Podesta, John HC
John (not tony)
===
kash enemies list? why?
Trump FBI nominee has a full 'enemies list' — Here’s who’s on it - Alternet.org
tom cat fox
FIRST ON FOX: Senate Republicans are sending a stark warning to White House climate czar John Podesta over the Biden administration's pause on key energy projects.
October 26, 2016
Was Hillary’s Secret Plan to Attack Climate Skeptics Exposed by Wikileaks?
- Government & Politics
- Environment & Energy
- Government & Liberty
Was Hillary’s Secret Plan to Attack Climate Skeptics Exposed by Wikileaks?
Published October 26, 2016
On Tuesday, October 25, 2016, Wikileaks released a series of emails sent between Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, and the infamous “social change” media activist, David Fenton. The emails revealed a $3 million plan to attack the Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel to put them ‘on the defensive’ about their realistic climate stand. The goal was to scare conservative politicians into supporting new government global warming rules and bans.
The series of emails WikiLeaks hacked from Podesta’s account shows that David Fenton thanked Podesta for a meeting on February 19, 2015. Fenton and sent him two emails documenting their conversation.
The first email said: “Here is the [Fenton Communications] plan to go after [the Wall Street Journal] and Fox [News Channel] on climate. I have 500,000 [dollars] of this pledged if I can raise another million.”
The plan, attached to the email, used “guerilla tactics,” budgeting $350,000 for groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace for civil disobedience and social media campaigns, and $600,000 for advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and on the Fox News Channel. It would involve the creation of websites that disseminated true-believer views about climate change, and directly challenged the reporting in Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media.
Fenton’s email said:
“Fox News is the biggest single factor keeping almost 40% of Americans from believing humans are changing the climate, while only 10% know that 97% of climate scientists agree we are warming the earth at our peril. In some ways, the effect of the Wall Street Journal is even worse, as it sows regular confusion among its 3 million daily subscribers – business leaders and investors among the most influential people in the country.” [Murdoch’s companies also own the Wall Street Journal and he heads 21st Century Fox.]
Fenton continued his increasingly desperate email plea: “Unless and until the Journal and Murdoch are put on the defensive on climate change, opening political space for conservatives to come forward, it is unlikely that bipartisan efforts on climate change will be achieved in time.”
Part of Fenton’s plan involved “public shaming” of Murdoch so that his six children, who have more fanatic views on climate change, would have “leverage with their father”.
Clinton’s campaign has neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the Wikileaks emails, but has attacked what it said were Russian state actors involved in obtaining them. A Clinton campaign source dubbed the Wikileaks website a “propaganda arm of the Russian government” seeking to help elect the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, a conspiracy theory that serves as its own public shaming.
Fenton’s proposal to Podesta and its prime goal to “make Murdoch’s climate denial a major issue,” and “bring the scientific facts on climate change to his audiences,” was ironically released a day after an unwelcome story ran in London’s *Daily Mail* with the headline “Exposed: How top university helped secure £9million of YOUR money by passing off rivals’ research as its own… to bankroll climate change agenda.” So much for the integrity of “scientific facts on climate change.”
The Daily Caller covered the story for Americans:
“The UK government gave $11 million dollars to the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) in exchange for research that the organization reportedly never actually did. Many papers CCCEP claimed to have published to get government money weren’t about global warming, were written before the organization was even founded, or were written by researchers unaffiliated with CCCEP. The government never checked CCCEP’s supposed publication lists, saying they were “taken on trust.”
According to The Daily Mail, “Academics whose work was misrepresented reacted with fury. Professor Richard Tol, a climate change economics expert from Sussex University, said: ‘It is serious misconduct to claim credit for a paper you haven’t supported, and it’s fraud to use that in a bid to renew a grant. I’ve never come across anything like it before. It stinks.’ “
How could such a scandal begin? The chairman of the CCCEP since 2008 has been Lord Nicholas Stern, a militant global advocate for drastic action to combat climate change. He is also the president of the British Academy, an invitation-only society reserved for the academic elite. It disburses grants worth millions to researchers – and to Lord Stern’s own organization. Do we see the seeds of corrupt power here? Is this the beginning of another ClimateGate for the U.K.?
Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks emails between David Fenton and John Podesta show us only a proposal for a multi-million dollar attack against people with opposing but honestly held opinions, who are not given the right to those opinions – a signature mindset increasingly visible among intolerant progressives.
Fenton concluded his WikiLeaks email:
“We have let Rupert Murdoch get away with this atrocious behavior for too long. It’s time to make his endangerment of national and economic security a prominent, inescapable issue.”
Fenton is no scientist. His climate opinions are second hand, “taken on trust” from government science. Government science has been seen as the same type of oxymoron as military intelligence.
Evidently, Podesta did not take Fenton’s razzle-dazzle on trust. There is no evidence that Fenton’s $3 million campaign ever went ahead. To the contrary, climate change seems to be the poor stepchild of the 2016 election’s leading issue awards. If, somehow, the Fenton fantasy was actually put into action, it left the Wall Street Journal and Fox unscathed in their climate realism. Certainly, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to be taking climate policy advice from his six offspring. So, perhaps David Fenton’s Wikileaks email plans are what the Roman Empire once referred to as brutum fulmen – harmless thunderbolt.
