On September 23 in New York, the president will have an opportunity to score a political victory and advance an important part of his agenda. No, not at some Park Avenue fundraiser, although he might squeeze one in, but at Climate Summit 2014, a meeting of heads of state convened by U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon “to galvanize momentum toward a new global agreement on climate change,” to be finalized at a 2015 summit meeting in Paris. This is an opportunity for President Obama to lead from the front, and in the process lay out a program that might, just might, break the partisan deadlock in Washington.
The president likes to refer to the arc of history, to criticize those who are on the wrong side of history. Well, when it comes to energy and environmental policy it is the president who is on the wrong side of history, in two respects: He wants to end the use of fossil fuels, and use command-and-control regulatory techniques to do so. All of this just when fossil fuels are becoming cheaper and more abundant domestically, their use less threatening to the environment, the need for their contribution to economic growth more compelling, and when evidence is mounting that central direction produces unnecessary costs in lost growth and higher levels of unemployment.
