Wow, President Obama's Chief Of Staff Has Climate Policy Background, Nat. Journal Breathlessly Notes
Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, is best known for two things: his national security chops—he had key roles on the White House National Security Council—and the high regard in which he’s held by President Obama. McDonough has been part of Obama’s inner circle for nearly a decade, and the president has called his new chief of staff one of his “closest and most trusted advisers.”
Here’s what a lot of people don’t know about McDonough: He has a background on climate change, and he takes the issue very seriously. “Denis McDonough understands the threat posed by climate change to national security more than any White House chief of staff in the 21st century,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank where McDonough worked as senior fellow in 2006 and 2007; while there, he wrote and contributed to several papers on climate change.
Jason Bordoff, who served as the president’s special assistant for energy and climate change on the National Security Council, wrote in an e-mail to National Journal, “When Denis was deputy national security adviser … we worked together on several energy and climate-related issues. Denis recognizes that climate change is a serious problem, and that strong U.S. leadership and action is needed to address the challenge.”
Here’s why that’s important: If Obama wants to follow through on his 2013 Inaugural Address pledge to make climate change a cornerstone of his legacy, he’ll need to make a series of tough, highly controversial executive decisions. There is almost no chance Congress will pass climate-change legislation in his second term, which means that the White House will have to drive any meaningful policy action. That action will probably come in a series of aggressive Environmental Protection Agency regulations to slash pollution from coal-fired power plants, and in the president’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, the $7 billion project that would bring carbon-heavy tar-sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. Obama will also need to act ahead of a United Nations summit in 2015, at which the world’s nations are expected to sign a binding treaty to tackle climate change.
EDIT
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-man-who-could-put-climate-change-on-the-agenda-20130404