But do not underestimate the man. Fenton is remembered as the one who engineered the phony 1989 Alar “poison apples” scam with the Natural Resources Defense Council to wrongfully disparage hundreds of blameless orchardists into bankruptcy.
He gloated about it.
First published at [LeftExposed.org.]
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BS
Biden admin creates pathway with eco groups to shutter energy source serving millions of Americans
Legal agreement 'marks a new direction for the Pacific Northwest,' Biden's clean energy czar John Podesta said
By Published December 14, 2023
no lnx
the White House, in coordination with Native American tribes and environmental groups, announced actions Thursday that provide a pathway for breaching, or removing, four hydroelectric dams in Washington state to protect salmon.
As part of the announcement, the federal government entered into a legal agreement with the Pacific Northwest tribes and environmental organizations filed earlier in the day in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. Under that agreement, the tribes and eco groups — which had sued the federal government in an effort to forcibly breach the dams — agreed to stay the litigation through 2028.
"President Biden understands that the Columbia River System is the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest, and for the first time under his direction, federal agencies are putting all hands on deck to support regional and Tribal efforts to restore wild salmon in the region," White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Chair Brenda Mallory said in a statement.
Mallory said the agreement charts a new path to restore the river. Environmental activists, Democrats and tribes have argued that the four federally-managed dams, which are located on the lower Snake River winding through Idaho and Washington before feeding into the Columbia River and Pacific Ocean, have decimated salmon and steelhead populations by blocking natural migratory patterns.
HOUSE PANEL TO PROBE BIDEN ADMIN'S NEGOTIATIONS WITH ECO GROUPS TRYING TO TEAR DOWN KEY POWER SOURCE
Chair Brenda Mallory, Council on Environmental Quality, speaks at the Fight for Our Future: Rally for Climate, Care, Jobs & Justice in Lafayette Square near The White House on April 23, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Green New Deal Network)
"Today's historic agreement marks a new direction for the Pacific Northwest," added White House clean energy czar John Podesta. "Today, the Biden-Harris Administration and state and Tribal governments are agreeing to work together to protect salmon and other native fish, honor our obligations to Tribal nations, and recognize the important services the Columbia River System provides to the economy of the Pacific Northwest."
Democratic Govs. Tina Kotek of Oregon and Jay Inslee of Washington; several involved tribes, including the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla; and environmental groups like Earthjustice, which represented plaintiffs in the case, all applauded the agreement as an unprecedented path forward.
MAJOR US POWER SOURCE FACING EXTINCTION THANKS TO RED TAPE, SPARKING CALLS FOR REFORM
The agreement includes $1 billion for wild fish restoration and a plan to develop new clean energy power operated by tribes. And it further establishes the so-called Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative, which includes a "comprehensive new roadmap" for salmon recovery involving a call to replace the energy, transportation, irrigation and recreation services provided by the lower Snake River dams, so they can be breached, according to Earthjustice.
The initiative explicitly recommends that dams are breached within two fish generations, or approximately eight years. While there isn't an explicit plan to breach the dams — an action that the White House has acknowledged would require congressional approval — the agreement does include commitments to begin replacing the services provided by the dams.
President Biden previously pledged to work with proponents of breaching the four lower Snake River dams to "bring healthy and abundant salmon runs back." (Getty Images)
"Congress — and Congress alone — can authorize removal of the dams on the lower Snake River. Bureaucrats, activist litigation, nor this administration’s radical agenda will determine the fate of any of the Northwest’s federal dams," Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
"This litigation effort was useless: It occurred behind closed doors, between two parties who wanted the same end result — to tear out our dams, and it completely excluded Idahoans who rely on the River System for its energy, transportation, agriculture and recreation benefits," he continued. "I will continue to fight any breaching efforts, and, at every turn, I will reject the Biden administration’s efforts to usurp Congressional authority."
BIDEN ADMIN PLAN TO RELEASE PREDATOR NEAR RURAL COMMUNITIES FACES WIDESPREAD OPPOSITION: 'A HUGE THREAT'
Risch, other Republican lawmakers, power industry groups and agriculture groups have all loudly objected to any plan involving the breaching of the dams, pointing to their clean energy output and vital services providing passage for barges traveling along the river.
The dams were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers primarily to ensure the Snake River was passable for such barge transportation. However, since then, the main benefit has been their reliable clean energy output. They still provide about 8% of the state's electricity, enough to serve millions of residents, and have a large total capacity of 3,000 megawatts.
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam is shown in the Columbia River system in Washington state. (Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Removing the dams would also likely chip away at U.S. climate goals since their energy production would likely need to be replaced by fossil fuel alternatives. According to federal data, replacing hydropower generated by the dams with natural gas generation would increase carbon emissions by up to 2.6 million metric tons per year, the equivalent of 421,000 passenger cars.
In addition to the impacts on energy and climate ambitions, removing the four Snake River dams would harm agriculture exports. Aided by the dams, barges traveling along the Columbia River system carry about 60% of Washington's annual wheat exports and a staggering 40% of the nation's total wheat production.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
"Instead of working with all interests, the U.S. Government chose for months to hold secret negotiations and refused to share any details with us, let alone allow our participation," the executive directors of Northwest RiverPartners, the Public Power Council and the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, which collectively represent power utilities, ports, agriculture companies and other businesses dependent on the dams, said last month.
