“We’re Going to Keep on Encouraging Oil Development”

On July 6, the world experienced its hottest day ever recorded. That same day, Obama tweeted a video from an interview he had just given to comedian Hasan Minhaj in which he spoke about the hopelessness faced by younger generations about the climate crisis.

“Malia comes to me,” says the former president about his twenty-four-year-old daughter, with a serious look on his face. “She says, ‘All our friends, sometimes we talk about climate change and we just feel like there is no way we’re going to be able to solve this. . . . A lot of my friends, they just feel as if, what’s the point?’”

According to Obama, this is how he replied: “We may not be able to cap temperature rise to two degrees centigrade. But here’s the thing. If we work really hard, we may be able to cap it at two and a half instead of three. Or three instead of three and a half. That extra centigrade, that might mean the difference between whether Bangladesh is under water. It might make the difference as to whether one hundred million people have to migrate or only a few.”

Left unsaid in the interview is that Obama squandered numerous opportunities to tackle rising temperatures, and even bragged about overseeing the largest expansion of fossil fuel production in US history.

In March of 2012, Obama gave a speech in Cushing, Oklahoma in which he touted “what we’re calling an all-of-the-above energy strategy.”

That month, more than fifteen thousand warm temperature records were broken in the United States, making it the hottest March ever recorded — developments that were likely exacerbated by climate change.

He told the crowd, “Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. . . . We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline [sic] to encircle the Earth and then some.”

Obama went on: “As long as I’m president, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”

That summer, Arctic sea ice hit a record low, and in the fall, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report finding that Earth was on track to warm by four degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The report warned of “the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems.”

Obama received $1.1 million in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry during his 2012 reelection campaign.

In 2015, Obama declared that there was “no greater threat” than climate change. Later that year, he signed legislation lifting the forty-year ban on crude oil exports, a key priority for Republicans and the fossil fuel industry, increasing fossil fuel exports by more than 750 percent in the first five years after it was lifted.

As president, Obama oversaw an 88 percent increase in total oil production.

“You wouldn’t always know it, but [oil production] went up every year I was president,” said Obama at a 2018 fundraiser for a think tank at Rice University in Texas. “Suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people.”

“Not Particularly Committed”

“We were warned and warned and, for decades, the world shrugged,” tweeted David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for both of his presidential campaigns, on July 21. “Skeptics dismissed science. Now the effects of climate change are inescapably clear.”

Two days later, Axelrod tweeted, “For decades, we dithered and ignored the warnings and the science. Now we’re paying the price. Yet some STILL promise to roll back common sense measures necessary to TRY and prevent today’s disaster from becoming tomorrow’s irreversible catastrophe.”

Just a few weeks earlier, Axelrod had told the New York Times that including the natural gas Mountain Valley Pipeline in the recent debt ceiling deal to please coal baron Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, was a necessary compromise.

The pipeline project would carry fracked gas from West Virginia to Virginia, across steep terrain in the Appalachian Mountains, including more than two hundred miles with “high landslide susceptibility.” Opponents say that the new pipeline would cause emissions equivalent to twenty-six new coal-fired power plants.

When Obama was president, news reports suggested that Axelrod helped steer the administration away from climate action.

In 2010, a New Yorker story on the failure of Obama’s signature climate policy, a cap-and-trade plan that would have capped greenhouse gas emissions while allowing corporations to trade pollution credits, reported that “Axelrod, though influential, was not particularly committed” to the climate legislation.

According to the story, after passing the Affordable Care Act health care law in 2010, Axelrod and other senior White House advisors warned that “being closely associated with the messiness of congressional horse-trading was destroying Obama’s reputation” and did not want to pick another big fight over cap-and-trade.

In 2012, the Atlantic published a report suggesting that Axelrod had shut down any talk of climate change during Obama’s reelection campaign.

Neither Obama nor Axelrod responded to a request for comment.