Obama presses Trump not to back away from clean energy
U.S. President Barack Obama cast the adoption of clean energy in the U.S. as “irreversible,” putting pressure on President-elect Donald Trump not to back away from a core strategy to fight climate change.
“Despite the policy uncertainty that we face, I remain convinced that no country is better suited to confront the climate challenge and reap the economic benefits of a low-carbon future than the United States,” Mr. Obama wrote.
Mr. Obama, penning an opinion article in the journal Science, sought to frame the argument in a way that might appeal to the president-elect — in economic terms. He said the fact that the cost and polluting power of energy have dropped at the same time proves that fighting climate change and spurring economic growth aren’t mutually exclusive.
The articles reflect an effort by Mr. Obama to pre-empt the arguments Mr. Trump or Republicans are likely to employ as they work to roll back Mr. Obama’s key accomplishments in the coming years.
Secretary of State John Kerry, one of Mr. Obama’s top allies on climate change, echoed the president in a speech Monday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Kerry said the answers to climate change are relatively straightforward and depend on the U.S. relying on cleaner sources like solar, wind, biomass and nuclear energy, but added that he didn’t know what policies Mr. Trump and the next secretary of state would pursue.
Mr. Obama has turned to an unusual format to make his case to Mr. Trump to preserve his policies — writing in academic and policy journals. In the last week, Mr. Obama also published articles under his name in the Harvard Law Review about his efforts on criminal justice reform and in the New England Journal of Medicine defending his healthcare law, which Republicans are poised to repeal.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to reinvigorate the U.S. coal industry and dismantle Mr. Obama regulations targeting coal-fired power plants. More recently, he’s suggested he’s keeping an open mind about climate change and about whether he’ll pull the U.S. out of the global emissions-cutting deal struck in Paris in 2015 that Obama helped broker.