"It is not surprising, then, that this proposal turns its back on over three million electricity customers as well as the farming, transportation, navigation and economic needs of the region," they continued. "By purposely excluding our respective organizations from the negotiations, literally millions of Northwest residents were deprived of fair representation in this process."
That statement came after lawmakers, led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., wrote to President Biden, calling for him to reject any agreement involving the breaching of dams. The letter included a leaked mediation document that paved the way for Thursday's announcement.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
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John David Podesta Jr. (born January 8, 1949) is an American political consultant who has served as senior advisor to the president for clean energy innovation and implementation since September 2022. Podesta previously served as White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2001 and counselor to President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2015. Before that, he served in the Clinton administration as White House staff secretary from 1993 to 1995 and White House deputy chief of staff for operations from 1997 to 1998.
He is the former president, and now chair and counselor, of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank in Washington, D.C., as well as a visiting professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.[1] Additionally, he was a co-chairman of the Obama-Biden transition team.[2][3][4]
In his current role as senior advisor to President Biden, Podesta oversees the disbursement of $370–783 billion in clean energy tax credits and incentives authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.[5][6]
Early life
Podesta spent most of his early years in Chicago, where he was born, growing up in the neighborhood of Jefferson Park on the city's Northwest Side.[7] His mother, Mary (née Kokoris), was Greek-American, and his father, John David Podesta Sr., was Italian-American.[8] Tony Podesta, a lobbyist, is his brother.[9][10] Podesta's father did not graduate from high school, but encouraged his children to attend college.[11]
In 1967, Podesta graduated from Lane Tech High School in Chicago. Podesta met Bill Clinton in 1970 when they worked in Connecticut for Joseph Duffey, a candidate for the United States Senate.[12] In 1971, he graduated from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he had served as a volunteer for the presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy.[11] He received his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1976.[13]
Podesta worked as a trial attorney for the Department of Justice's Honors Program in the Land and Natural Resources Division (1976–77), and as a Special Assistant to the Director of ACTION, the Federal volunteer agency (1978–79). His political career began in 1972, when he worked for George McGovern's unsuccessful presidential campaign.[14]
Career
Podesta held positions on Capitol Hill, including Counselor to Democratic Leader Senator Thomas Daschle (1995–96); Chief Counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee (1987–88); Chief Minority Counsel for the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks; Security and Terrorism; and Regulatory Reform; and Counsel on the Majority Staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee (1979–81). In 1988, he and his brother Tony co-founded Podesta Associates, Inc., a Washington, D.C., "government relations and public affairs" lobbying firm. Now known as the Podesta Group, the firm "has close ties to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration [and] has been retained by some of the biggest corporations in the country, including Wal-Mart, BP and Lockheed Martin."[15]
Clinton administration
Podesta in 1993
Podesta served as both an assistant to the president and as deputy chief of staff. Earlier, from January 1993 to 1995, he was assistant to the president, staff secretary and a senior policy adviser on government information, privacy, telecommunications security and regulatory policy. Podesta was the first White House staffer to get the news of the Lewinsky scandal and was put in charge of managing the crisis.[16] In 1998, he became President Clinton's chief of staff in the second Clinton administration and served in the position until the end of Clinton's time in office in January 2001. Podesta encouraged Executive Order 12958, which led to efforts to declassify millions of pages from the U.S. diplomatic and national security history.[17]
Post-Clinton administration
[
](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Podesta,_Bill_Clinton,_and_John_DeGioia.jpg)Podesta meeting with Bill Clinton and Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia in 2006.
In 2003, Podesta founded the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., and served as its president and CEO until he stepped down in 2011. (CAP chief operating officer Neera Tanden succeeded Podesta as president and CEO, taking over day-to-day operations.)[18][19] Podesta remained chairman of the nonexecutive board of directors for a time,[19][20] and remains on the board as of August 2020, although not as chairman.[21]
Podesta has taught at his alma mater, Georgetown University Law Center, many times over the years,[22] teaching classes on congressional investigations, law and technology, legislation, copyright and public-interest law.[22][23] On the Georgetown faculty, Podesta's title is Distinguished Visitor from Practice.[23]
From 2002 to 2014, Podesta served as a member of the Constitution Project's bipartisan Liberty and Security Committee.[24] In 2008, he authored The Power of Progress: How America's Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Our Country. In 2009, he accompanied Bill Clinton to North Korea for negotiations securing the release of two American journalists imprisoned on espionage charges. He can be seen in numerous widely circulated photographs of Clinton meeting with Kim Jong-il.[25]
Podesta opposes the excessive use of classification, and in a 2004 speech at Princeton University condemned what he called the U.S.'s "excessive government secrecy" and "bloated secrecy bureaucracy".[26]
...
