 1970s...

...First, of course, is the economic mess, which has a double-edged effect...

...Given that there are no existing blueprints for the transportation and electricity grids that add a green vision to the stimulus, who will design them, and according to what principles...

...One of the socioeconomic rights the UN has threatened to legitimize is the right to a consistent and adequate supply of clean water-a right currently denied in practice to more than one billion people worldwide, according to the UN Development Programme...

...government on terms exceedingly favorable to the plaintiffs, thus opening access to sensitive areas, removing protections on wilderness, weakening endangeredspecies rules, and eliminating prohibitions on logging...

...The first and easiest part of Obama's agenda, therefore, is simply to enforce the laws of the land that govern pollution, waste disposal, public lands, and air and water quality...

...It does nothing to regulate toxics, but does create a powerful tool for local communities to identify toxics in their midst and for governments to spot potential noncompliance with environmental rules (just as a dubious tax return may suggest financial shenanigans...

...and federal laws generally rely on a hodgepodge of often poorly supervised state implementation plans...

...position to take into renewed global negotiations on climate change...

...Several posted comments decried the failure to frame a wider agenda of environmental planning, local green initiatives, and tackling overconsumption...

...I have argued elsewhere that liberal internationalists have put too much faith in international treaties as the grand strategy of global environmentalism, while paying too little attention to other emerging approaches, such as multi-stakeholder forums and various types of network-based transnational initiatives...

...In January of this year, Yale University's online magazine Yale Environment 360 asked several high-profile environmentalists to identify a green agenda for Obama's first one hundred days...

...Launched during the mid-1990s and backed by a coalition of organizations including Friends of the Earth, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and USPIRG, Green Scissors flagged more than $58 billion in wasteful annual federal spending that also hurt the environment, including dubious research and development programs for the coal and nuclear industries, agricultural subsidies, questionable road-building projects, and channel-deepening on the nation's waterways...

...Full disclosure: Obama's science adviser, John Holdren, was my dissertation chair at Berkeley...

...A 2005 Government Accountability Office report, however, found that EPA paid scant attention to this requirement in drafting key clean-air rules during the late Clinton years and Bush's first term...

...If the U.S...

...The 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA settled the legal dispute, ruling that EPA had such authority and that the administration's rationale for failing to regulate carbon dioxide was inadequate...

...In grappling with Detroit, don't confuse hybrid sport-utility vehicles with the future of American transportation...

...A 2001 ruling that the law did not apply to "isolated" waterways was interpreted extremely broadly by the Bush administration, and a 2006 decision by the Court created fundamental uncertainty as to the act's applicability to "non-navigable" waterways and associated wetlands...

...In seeking energy independence, don't bet the farm on the increasingly dubious ethanol/biofuels plunge...

...Again, the idea of environmental rights-in this case, strengthened shareholder rights that promote corporate transparency and accountability-are a key element...

...Already lacking adequate resources, enforcement and compliance efforts were also sidetracked when the attacks of September 11, 2001, handed EPA a demanding new set of tasks related to public water supplies and hazardous facilities...

...One reason Clinton's executive order has had little bite is a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that prevented individuals from bringing private lawsuits to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (Title VI prohibits exclusion or discrimination in programs that receive federal funding...

...As a result, they have pushed for shareholder resolutions, proxy voting rules, the mobilization of pension funds and foundations, and other tools for climate-related corporate transparency, disclosure, and responsibility...

...AN ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS AGENDA Beyond cleaning up the mess and readjusting the framework, the hardest part of the environmental agenda is the most fundamental: we need to move beyond an understanding of environmental protection as simply a regulatory threshold that polluters should not exceed toward an understanding of (and actionable basis for) the environmental rights of citizens...

...To be sure, serious action on the climate crisis is desperately needed, and the team of advisers Obama has put in place on energy, environment, and science policy seems likely to remain committed to it...

...Consider the Toxics Release Inventory, a reporting system established by Congress during the Reagan era, in response to the disastrous release of toxics at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India...

...Given the stakes and the interests that have sprung up around the current legal framework, updating it has always been contentious, and has frequently proven impossible...

