President Obama’s latest executive order to green the federal government follows in the footsteps of a long line of mixed attempts and failures to conserve energy and clean the environment going back four decades to the Carter administration.
Last Thursday’s announcement directed federal agencies to use more solar and wind energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting their use of fossil fuels.
In the 1970s, then-President Jimmy Carter announced similar federal reforms for the government to reduce energy consumption in response to the Arab oil embargo. He erected solar panels on the roof of the White House and launched an initiative to produce synthetic fuels to cut back on foreign oil imports.
The solar panels on the White House roof were later removed by former President Ronald Reagan and then re-installed by the current president. The synthetic fuels company Carter created went belly up. And the fracking revolution has transformed America into a world leader in new oil and gas production.
Less can be said about former President Bill Clinton, who signed into law the Energy Policy Act of 1992, creating a federal alternative fuels vehicle program to switch the government from gasoline to ethanol or another alternative vehicle fuel. The program became subject to scrutiny after it was discovered federal agencies were purchasing flex-fuel vehicles that can run on either gasoline or ethanol to comply, but were filling up with plain gasoline because they couldn’t find enough of the cleaner fuel.
Other efforts initiated by former President George W. Bush have also waned over the years, such as his hydrogen fuel cell initiative and FreedomCar to end the nation’s “addiction to oil” and end imports. Now the Senate energy committee is holding hearings on oil exports. However, many of the leading carmakers like Toyota and Honda are still attempting to make cars that run on hydrogen.
This time around, the president is focused squarely on climate change, an issue that has become most prominent in the last 15 years. Many scientists say the rise in temperature is caused by the consumption of fossil fuels, and lower-emitting resources like wind energy is a step to reducing the trend.
Therefore, the president is boosting the amount of renewable energy the government uses to 30 percent, and setting a goal to reduce greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming by 40 percent in a decade.
“These are ambitious goals, but we know that they’re achievable goals,” Obama said while announcing the effort March 19 from the Energy Department in downtown Washington.
The Thursday executive order dovetails with actions Obama has already taken in the past two years to implement his comprehensive and controversial Climate Action Plan, which includes new regulations to cut carbon emissions from power plants, along with increasing vehicle fuel efficiency.
Prior to that, the president had announced a renewable energy goal for the nation, an efficiency target and other actions including his goal to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. Automakers say they are about half way there on the vehicle goal, but it doesn’t look like it will happen this year.
The president noted that over the past six years, “we’ve done more than ever to combat climate change,” and in 2014 “the federal government used less energy than at any time in the past four decades. And in a historic joint announcement that many of you saw, China committed to limiting their emissions for the first time.”
This new executive order demonstrates that the U.S. is “going to be leading by example,” suggesting the action could help persuade more countries like China to follow suit and invest more in renewable energy, and ultimately reduce global emissions.