Podesta has served on the board of directors of Bedford, Massachusetts–based energy company Joule Unlimited since January 2011.[32][33] He has also served on the board of the Portland, Oregon-based Equilibrium Capital. In 2013, Podesta earned $90,000 as a consultant to the West Chester, Pennsylvania-based HJW Foundation, a nonprofit group led by Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss.[32] He was the U.S. representative to the UN High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.[34]
After the 2016 election, Podesta joined The Washington Post as a columnist.[35] Podesta also sits on the steering committee of the China–United States Exchange Foundation.[36]
On September 2, 2022, President Joe Biden appointed Podesta as senior advisor to the president for clean energy innovation and implementation.[37][38][39] In this role, Podesta will oversee the $370–783 billion climate investment authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which was passed the previous month.[40][5][6]
Personal email leak
Main article: Podesta emails
On October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks started to publish thousands of emails reportedly retrieved from Podesta's private Gmail account, some of which contained controversial material regarding Clinton's positions or campaign strategy.[41] Podesta and the Clinton campaign did not confirm or deny the authenticity of the emails.[42][43] Experts investigating the leak, including a private security firm called Secureworks, claimed that a Russian hacking group named Fancy Bear gained access to Podesta's account through phishing.[44] Podesta said that Russian intelligence officials attempting to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump were behind the leak.[41]
The United States Intelligence Community released a statement directly accusing Russian intelligence of involvement.[45][46][47][48][49] Vice President Joe Biden told NBC News that the United States was "sending a message" to Russian President Vladimir Putin and that a wide-ranging "clandestine" cyber operation would take place in response to the Russians' activities.[50] When asked about the leaks, Putin replied that claims of Russian involvement were false. "The hysteria is merely caused by the fact that somebody needs to divert the attention of the American people from the essence of what was exposed by the hackers."[51][52]
Personal life
John Podesta is Catholic and has worked with Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United.[53][54]
He and his wife Mary Podesta, a Washington, D.C. attorney, married in 1978 and have three children.[55][56] His daughter, Megan Rouse, is the president of the Dublin Unified School District (CA) Board of Trustees.[57][58] Podesta is an avid cook.[59]
See also
- Podesta Group
- Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections (July 2016 – election day)
Notes
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/7-years-later-failed-waxman-markey-bill-still-makes-waves/
7 years later, failed Waxman-Markey bill still makes waves
By Amanda Reilly, Kevin Bogardus | 06/27/2016
7 years later, failed Waxman-Markey bill still makes waves
It’s been seven years since the House passed major legislation to create a cap-and-trade system for heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, and though that legislative attempt ultimately failed, the bill’s sponsors still say it sowed the seeds for other climate change efforts.
As is well-known, the Waxman-Markey bill was not taken up by the full Senate and never became law. But looking back over the last seven years, the bill’s sponsors and their former congressional aides reminisced with E&E Daily in interviews that the unsuccessful fight was worthwhile and that it has had important repercussions.
"It is always worthwhile to fight for what you believe in," former Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California said in his office in Washington, D.C., "and if you don’t succeed at first, you keep trying."
Waxman retired at the end of the 113th Congress, and early last year he joined his son’s public affairs and government relations firm, Waxman Strategies. The bill’s other sponsor, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, has been the junior senator from Massachusetts since 2013.
The two former House lawmakers introduced their bill, formally known as the "American Clean Energy and Security Act," on May 15, 2009. The 1,400-page bill would have established emissions caps through 2050 for several greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, and instituted a system for trading emissions allowances.
Waxman-Markey squeaked by the House seven years ago yesterday on June 26, 2009, by a vote of 219-212.
Phil Barnett, who was the Democratic staff director at the House Energy and Commerce Committee under Waxman at the time, said working on the bill was "demanding" and "challenging."
"We worked intensively on it for six months … seven days a week, long hours. The bill was a top priority for Chairman Waxman," said Barnett, now a consultant, adding, "The entire staff poured their hearts and souls into the effort because they thought it would do something to solve the climate problem as well as create economic opportunities and keep costs low."
Looking back, Markey pointed to work on the health care law, another priority for President Obama, for stymying the cap-and-trade bill’s momentum in the Senate.
"We finished Waxman-Markey in the last week of June of 2009. So we had finished our work," Markey said. "We were ready to go. And the politics of it then got much more complicated than anyone thought they would have."
The political dynamics around health care reform became complex with the death of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy in August 2009. When Republican Scott Brown won Kennedy’s seat in an upset victory in a special election in January 2010, the politics of passing major legislation became more difficult becauseBrown gave Republicans a 41st seat in the Senate, thereby robbing Democrats of a filibuster-proof majority.
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Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) never brought the climate legislation, which was championed in the upper chamber by then-Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, to a vote on the floor. Many people close to the legislation have since blamed a number of factors, including Republican opposition and concessions to special interests.
"It was a disappointment that we couldn’t get a bill all the way through, but we highlighted the issue," Waxman said. "We gave it our best effort. We tried to accomplish that goal. But I know from my own history as a member of Congress, I have to work sometimes decades before some of the proposals I made eventually became law."
He cited, for example, the 15 years it took for Congress to pass the 2009 Tobacco Control Act, which gave the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco products.