...Aware of economic realities, the lobby for climate action quickly made the idea of using stimulus spending to address global warming into the thousand-pound gorilla in the green room...

...Again, much of the environmental community has been solidly on board, sensing a once-in-a-generation opportunity...

...These twin effects of the crisis have not been lost on green advocates, particularly those growing desperate for a response to the problem of climate change...

...The smoking-gun standard for showing intentionality cripples many efforts to hold polluters accountable for environmental injustice...

...Also, state-level actions are an important part of Obama's scramble to find a credible U.S...

...Fueled by episodes in which poor and minority communities have become favored sites for waste dumps or toxic industrial facilities, the environmental justice movement has been one of the most energetic strands of American environmentalism of the past few decades...

...Simply put, harmful practices will endure as long as there are communities unable to give effective voice to their rights...

...The Endangered Species Act is based on a slow and cumbersome listing process, makes species rather than critical habitats the predominant focus of conservation policy, and has inadequate provisions to support the recovery of species once they are listed as threatened or endangered...

...At the same time, watching how groups that were at best marginally connected to the campaign sought to cash in, prominently displaying polar bears on their Web sites and fundraising appeals, made for a cautionary tale...

...Hilda Solis, Obama's labor secretary but at the time a House Democrat, requested the 2005 GAO report that documented EPA's inattention to the Clinton executive order...

...At the Environmental Protection Agency, thinly veiled "reforms" to weaken cleanair rules were met with increasingly caustic rejections by the federal courts...

...the same federal agency that pushes a development project is given control of assessing its environmental impacts...

...More fundamentally, Bush's shoveling of money into banks and financial firms extracted no conditions on transparency, public information, or corporate responsibility...

...Above all, don't forget that this agenda will require the same creative coalitions and popular pressure for change that created the opportunity in the first place...

...There is also a deeper layer to the politics of the economic crisis, untapped thus far, which would be a push to green not just the stimulus but also the bailout...

...Laws governing air and water pollution, endangered species, drinking water, and environmental impact assessment rode in on a wave of popular concern...

...climate legislation with a proposal for 80 percent cuts from 2005 emission levels by 2050, as USCAP does, when a lower atmospheric concentration will likely be required, and sooner, for anything approaching climate stability...

...And here, there is a real danger that the rest of the pressing environmental policy agenda may be left behind...

...Efforts to stop mountaintop-removal mining, tighten emissions standards on airborne toxics, or protect depleted fisheries will be scrutinized more than ever for their impact on jobs and economic growth...

...There is little else to point to or build upon, given the Bush (and Clinton) legacy of federal inaction...

...The liberal shift in Congress may mean that various "reform" movements seeking to gut laws such as the Endangered Species Act have been beaten back, at least temporarily...

...A second form of obstructionism that can readily be undone involves Bush's blockage of action by state and local governments, many of which became the de facto sources of environmental policy innovation during the Bush era...

...Under Clinton, TRI violations were used to help build cases for some of the largest lawsuits and consent decrees pursued against major polluters...

...But it also paid Obama a political dividend of sorts...

...These local initiatives have become good politics as well as good policy...

...On vehicle emissions, no fewer than sixteen states are poised to adopt California's targets, whose implementation was blocked by Bush's EPA...

...mission at the UN had a standard checklist for red-flagging draft resolutions of the General Assembly...

...This would at least give the United States a starting point with which to enter global negotiations...

...How large will be the loophole for socalled "offsets" (the often dubious or poorly monitored schemes to reduce net emissions through tree planting or renewable energy projects, which can end up as little more than accounting schemes to avoid real reductions...

...support instead of efforts to undermine them...

...foreign policy...

...In rejecting an EPA rule on the highly toxic substance mercury, the D.C...

...The United States, in contrast, has consistently opposed any formal recognition of such a right...

...Reorienting spending priorities will require sustained pressure from environmentalists and green jobs advocates and will have to be tied to the larger idea of using the stimulus to retool America's energy systems for sustainability as well as independence...

...Although they have been crucial to cleaning up the environment and holding polluters accountable, they bear little resemblance to what we would call environmental best practice in the twenty-first century...

