Eight years ago, President-elect Barack Obama wanted Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to be his Interior secretary. David Hayes, who was leading Obama’s transition team for Interior and other agencies, remembers trekking to Salazar’s office on Capitol Hill at least twice to make the case for the Cabinet post.
He had the perfect bait. Three years earlier, Sen. Salazar had led a successful effort to require the Bureau of Land Management to authorize renewable energy projects on public land. The agency was supposed to approve 10,000 megawatts of solar, wind and geothermal electricity by 2015, but under then-President George W. Bush, its congressional mandate went nowhere. Hayes, seeing a rare opportunity, told Salazar that as Interior secretary, he’d have the chance to make renewables on public land a signature issue.
“We talked about renewable energy and how the Interior Department could turbo-charge potential renewable energy on public lands and make up for the historic and long-standing failure to give renewable energy anything like the attention fossil fuels had gotten on public lands,” Hayes recalled in a recent interview.
Salazar took the job, and made clean energy projects on public land a top priority. The initiative took the department from zero to 60 on renewables, and it is a clear example of the paradigm shift that the Obama administration brought to the West and to its energy development.
Eight years later, a new president-elect has dismissed climate change as a hoax, promised to revive coal and other extractive industries, and sworn to cut—or gut—the US Environmental Protection Agency. Come Jan. 20, 2017, many of Obama’s initiatives will be under sustained attack. Some of them won’t survive. But Obama helped transform the West’s view of its energy potential, and he encouraged the region to get involved in the global fight against climate change. Changes like that go deep and may prove harder to undo.
Obama and the West
President Barack Obama’s environmental record reflects an inclination toward compromise and incremental progress: He delisted 29 recovered species, but weakened the Endangered Species Act; he designated over two dozen national monuments, more than any other president, but left other key public lands unprotected; he promoted tribal sovereignty, but made little progress in addressing the systemic inequalities in Indian Country; and he failed in his attempts to loosen Big Ag’s grip over small ranchers.
Yet Obama may well be remembered as the first leader to seriously address the foremost environmental issue of our times—climate change. Though he oversaw surges in oil and gas production, he embraced clean energy and tackled greenhouse gas emissions, drawing deep opposition from the fossil fuel industry along the way.
Now comes a president whose Cabinet choices appear innately friendly to extractives and hostile to public lands and environmental protections. The Republican-backed Trump administration has pledged to roll back as many of Obama’s decisions as it can. Still, it may prove hard for it to undo all the accomplishments of the 44th president.
The president’s work on climate change started slowly. During his first term, Obama spent most of his political capital on the Affordable Healthcare Act and his economic recovery plan to lift the nation out of recession. Following his re-election, however, he focused broadly on domestic energy production and later the growing threat of climate change.
In early 2012, Obama traveled to Boulder City, Nevada, to stand in the midst of a sea of photovoltaic panels at what was at the time the largest facility of its kind in the country. “I want everybody here to know that as long as I’m president, we will not walk away from the promise of clean energy,” he told the crowd. But he also underscored his commitment to drilling. “We are going to continue producing oil and gas at a record pace. That’s got to be part of what we do. We need energy to grow.”