Genesis of executive branch efforts
The collapse of the Waxman-Markey bill in the Senate in 2010 spurred the Obama administration to aggressively use the executive branch to issue regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. EPA issued its final Clean Power Plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants last August and helped negotiate the international climate change deal in Paris last December.
In the first term, "the administration really focused on trying to get a big legislative fix to the climate change problem. As you know, that effort fell short," John Podesta, who was a top adviser to Obama and helped drive White House climate policy from 2014 to 2015, said at a recent conference in California. "In the second term, there was more focus on organizing and coordinating the agencies and the White House offices on both the domestic and international side of the equation."
Podesta, who is now campaign chairman for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, said that, if elected, the former secretary of State would likely focus on executive actions instead of attempting to pass a "grand climate fix" through Congress, even if the Senate flips to Democratic control.
Obama’s experience was "illustrative," Podesta said.
"A successful climate agenda requires a senior, serious point person in the White House," he said, "who can drive the agencies to do all they can across the whole suite of federal authorities."
But for the Obama administration, starting with a grand climate fix was "absolutely the right thing to do," Waxman said.
And Markey credited the legislation for setting the stage for the Obama administration’s second-term actions by helping to create necessary alliances.
"Much of what the president has done since then, and even if you look at the Clean Power Plan, it’s based largely on what was inside of the Waxman-Markey bill that we passed," Markey said. "So we had worked out the partnerships, the coalitions, that were still there when the president decided to develop the Clean Power Plan. So I think it was actually a very helpful political process to have gone through."
Michael Goo, another former top congressional aide who worked on the bill, agreed with the Massachusetts senator, saying, "Waxman-Markey is still the yardstick by which to measure climate programs."
"It was economywide, it set reduction pathways based on what the science was telling us, and it showed us how, by working together with industry, we could craft an effective climate program consistent with a growing economy," said Goo, now with AJW Inc. "And I think, sooner or later, we will return to something like it. "
Clinton vs. Trump
Markey called a potential Hillary Clinton administration paramount to the United States "continuing to be the world leader" on climate change.
Obama promised the globe in the time before the Paris climate negotiations that the United States would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions between 26 and 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. In Paris last December, more than 190 nations agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 C. The agreement also commits countries to periodically revisiting their pledged domestic emissions reductions.
Both Waxman and Markey are optimistic that Clinton will become the next president of the United States.
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"I think she would be wise to follow the example of President Obama in trying to put this as a high priority to work with the rest of the world to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change," Waxman said. "I believe she’s committed to it."
Markey is harshly critical of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s inconsistent views on climate change. In 2009, before international climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, Trump signed an open letter calling global warming a problem; he’s since claimed that it is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese to hurt American business.
Trump has more recently vowed to undo the Paris climate pledge, which Obama officials are hopeful will go into force before the beginning of the next administration. Once entered into force, which happens when at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions formally adopt it, the withdrawal process for a nation takes four years.
Markey compared Trump’s claim that climate change is a hoax to the businessman’s former claim that Obama was born in Kenya and not the United States.
If Trump is elected, Markey said, "every single promise we made to the rest of the world [on climate change] will be broken."
A campaign issue?
Markey also predicted that climate change would become a more hotly debated issue this presidential election compared with the 2008 race, when both parties’ candidates expressed support for addressing greenhouse gas emissions, and the 2012 race between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) when climate change was largely a nonissue.
"It’s going to become a larger and larger issue that goes right to [Trump’s] credibility as a leader in our country," Markey said. "So the more he says it, the better for us because suburban swing Republicans and independent voters believe the science of climate change."
Others have said the same.
"The Clinton campaign is going to push these issues, and their allies in the clean energy business sector are going to push these issues forcefully, especially in swing states," said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser for the Bill Clinton administration and an energy consultant. "I think they see it as a profound political vulnerability for Trump and the Republicans generally."
Still, a recent Gallup poll found that, of 17 policy issues, the issue gap for climate change is greatest among voters. The poll found that 72 percent of Democrats say that the issue of climate change is "extremely" or "very" important in how they vote for a presidential candidate. Just 25 percent of Republicans say that the issue is important.
Waxman lamented the hyper-partisan nature of Congress and that "compromise" has become a "dirty word" in D.C. He said he’s surprised that supporters of cap and trade were unable to harness the business community in attracting more Republican support for the legislation.
"It has been a difficult time that we’re going through in getting a more reasonable way to compromise," he said, "because so many of the Republicans that have been elected to office in the last four, six years think that their role is to say no to anything that the Democratic president, Democrats want."
Greg Dotson, who was the chief environmental staffer on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at the time of Waxman-Markey, said that Republican support did not materialize despite support from companies in the oil and chemical sector.
"The assumption and hope was that if you got businesses on, you got Republicans on," said Dotson, who is now the vice president for energy policy at the Center for American Progress. "So we did a lot of work to address business concerns, and we got a lot of business support, and that did not translate to broad Republican support.
"For an incoming president," Dotson added, "that’s a pretty scary precedent."
At a recent hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, Markey said it was ironic that coal-industry allies who are complaining about EPA greenhouse gas regulations’ impact on jobs didn’t support the cap-and-trade legislation.