...Bill Clinton used the same tactic in the opposite direction in the days before leaving office, approving new standards on diesel emissions, restrictions on building roads in national forests, and a tightened standard on arsenic in drinking water...

...The question is whether environmentalists have since learned to navigate more effectively in these politicaleconomic waters...

...The U.S.-Canadian Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, once seen as a model legal instrument for governing transboundary waters, is so outdated that even the joint commission tasked with carrying it out has called for its complete overhaul...

...Staff were warned to scan for "language that creates a `right' to anything (food, healthcare, peace etc...

...The second, more consequential set of don'ts involves the danger of confusing parts of the problem with parts of the solution...

...Although many of these plans can be found in predictable blue states such as California, Maryland, and Massachusetts, there is a striking parallel between a map of statewide climate initiatives and a map of the states that Obama flipped from red to blue, including Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and much of the Southwest...

...Exposure to toxics correlates with race, even when controlling for income and property values...

...The Kyoto Protocol, which defines the current framework for international cooperation on global warming, ends in 2012, and the last conference of the parties before a post-Kyoto global framework is established will take place this December in Copenhagen...

...Backers argue that enhancing American energy security means investing more, not less, in petroleum and coal, and the nuclear industry is committed to exploiting climate concerns as a way to launch a governmentsubsidized revival...

...The environmental challenge before Obama, Congress, and the nation is twofold: to mobilize a response to the climate challenge that will supplant rather than reinforce the political economy that got us here and to keep climate change from pushing aside equally urgent initiatives on environmental health, biodiversity, public lands, international cooperation, and environmental justice...

...Recently, a handful of green organizations launched a campaign that forced the Bush administration to list the polar bear as a threatened speciesopening a back door for climate action by forcing a management plan for habitat protection...

...The harder part will be to push ahead with badly needed upgrades and retooling, a task that may be feasible for the first time since the onset of the Reagan era...

...GREENING THE STIMULUS Obama's stimulus package includes substantial, if vaguely defined, investments in transportation, electricity generation and distribution, and energy efficiency in buildings, and he has also supported a fast track for climate legislation...

...The group, which included authors Bill McKibben and Paul Hawken, green-economy activists Van Jones of Green for All and Mindy Lubber of Ceres, a handful of academics, and the heads of a few Washington-based organizations, sang a strikingly similar tune: Obama must implement a crash program on climate change, green jobs, and clean energy...

...But there is a risk that the perfect storm of need and opportunity propelling the climate conversation will push other critical needs off the agenda...

...However, the facts of the moment complicate any attempt to recuperate America's environmental policy...

...To be sure, powerful interests continue to back many of these projects, and the shift from Republican to Democratic control does not make them particularly riper for pruning...

...Bush's appalling performance yielded a bumper crop of low-hanging green fruit, much of which can be harvested without bold new legislation or dramatic spending initiatives...

...An environmental agenda for Obama KEN CONCA As recently as last year's presidential campaign, the debate on Barack Obama's environmental agenda would have centered on righting the astonishing wrongs of the George W. Bush era...

...Despite their limits, the stimulus and climate initiatives remain heady opportunities, perhaps marking a significant departure from business as usual...

...Under Bush, the U.S...

...At the same time, the recession creates unprecedented opportunities for public investment through stimulus spending, including much-touted "green jobs" programs in conservation and renewable energy...

...In 1994, at the crest of the first surge of the environmental justice movement, Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which required each federal agency to "make achieving environmental justice part of its mission" by identifying and addressing "disproportionately high and adverse" environmental impacts on minority and low-income groups...

...But at the same time, he must not let the favored agenda items of Beltway greens distract from the larger national agenda of sustainable jobs and healthy communities...

...and all but a few holdouts are compiling statewide greenhouse gas inventories...

...A renewed international commitment would also mean enhancing environmental aid as part of U.S...

...Circuit Court suggested that EPA's "explanation deploys the logic of the Queen of Hearts, substituting EPA's desires for the plain text" of the relevant legislation...

...Similar examples of regulatory weakening can be found across the core areas of EPA's mandate, including clean water, clean air, and the management of toxic substances...

