Climate, Environment, and Energy - Obama Presidency Oral History

With climate change legislation off the table, the administration gradually increased its use of the executive powers of the presidency to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and protect portions of the American landscape from development and pollution. In interviews, officials from a wide range of agencies, departments, and offices provide details about, among other actions, the heightening of efficiency standards for cars and trucks, steps taken to regulate power plant emissions, and the creation of national monuments on land and sea.

During the Obama years, anthropogenic climate change increased the frequency and intensity of major storms, and administration alumni describe their efforts to update emergency response and disaster recovery protocols for this new reality. These storms occasionally created space for President Obama to center climate change in national discourse and for officials to introduce novel programs to mitigate emissions and promote climate adaptation. In project interviews, for instance, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan recounts the launch of a climate-focused, innovative landscape and urban design competition as part of the Hurricane Sandy recovery effort, and landscape architect Kate Orff reflects on its impact on her field.

Arguing that climate change is an essentially global problem, the administration made international climate negotiations a central part of its climate strategy. In the project archive, diplomats, technical experts, and advisors reflect on the administration’s participation in both annual United Nations climate summits and bilateral climate talks with key counterparts, namely China. Together, they sketch the trajectory of international climate politics from the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 to the 2015 Paris Agreement and beyond.

In his oral history, John Podesta, one of Obama’s top climate advisors, describes climate change as “an interrelated, intersectional problem of the economy, the environment, security and well-being.” Accordingly, across the collection, climate change emerges as an issue in interviews with a wide range of officials, including those for whom environmental issues were not obviously central to their portfolios. Among others, speechwriters, national security experts, and agriculture leaders reflect on how the acceleration of the climate crisis forced them to devote increased attention to climate change, center new issues in their policymaking processes, and develop new forms of expertise.

Still, many activists argued that, taken together, the administration’s actions to decarbonize the American economy, mitigate American and global emissions, and protect vulnerable communities were far from sufficient, given the scope and urgency of the climate crisis. In light of this reality, the American environmental movement developed considerably over the course of the Obama years, enlivened by new strategies from establishment institutions and a new generation of climate activists. The Obama Presidency Oral History captures this process through interviews with several notable activists and civil society leaders, who describe their efforts to mobilize and organize the public to pressure the administration to take action commensurate with its stated principles and the scale of the problem.

These interviews cover a wide range of issues, highlighting, among other themes, environmentalists’ frustration with President Obama’s persistent vocal support for fossil fuels and the mobilization against the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure like the Keystone XL pipeline. The archive’s coverage of those protests documents how they transformed the environmental movement, nurtured a new generation of movement leaders, and created new environmentalists like Art and Helen Tanderup, Nebraska farmers who joined the Cowboy-Indian Alliance after learning that the proposed course of the pipeline cut through their lands.

Climate change and environmental policy overlap and intersect with a number of other topic areas in the collection, including agriculture, the financial crisis and economic recovery, and science.