President Obama will be releasing his vision for a climate change strategy on Tuesday, June 25. With just a few years until the next election and almost a year into his second term, the president will use this opportunity to set a course on this issue for the remainder of his presidency. This event is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it will give guidance to both the business and environmental communities as to what sectors and activities will be in line for changes. Second, by establishing the boundaries of the administration’s approach to climate change, it will clarify the degree to which Congress may want to legislate in new areas, such as taxation. And third, the level of ambition set by the U.S. will be an important consideration for international discussions to address climate change that are due to culminate in a new international agreement in 2015.
The road to this announcement thus far has in fact been longer than the road remaining ahead—some observers may recall that even in the presidential debates in 2008, both Barack Obama and John McCain agreed on the importance of addressing climate change and differed primarily in the degree of stringency they would apply to a policy of pricing greenhouse gas emissions. On the campaign trail that same year, Obama repeatedly returned to three priority themes that he promised to focus on during his presidency: the economy, health care and climate change. As we now know, other issues took precedence in the ensuing years, particularly after a disappointing international climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, and after the 2010 elections and vitriolic health care debate helped scuttle discussion of a domestic cap-and-trade program on greenhouse gas emissions.
See full Article: http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2013/06/24-obama-climate-announcement-hultman
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