...Budget authorization is one thing, but where will the funds actually go...

...TRI requires companies to report to EPA how they handle and dispose of toxic materials...

...International environmental law provides a parallel challenge...

...The last administration's performancethe junking of science, the suppression of basic information, the spinning of facts to fit ideology, the wanton disregard for enforcing pollution laws, the use of rule-making power for private gain-did extraordinary damage to the nation's environment...

...electricity generation...

...State and federal agencies have frequently been caught enforcing environmental rules selectively or responding to environmental complaints in ways that tilt toward affluent white neighborhoods...

...not explicitly recognized in U.S...

...Interestingly, many of the forum's readers were dissatisfied with this chorus for a climate Manhattan Project...

...Groups such as the National Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense Fund traded their support for an elusive notion of political access, instead of holding out for serious green provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement or the World Trade Organization...

...For electric power generation, half-a-dozen states are pioneering programs that cap carbon emissions, require offsets for new emissions sources, or implement some sort of "cap-and-trade" system (in which a mechanism to buy and sell pollution rights in a regulated market creates incentives to reduce emissions...

...biodiversity law frames the problem narrowly in terms of preserved species (as opposed to genetic diversity and ecosystem health...

...Getting back on track also means rooting out the cozy relationships between regulators and developers that were exposed in the graft, sex, and drugs scandal of Interior's Minerals Management Service, which collects oil and gas royalties for the federal government...

...As it emerges from its decades-long slumber, America's environmental policy debate must above all else avoid archaic terms of reference...

...As the Investor Network on Climate Risk points out, investors face climate risks ranging from extreme weather events to the threat of climate-related lawsuits...

...But where Clinton was paying some debts to make up for an uninspiring environmental record, Bush`s last-minute manipulations were a continuation of business as usual...

...Thus, a final element of the to-do list is that it be accompanied by a strong commitment to a principled set of "don'ts...

...Cap-and-trade sets an overall emissions ceiling, issues permits to emitters, and allows them to buy and sell the permits in a quest for economic efficiency in allocating reductions...

...This will require strengthening EPA's capacity for enforcement and compliance monitoring...

...As these proposals are translated into action over the next few years, the key question will be whether they help to build bottom-up economies of sustainability in local communities or simply reproduce America's increasingly shaky "too big to fail" business model...

...At a minimum, this would mean keeping investment flowing to the small but growing renewable-energy sector of the U.S...

...A common tactic to promote this agenda, as revealed in a 2003 CBS News report, was to settle resource-development lawsuits against the U.S...

...But it also could mean business as usual, shoveling funds to Big Auto and Big Energy in much the same manner that they have been shoveled to Big Finance...

...The gerrymandering of environmental rules to weaken requirements or suit particular interests reached down to the most straightforward and innocuous programs...

...Just as much of the Troubled Assets Relief Program bailout money ended up with clients of Goldman Sachs, we may in a few years be asking how so much of the green stimulus money ended up, directly or indirectly, in the hands of Big Oil and Big Auto...

...In 2008, the United States pledged a paltry $5.8 million to the UN Environment Programme, which administers the secretariats for important international agreements, provides technical support for developing countries, and maintains several important environmental monitoring systems...

...At the Interior Department, top Bush appointees unabashedly represented resource developers pushing for open access to public lands...

...As a result, in order for victims to bring suit under the Civil Rights Act, they must work through a government agency and show an explicit intention to discriminate rather than simply a consistent pattern of disproportionate racial impact...

...more plausibly, the motivation is fear that a right to water would undercut the push for water privatization around the world...

...In boosting the economy, don't sink stimulus money into rebuilding the same infrastructure that brought us to our current sorry state of energy profligacy...

...The Clean Water Act, for example, urgently requires fixing in light of Supreme Court rulings that have introduced ambiguity as to its scope...

...The list of international agreements that the United States has failed to sign, withdrawn from, or failed to ratify includes not only the Kyoto climate accord but nearly every piece of important international environmental law of the past two or three decades: the Stockholm and Rotterdam agreements on hazardous chemicals, the Basel Convention on the toxic waste trade, the Cartagena Protocol on "biosafety" (risks related to genetically modified organisms), the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Law of the Sea agreement...

