President Obama cited his climate change accomplishments in his final State of the Union address Tuesday night, citing successes on clean energy and a push to transition off fossil fuels.
“Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it,” Obama said. “You’ll be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.”
The president noted that under his watch the nation is transitioning to more wind and solar energy and moving away from “dirtier energy.”
“In fields from Iowa to Texas, wind power is now cheaper than dirtier, conventional power,” he said. “On rooftops from Arizona to New York, solar is saving Americans tens of millions of dollars a year on their energy bills, and employs more Americans than coal — in jobs that pay better than average.”
“We’re taking steps to give homeowners the freedom to generate and store their own energy — something environmentalists and Tea Partiers have teamed up to support,” he said. “Meanwhile, we’ve cut our imports of foreign oil by nearly 60 percent, and cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth.”
The Environmental Protection Agency tweeted ahead of the speech that by 2030 the Clean power Plan, the centerpiece of the president’s climate agenda, will reduce “power sector carbon pollution 32 percent below 2005 levels, preventing millions of tons of pollution a year.”
But what the president ignored was that more than two dozen states are suing the EPA over its far-reaching Clean Power Plan, which they argue is unconstitutional.
Critics of the plan argue that it will drive up energy costs and make the electric grid more vulnerable to blackouts. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to decide on whether to stay the regulation as soon as this week.
Environmental groups, unsurprisingly, were pleased by his speech, while still not leaving him completely off the hook. A joint statement issued by the liberal Center for American Progress and seven other environmental groups said the president’s work is important, “however, is not yet done.”
“We believe that there is an opportunity to accomplish even more during the final year of the Obama administration and in a pro-climate action administration to follow, and we look forward to working with the president to tackle methane pollution from the oil and gas industry, deepen carbon pollution reductions in the transportation sector, improve the resilience of our forests, wetlands, waterways and other wildlife habitats, shift away from fossil fuels, and accelerate the transition to clean energy alternatives that will benefit the economy and health of communities across the country,” the joint statement added.
Obama did not discuss how those efforts would move forward in the new year. Instead, he said he would move to attribute the cost of climate change on fossil fuel production to reinvest that money into a 21st century infrastructure.
“I’m going to push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet,” he said. “That way, we put money back into those communities and put tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st century transportation system.”
Fossil energy groups and critics of the administration said they didn’t hear anything unexpected from the president. Coal groups noted that one thing the president did not mention was the high cost of his administration’s climate rules on the public and industry.
