Ex-Obama officials rue missed chances on climate action

The failure to clinch energy and environment legislation in former President Barack Obama’s first term was a “significant missed opportunity,” Obama’s former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a recently released oral history.

Another official, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, went so far to say that Obama should have tried to "shake down" lawmakers to garner votes.

While the massive health care law, the Affordable Care Act, was among the Obama administration’s top legislative priorities, another big priority was sweeping energy and climate legislation.

But that effort ultimately took a back seat to the health care effort and fizzled in the Senate, frustrating senior Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration.

Oral histories produced by Columbia University that document the Obama presidency offer new details about the political machinations and behind-the-scenes policy discussions ahead of the passage of the health care law, which was enacted 14 years ago this month, and the demise of the climate and energy bill. Those interviews, the latest of which were released Friday, include lengthy interviews with former Obama officials and Senate Democrats.

Sebelius, who helped shepherd the landmark health care law into existence, lamented the fact that only one of those legislative efforts worked out. The administration had been successful, she said, in “translating the health side of environment to individuals,” and climate and energy legislation would have contained additional public health benefits.

“I think the most unfortunate part of that split energy was the fact that we didn't have the Senate pass an energy bill that had a lot of these features in it,” Sebelius said in an interview recorded in January 2021 and released Friday.

“I think looking back, the possibility was there that Barack Obama could've had two signature pieces of legislation, and those would have provided the framework then for doing all these other efforts,” she said. “We did a lot of work together on the environment, on EPA regulations, on updating standards and looking at things through the health lens. But it was never with a legislative framework that was driving an overall policy in a different direction.”

Nancy-Ann DeParle, a health policy expert who led health care reform efforts in the Obama White House, listed climate change among the former president’s top priorities.

“My sense was the president had three top issues that he wanted to get done,” DeParle said in a 2020 interview released Friday. “One was health care reform, one was climate change, and one was immigration reform.”

A key reason Democrats were successful in passing the health care law and not climate change legislation “is because we’d done the groundwork a year in advance,” said former Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who chaired the Senate Finance Committee and was a key architect of Obama’s health care law.

“Obama didn't have the opportunity — didn't have the luxury of a prior year of committee work trying to address climate change,” Baucus said in a 2021 interview.

Obama 'too standoff-ish'

In 2009, the Democratic-led House passed a cap-and-trade bill led by then-Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.). But efforts in the Senate stalled out.

Carol Browner, who was Obama’s chief climate adviser from 2009 to 2011, put some blame for cap and trade’s failure on committee differences in the Senate. Then-Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and then-Energy and Natural Resources Chair Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) had very different ideas. Bingaman’s garnered Republican support.

“Harry Reid wanted them to figure out how to move together. He wasn't going to pick and choose between his committee chairs. And they just could not figure it out,” she said of the former Senate majority leader, a Nevada Democrat, in her own 2020 interview for the project.

She said that although it would have been difficult and strained relationships, Obama should have picked favorites between them, to help one bill pass.

“You could have just said, ‘OK, just take one of the bills. Just take the Bingaman bill' — because it actually had Republican support — 'and drop the word "climate" into it and pass it, and let us get to conference and see what we can do.’ But that was a lot to ask of people.”

Chu said in a 2020 interview the administration decided to concentrate on health care during Obama’s first year in office, with energy to come the following year.

But when Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterm elections, Chu said “all of a sudden, a lot of things dramatically changed” and the president took a more hands-off approach with Congress. Chu recalled how former President Abraham Lincoln “wasn’t above shaking down people” to push lawmakers to abolish slavery, as shown in the film "Lincoln" — an attitude he wished Obama adopted.

“Now, I'm not asking President Obama to do immoral things,” Chu said. “But to shake down and use the power of the presidency to really garner votes was something I wish he had done more of. He was too much of a gentleman, too standoff-ish about that.”

'The big, bad EPA'

Faced with congressional gridlock on climate and other legislative goals, the Obama administration announced a campaign named “We can’t wait” in 2011 to advance priorities through executive actions.

“We had a little competition amongst different offices of the White House, who could come up with the best idea,” DeParle said. “It ended up being a lot of fun. And I would, every week, write the president a memo about that, too, about what we were planning.”

The list “came from the staff of the White House, because we wanted it to all be close hold and not subject to [the Freedom of Information Act], for example,” DeParle said. “But we each talked to Cabinet secretaries.”

But it proved tough to do some of the things the president wanted — including environmental rules — through executive actions, DeParle said.

“We had a lot of tools. The laws that Congress had passed over the 30 years before Barack Obama came to office did give the executive branch authority to set certain emissions standards, to impose constraints on the way our waters were regulated and all those things,” she said. “But they were all subject to litigation.”

Leading the effort to analyze costs and benefits of rules inside the Obama White House was Cass Sunstein, the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. DeParle called that job one of Obama’s “most important appointments” and “one that 99 percent of Americans haven’t even heard of.”

DeParle recalled disputes between the White House and the heads of EPA and the Interior Department over executive actions. “The rational guy wants to be able to make his case in a rational way about why we chose this number versus that number, what the benefits are going to be, because there will be some negative impacts in some industries,” she said.

Lisa Jackson, who served as Obama’s first EPA administrator, said while she was in office that she preferred climate legislation over the alternative of clamping down on greenhouse gas emissions with EPA regulations.

“The inability to get a [climate] law done and the desire to continue to make progress meant that we were now back to that other scenario where if you don't pass a law, the big, bad EPA is going to regulate,” Jackson said during a 2021 oral history interview posted last year.

“It’s a shame because it's a loss of time, first off, in a time-bomb problem,” Jackson said.

Gina McCarthy first joined the Obama administration as head of EPA’s air office and later served as Obama’s second EPA administrator. She recalled in a 2020 interview the lengthy process of drafting climate change regulations, including the Clean Power Plan, which was designed to curb power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions.

The rule was stayed by the Supreme Court and later rolled back by the Trump administration. Still, McCarthy argued the measure ended up achieving reductions in planet-warming gases.

“It proved to be a tremendous market signal to the outside world. We really didn't require any action to start for a few years, but the utilities began immediately to think about this,” McCarthy said. “It ended up even being effective without coming into implementation.”

The saga over climate change regulations continues today. The Biden administration is slated to offer its own iteration of EPA standards for power plant greenhouse gas emissions next month.