...They promote practices that skew our entire system of economic production toward unsustainability, toxification, and waste...

...If my electric utility or local factory decides to buy permits rather than reduce emissions, hasn't my community lost a real chance to leverage a cleaner environment...

...In Alexander v. Sandoval, the Court ruled five to four that there is no private right to take legal action to enforce regulations related to disparate impact...

...Environmental injustices do more than add a green hue to the fact that it's tough to be poor and black or brown in America...

...Another type of low-hanging fruit can be harvested with a sharp pair of "green scissors"the name given to a campaign to identify antienvironmental subsidies and tax breaks in the federal budget...

...Those who recall the winding down of the cold war will remember a similar response among greens, in their call to reorient the chimerical peace dividend into investments in what they termed "environmental security...

...as of this writing, Obama has shown little inclination to do so, either...

...Several of these accords have proved to be reasonably effective...

...1103, the Environmental Justice Act of 2007, which would require EPA to conduct environmental justice reviews of its programs and strengthen justice considerations in rulemaking...

...What are the lessons from the increasingly apparent problems with Europe's cap-and-trade scheme, in place since 2005...

...The Pew Center on Global Climate Change tracks state-level climate initiatives, which have grown and proliferated in proportion to the Bush administration's obduracy...

...A bolder stroke would be to restore the ability to take private legal action for environmental justice under the Civil Rights Act-shifting the power of enforcement and accountability from a government agency to millions of American citizens...

...The Bush administration tried repeatedly to alter the rules on TRI: weakening reporting requirements, expanding loopholes, redefining what counts as toxic waste...

...The UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights explicitly rejected such reasoning in a 2002 general comment on water rights, pointing out that such basic human needs as water must be recognized as the foundation of political rights and not simply their byproduct...

...Only Stanford scientists Paul and Ann Ehrlich cast the problem in wider terms of consumption, inequity, ecosystem destruction, and unsustainability (although the insight of their broader diagnosis is lost in their persistent emphasis on population control as the antidote...

...Air pollution law privileges a handful of pollutants...

...development assistance...

...An important first step, therefore, is putting an end to Bush-era obstructionism...

...economy (without which, tax-credit incentives to install a solar panel or switch to wind power do little good...

...Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain, among others, have recognized an international right to water and directed their development-assistance programs to take this into account...

...RESHAPING THE FRAMEWORK Amore difficult challenge is to upgrade and modernize an increasingly outdated and frayed legal framework for environmental protection...

...In human rights parlance, the environment is typically cast as a socioeconomic right-making it automatically suspect in U.S...

...Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of five prominent environmental groups and twenty-six corporate partners including Dow Chemical, GE, Dupont, Duke Energy, the Big Three automakers, and oil giants BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips...

...It hamstrings any initiatives that threaten to suppress economic activity (however harmful that activity to the actual well-being of people or ecosystems...

...Watching this battle was a reminder of the powerfully effective role the environmental lobby may still play, despite its reactive habits, its Beltway ossification, and its growing corporate ties...

...But these laws often lacked careful economic or scientific analysis and were designed to regulate the activities of a very different economic era...

...government has been reluctant on environmental rights at the domestic level, it has been explicitly obstructionist internationally...

...the first Earth Day turned out an estimated twenty million Americans...

...Again, however, the approach avoids some very tough questions: Why start the bargaining on U.S...

...Clearly, the combination of Obama's election and the need for stimulus spending has led the U.S...

...Others noted the omission of equally pressing global challenges-biodiversity loss, for example, and the growing crisis of the world's oceans...

...It is instructive to recall the green cover that much of the mainstream environmental community gave to the Clinton-Bush free-trade agenda in the 1990s...

...environmental community to sense a strategic opportunity of a sort not seen since the wave of landmark green legislation in the Nixon years...

...On climate, the administration is committed to a cap-and-trade approach along the lines put forth by the U.S...

...According to Pew, more than thirty states now have or are developing a climate action plan...