Presidential Leadership and the Environment

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Presidential Leadership and the Environment

• UST 652/752 Environmental Policy
• Dr. Kaufman
• Presented by Sheetal Puthran

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• Understanding the relationship between
  population, human activities, and the
  environment, and developing strategies for an
  environmentally sustainable future are among the
  most complex issues with which society must deal.
• The President must appear to have a significant
  role in environmental issues and the public
  expects to have strong environmental leadership
  from the White House.
• It is important to examine the powers of the
  presidency to effect environmental change.

• President cannot govern alone, he must rely
  on Congress to enact legislation and provide
  funding to carry out all activities.
• The role of the president role gets
  stronger when the
  presidents won party has a majority role in both
  Congress as well as presidency.

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Presidential powers in Environmental Policy cycle

• Agenda setting Bringing issues to public
  attention,public debate,press conferences, media
  events.
• Policy formulationDevoting presidential staff
  and mobilizing expertise inside and outside
  government.
• Legitimate policy Supporting legislation in
  Congress and brokering compromises.
• Policy Implementation Presidents use their
  powers to oversee the bureaucracy in various
  ways to influence policy implementation.
• Finally they constantly assess and evaluate
  existing policies and propose reforms.

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Two Radical Policy Change

• There have been two periods in history when the
  public had demanded very strong leadership on
  the environment.
• In 1970-72, when the environmental movement that
  had gathered force in 1960 reached a crescendo.
• Understanding the force, President Nixon declared
  1970s as the Environmental Decade and signed
• - The National Environmental Policy Act
• - The Clean Air Act
• - The Endangered Species Act
• - Created the Environmental Protection
  Agency(EPA)
• The second wave was in 1980s during Ronald
  Reagans presidency.
• Serving as a vice-president to Reagan and then
  being elected President in 1988, George W. Bush
  supported passage of a major Clean Air Act in
  n1990.

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Presidential Influence

• A Presidents influence on Environmental policy
  can be evaluated by examining a few basic
  indicators
• Presidents environmental Agenda
• Presidential Appointments
• Presidents proposed Budgets
• Presidential Legislative Initiative
• Presidents Executive Orders
• Presidents opinion on International
  Environmental Agreements

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Classification Contributions

• Presidents can be classified generally in terms
  of their attitude towards the seriousness of
  environmental problems,based on relative
  priority.
• OPPORTUNIST LEADERS
• They held office at the peak of public opinion
  surges demanding action to strengthen
  environmental protection.
• Richard Nixon
  George H. W. Bush

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Classification Contributions(contd.)

• FRUSTRATED UNDERACHIEVERS
• Democratic Presidents who came to office with
  large environmental agendas and strong support
  from environmental constituencies but
  accomplished less than expected.
• Jimmy Carter
  Bill Clinton

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Classification Contributions(contd.)

• ROLLBACK ADVOCATES
• Presidents who came with negative environmental
  agendas.They represented anti-regulatory forces
  in the Republican Party and sought to roll back
  or weaken existing environmental legislation.
• Ronald Reagan
  George W. Bush

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The Reagan RevolutionChallenge to
Environmentalism

• The environmental decade of the 1970 came to
  abrupt halt with Reagans victory in 1980.
• The first president to come to office with an
  anti-environmental agenda
• He saw environmental regulation as a barrier to
  supply side economics.
• With a Republican majority in the Senate, he
  passed the Recovery Act of 1981 which reduced
  income taxes by nearly 25 and deeply cut
  spending for environmental and social programs.
• He attempted to abolish the Council on
  Environmental Quality (CEQ) but failed.
• Reagans budget cuts had major effects on the
  capacity of environmental agencies to
  implementing their growing policy mandates.

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The Reagan RevolutionChallenge to
Environmentalism(contd.)