He complained that the coal industry rejected an offer of billions of dollars for carbon capture and storage technology via the Waxman-Markey bill. Markey argued that the bill attempted to help coal companies stay alive in a way that works "for all the interests."
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"We were trying to give them a bridge to the future," he said. "Do you think they wish they could go back to 2009 and grab that money?"
Waxman said that he was hopeful that the dynamic would change in Congress to allow for more collaboration between the parties. He predicted a disaster for Republicans at the polls in November.
"I think it’s going to change because I think they’re going to go down the tubes in this next election, and that’s going to be a lesson to them," Waxman said.
He added: "But I don’t know. I’m giving you my wishful thinking."
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lots of docs in twt not here
‘This is what collusion looks like’: GOP-led Senate report ‘far more devastating’ than Mueller probe
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 18, 2020
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s final report on its bipartisan Russia investigation revealed even more numerous contacts between President Donald Trump’s advisers and Russian operatives than former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
The committee, which is chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on Tuesday released its fifth and final report, totaling nearly 1,000 pages,following a three-year bipartsian investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The report documents the extent to which Russia sought to influence the election — and members of Trump’s team welcoming their assistance.
“The Senate report — even more extensive than the Mueller investigation — paints a far more devastating picture of Russian intelligence operatives’ access to the Trump campaign, describing far more insidious connections than even Mueller did in his report,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney wrote.
The report, like Mueller’s, did not conclude that Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia, but it found that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with a “Russian intelligence officer” and handed him internal campaign data. The report also suggested that Manafort might also be linked to Russia’s hack of the Clinton campaign.
“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to theG.R.U.’s hack-and-leakoperation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” the committee’s Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”
The report found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime associate of Manafort, was a “Russian intelligence officer” who might be connected to Russia’s “hack and leak operation.” (Manafort provided internal Trump campaign polling data to Kilimnik.)
While the Senate Russia report mentioned Kilimnik 819 times, the House Republican report did not mention him once. The Senate report also found that Kilimnik later “almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election.” Trump has repeatedly echoed the claim that Ukraine interfered in the election — not Russia.
Another part of the report also cited evidence raising the “possibility of Manafort’s potential connection” to the hack and leak operation, though the evidence was redacted.
The report described Trump’s former campaign chief as a “grave counterintelligence threat,” who worked with Russian operatives before and after the election.
The report also found thatTrump did discuss WikiLeaks with longtime adviser Roger Stone, even though he told Mueller’s team that he did “not recall” doing so. It also revealed that Stone directed an associate to request a leak of hacked emails by Clinton’s top aide when the infamous Access Hollywood tape dropped. The emails were published a half hour after the release.
Like the Mueller report, the Senate report also detailed efforts by Trump and his team to impede the years-long probe.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the committee, urged the public to “review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and reach their own independent conclusions.”
Rubio, however, tried to spin the report as favorable for the president.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” he said in a statement.
“What the committee did find however is very troubling,” he added. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”
But Rubio’s statement brushed over actions by Trump’s advisers, as well as the president’s own statements to investigators.
One part of the report notes that Trump told Mueller in written responses that he did “not recall” discussing WikiLeaks with longtime adviser Roger Stone, who was later convicted in the former special counsel’s probe before being granted clemency by the president.
“Despite Trump’s recollection, the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions,” the report said.
The report also noted that WikiLeaks “likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort” by publishing stolen Democratic emails.
Stone “obtained information indicating” that Clinton campaign chief John Podesta would “be a target of an upcoming release, prior to WikiLeaks releasing Podesta’s emails . . . Stone then communicated his information to Trump,” the report said.
Stone directed an associate to tell WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to “drop the Podesta emails immediately” the day the Trump campaign learned about the looming Access Hollywood tape.
The report also noted that the Senate investigation was met with “unprecedented potential executive privilege claims” from the White House.
“The committee was surprised by these assertions, because they were made inconsistently and because they have no basis in law,” the report said.
“The Trump campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the report added.
The report further concluded that Donald Trump Jr. might have obstructed the investigation, but the panel declined to pursue the issue due to “time and resource considerations.”
Trump Jr. participated in the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya about obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Russian government “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known,” the report said.
The report concluded by warning that “what happened to the United States in 2016 should be an alarm bell.”
“Russia is actively interfering again in the 2020 U.S. election to assist Donald Trump, and some of the president’s associates are amplifying those efforts,” the report said. “The Russian intelligence services’ assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process, and Trump and his associates’ participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats” to the homeland.
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http://time.com/4308369/hillary-clinton-john-podesta/
Meet the Man Behind Hillary Clinton's Campaign
Former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta is interviewed on Nov. 9, 2012, in Washington.
John Podesta is interviewed in Washington, Nov. 9, 2012. David Hume Kennerly—Getty Images
HILLARY CLINTON
Meet the Man Behind Hillary Clinton's Campaign
Jay Newton-Small
Apr 28, 2016
On the wall in his office at Hillary Clinton's Brooklyn headquarters, campaign chairman John Podesta has an oil painting on loan from his lobbyist brother, who is an avid art collector. The image shows two men hunched over a dining room table, bearing knives and forks. On the table lays a man in a suit, who looks vaguely like Podesta. “It’s better to be the guy with the fork,” Podesta quips to his colleagues, if they ask about the image, “than the guy on the table.”
