Lecturer in Law Lanhee Chen comments on President Obama's progress on his green agenda internationally and domestically for Politico.

For Barack Obama, it wasn’t easy being green — until, suddenly, it was.

During his earlier years in office, Obama never pushed the environment to the forefront of the national agenda. The economy took precedence. Then health care. At one point, toward the end of Obama’s first term, environmentalists counted the months between presidential uses of the term “climate change.”

…

Lanhee Chen, the former top policy adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said Obama’s “progress on his green agenda has come at great costs,” pointing to Democratic losses earlier this month in Senate races in Kentucky and West Virginia. “Both [are] states where Democrats thought they would be more competitive but where the president’s green agenda cost them significant support,” Chen wrote in an email.

Chen also questioned the staying power of Obama’s agreement with China, which he described as “illusory” because “neither party is bound to do anything, and the Chinese have promised to meet goals that their population growth and migration trends would have allowed them to meet anyway.”

“So I am not nearly as sanguine about how successful the president has been in the pursuit of his green agenda,” Chen wrote, adding that Obama still faces a critical legacy-defining decision on the Keystone XL pipeline that divides his own Democratic base.

Read More