• The EPA lost approximately one-third of its
  operating budget and one-fifth of its personnel
  in the early 1980s.
• The CEQ lost most of its staff and barely
  continued to function.
• Reagans appointees for EPA, Burford and James
  Watt were forced to resign due to their
  confidential dealings in business.
• Recognizing and realizing the embarrassment,
  Reagan appointed William Ruckelshaus and Lee
  Thomas to restore EPA.
• Though EPA was permanently weakened by the
  drastic budget cuts,the new appointees put
  efforts for restoration.
• Reagan clearly lost the battle of public opinion
  on the environment.

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The Bush Transition

• Bush transition means, what began as a productive
  environmental administration deteriorated into
  defensive disarray in its final year.
• He declared himself to be a conservationist in
  the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and promised
  to be an environmental President
• He pursued a bipartisan strategy in passing the
  Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990-the single
  important achievement.
• The three major goals
• - to control acid rain by reducing
  sulfur-dioxide emissions.
• - to reduce air pollution in eighty urban
  areas.
• - to lower emissions of 200 airborne toxic
  chemicals by 75 to 90 by 2000.

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The Bush Transition (contd.)

• During the last 18 months of Bush administration,
  Vice President Dan Quayles council operated in
  secrecy and frequently pressurized EPA and other
  agencies to ease regulations.
• He refused to endorse binding international
  agreements to deal with climate change and
  bio-diversity at the 1992 Earth Summit.
• He further refused to sign the Convention on
  Biodiversity despite efforts by his delegation
  chief, William Reilly.
• Many environmentalists who had supported Bush
  were dismayed by his deteriorating environmental
  policies.

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Clinton Presidency

• Clinton was elected in 1992 election due to the
  strong support from environmental constituencies
  and green voters.
• He came to office with strong and large
  environmental agendas but underachieved due to
  the competing priorities and lack of public and
  congressional support.
• Initially Clinton had promised not to support
  NAFTA and GATT unless protections for labor and
  the environment were added.
• But eventually alienated many environmentalist
  and democrats by uniting with Republicans to pass
  NAFTA in 1993 and GATT in 1994.
• Although his intention was stabilize carbon
  dioxide emissions by signing the biodiversity
  convention ,the administration failed to
  implement the policy.

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Clinton Presidency(contd.)

• Clinton managed to regain public support by
  restoring most of the funding for environmental
  programs.
• Unlike Reagan, he used his powers of appointment
  , budgeting, reorganization to reform and
  strengthen environmental protection.
• He issued orders for creating and enlarging
  twenty-two national monuments and protecting
  millions of acres of forest lands.
• Although there were congressional opposition,
  Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol treaty in
  1998.
• However Congress did not ratify the agreement and
  prohibited efforts to implement it.

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Emission of CO2 by countries in 1990
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President George W. BushA Preliminary Assessment

• Bush was closely tied to the oil industry and
  cared relatively little about the environment.
• He along with Dick Cheney who had headed
  Halliburton, proposed major increase in oil and
  energy production to prevent future energy
  shortages.
• They called for opening public lands,including
  the Artic National Wildlife Refuge , to oil and
  gas development.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
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President George W. BushA Preliminary Assessment
(contd.)

• Bush opposed designation of more national
  monuments without state and local consultation to
  reverse Clintons proclamations.
• Most Controversial decisions announced in early
  2001 in Bushs administration were
• - The United States would withdraw from
  the Kyoto Protocol
• - Suspension of a regulation that would
  lower allowable level of arsenic in drinking
  water from 50 ppb(parts per billion) to 10 ppb.
• - Delay in the plan to ban road
  construction in nearly 60 million acres of
  national forests.
• Bushs unilateral decision to withdraw from
  international climate change regime has left the
  US more isolated in global environmental
  diplomacy.

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Conclusion

• The record of recent presidents demonstrates that
  the White House has had a significant but hardly
  singular or consistent role in shaping national
  environmental policy.
• The United States cannot ultimately lead a world
  with which it refuses to cooperate in
  environmental diplomacy.
• The President thus has a vital role to play in
  future environmental policy making on the global
  as well as the domestic stage.