No one can argue that Podesta has been anyone's meal this primary season, and to the extent he has succeeded in his role, the same can be said of his boss, Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, with a win in Pennsylvania and four other states, she emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Even ahead of Tuesday’s voting, rival Bernie Sanders needed to win two-thirds of the remaining delegates to catch up with Clinton’s lead. After Clinton’s Acela Corridor sweep, Sanders path to the nomination is all but closed.
At the center of Clinton effort has been Podesta, a commanding presence in Clinton's orbit. When asked in Iowa just before the caucuses about how Podesta yields sticks and carrots, Campaign Manager Robbie Mook offered a puzzled look. “He’s John Podesta, you just do what he says,” Mook replied. It has been Podesta who has been charged with keeping the campaign coherent in the face of stumbles and setbacks, something that the 2008 Clinton operation failed to do. And it has been Podesta— part coach, part gatekeeper, judge and jury, director, fundraiser, policy wonk and strategist—who has overseen the Clinton effort.
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A lifelong runner, he has meticulously plotted every relay leg of the effort, has been deputized to confront Clinton on her failures and missteps, charged with keeping the unruly bands of Clinton family and friends in line, and has been spotted in Clinton's Brooklyn campaign headquarters standing on a chair with a bull horn, pumping up her 20-something staff. Podesta has also begun looking forward. For the general election, he asked Obama veteran Jennifer O’Malley Dillon months ago to start gaming out of a general election operation strategy versus various potential opponents—strategies she is already working with the Democratic National Committee to put in place should Clinton prevail—so they’d be ready for that turn when it came. Interviews with more than a dozen colleagues over the last several months reveal that Podesta is the first and last word on any issue, the primary and often only point of contact for much of exiled Hillary-land (Podesta stocked this campaign with professional campaigners, eschewing Clinton loyalists), everybody and nobody’s boss and simultaneously the campaign mascot and the wise man. Podesta is, in short, the man behind the Clinton campaign curtain.
Now he must lead next phase of the pivot to the general election, a process that began in earnest after Clinton won in South Carolina. On the charter plane out of Charleston that night, Podesta and Clinton toasted over a couple of blended Scotches. Neither are big whisky drinkers, but it was what they had on hand. For the first time, it was clear that the existential threat of Sanders had begun to fade. As is his style, Podesta did not let the toast linger, and promptly cut the celebration short: this isn’t over by a long shot, he warned. Don’t rest on your laurels. You still have many miles yet to go. Before they’d entered Tennessee airspace en route to Memphis, it was back to business.
THE ROOTS OF A PARTNERSHIP
In many ways this is the job Podesta has dreamed about for 20 years, though his first interaction with Hillary Clinton in her husband’s White House didn’t suggest it would ever happen. When Podesta was staff secretary, the then White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty gave Podesta an extra job: handling the scandals of Bill Clinton's first term. “You needed to isolate those as much as you can and keep the staff focused on the president and his agenda,” McLarty said. “I asked John to spear head that. He was superb.”
As part of that job, Podesta headed up the internal investigation on Travelgate, a scandal started when Hillary Clinton in May 1993 helped direct the firing of seven people from the travel office—usually non-political staff who continue through changes of Administrations. Ultimately, several investigations found the firings were inappropriate and most of the staff was reinstated. Podesta’s report was surprisingly critical of the First Lady’s role. Though no charges ever came of the scandal, the affair left Podesta in her doghouse. But the two policy wonks weren’t estranged for long. “When he left the White House he said to me he’d only go back for one job: Hillary’s chief of staff,” John’s brother Tony Podesta recalls. John Podesta declined to comment on the record for this story.
Podesta did eventually go back for other jobs, becoming Bill’s chief of staff in the final years—weathering Monica Lewinsky and impeachment with his friendships with both Clintons still in tact, that in itself a marvel. Though Podesta wouldn’t directly work for the Clintons again for years, he remained a key player in their orbit, publicly encouraging her to run for the Senate; helping raise money with his brother, with whom he co-founded Washington’s fourth largest lobbying firm, the Podesta Group; and then with the blessings and support of both Clintons launching his think tank, the Center for American Progress in 2003.
President Bill Clinton talks with White House Chief of Staff John Podesta on Jan. 20, 2001, in his last moments in the Oval Office before the president-elect's inauguration in in Washington.
President Bill Clinton talks with White House Chief of Staff John Podesta on Jan. 20, 2001, in his last moments in the Oval Office before the president-elect's inauguration in in Washington. Sharon Farmer—The White House/AP
When Clinton first began preparing for her first run for President in late 2006, Podesta chose to stay on the sidelines. But he made his opinions known. At a meeting at Clinton’s Washington home in December 2006, Podesta weighed in on the then New York senator’s nascent campaign. He thought her message of strength and experience made her too much like Microsoft when the market wanted Apple—something shiny and new, according to two aides who were present. During the campaign, when Apple overtook Microsoft in market value, Podesta emailed the story around—it was one of the only comments he made during that campaign.
For Podesta, the lesson was clear: if she ran again, Clinton had to be seen to be fighting for every vote and taking the primary seriously. Her slogan this time is "Fighting For You." Ahead of her July 2015 speech at the New School laying out her economic agenda, Podesta sat down with Clinton, her chief policy adviser Jake Sullivan and a couple of other staffers and thought about what her economic message should be, particularly knowing they’d be running against Sanders. Podesta advised her to pick things about which she was passionate—things like equal pay and childcare, say people present at the meetings. That speech has remained the heart of her message. “John is a very systematic thinker. One of the first things he did was look at operational strategy and look at lessons of 2008 and correct the mistakes,” Sullivan said.
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CAMPAIGN FRUITION
That didn’t mean the second campaign would be easy. Clinton, who herself acknowledges is not a natural politician, has struggled to beat Sanders, a 74-year old self-described socialist from Vermont. Her choice as Secretary of State to use a private e-mail server rather than government email, and the subsequent Congressional and criminal investigations into whether that potentially exposed top secret information, haunted her and made many question her credibility. And she suffered from relateability problems. She admitted in 2013 that she hadn’t driven a car since 1996, the tens of millions raised by the Clinton Foundation were scrutinized, and Sanders rarely lets a day go by when he doesn’t remind voters about how Wall Street banks paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches to their elite ranks.
The photo finish in Iowa shouldn’t have been so expensive. She shouldn’t have lost New Hampshire by 20 points, or Michigan at all. But this was the race that Podesta had planned for, for better and worse. Early on, he led the charge to keep everyone else in line, even as failures and setbacks strained the system. When Clinton's favored attack dog, David Brock began raising questions about Sanders' health, Podesta quickly shut the news down with a public Tweet. "Chill out. We're fighting on who would make a better President, not on who has a better Physical Fitness Test.” When someone in the Clinton circle put out word to Politico that staff might reorganize, it was Podesta who similarly restored order. “There is zero truth to what you may be reading," he said. "It's wrong."
Podesta made a conscious effort to course correct this campaign. Her first presidential campaign was hamstrung by back biting and leaking, as staffers lobbied for their strategies in the press. She spent too much money on media and neglected her field and technology teams. That staff was a coterie of longtime Clinton friends and aides picked more for their loyalty than their competence, leading her to change campaign managers mid-race in a bid to reset but her victories were never strong enough to allow her to catch up with Barack Obama's delegate lead. Podesta this time around invested heavily in field and technology early on, two areas where Clinton felt Obama had out-organized her. And only a handful of staffers worked for Clinton before this campaign, leaving the management of decades of Clinton insiders almost exclusively to Podesta. He also changed the tone and message of the campaign, encouraging Clinton to play up the historic nature of her campaign and speak often about women's issues and eschewing big rallies, no venues where Clinton shines, for intimate roundtables.
At a Clinton campaign senior staff retreat over the holidays in late 2015, each person was asked to bring an object that had some symbolic value to him or her. Podesta brought a snap bracelet from a relay race in Toronto. The campaign chair told the group about how in this particular race, one of his teammates had been shot in the leg running in the middle of the night. It turned out only to be by a pellet gun, but despite the drama all the runners finished the race. “John said it was a lesson about how we’ve got to take care of each other, no matter how bad things get and also to always keep looking at the finish line—though hopefully none of us will get shot,” said Mook. Podesta gave Mook the bracelet, and he carries it with him everywhere.
EAT OR BE EATEN
As Clinton makes the pivot to the general election, she is faced with the challenge of uniting her party. Sanders in an MSNBC town hall on Monday hinted that for his endorsement, he’d like to see Clinton embrace single payer health care and stronger stances on climate change, to which Clinton scoffed in her own town hall that winning means something. But the truth is, she will need Sanders’ help to unite and excite the party base around her, particularly among young and progressive voters.
She also has historically high negative polls ratings: a CBS poll in March found her underwater with voters by 21 percentage points with just 31% approving of her and 52% disapproving. Sure, Clinton benefits from the increasingly likely nomination on the Republican side of Donald Trump, who is even more disliked than she is: the same CBS poll found Trump with a 24% approval rating to a whopping 57% disapproval for a net deficit of 33 percentage points. The other Republican in the running, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, also suffers from more American disapproval than approval.
As a result, the general election portends to be one of the nastiest in history, with Trump already accusing Bill Clinton of preying on women akin to Bill Cosby. Not to mention, the ever-hanging threat of indictments relating to the e-mail scandal. Yet through it all, Podesta has stuck to his mantra, seeking to stay the aggressor not the victim: like any good runner he has mapped out the course prepared for the hills and challenges.The day of the Nevada caucuses found Podesta was at his brother’s house in Washington, overseeing a fundraiser for wealthy supporters. Podesta—a gourmet chef who often jokes he’d be fat if it weren’t for all the running—cooked for 200, part of a series of fundraisers where he and a celebrity chef cooked for donors. This time, he was whipping up Sunday brunch with Carla Hall, co-host of ABC’s The Chew. The message of the painting in his Brooklyn office was not far from his mind. “I’m behind the counter,” he half joked to the crowd, according to two people present, “because I don’t want to be the meal.”
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Because Keystone North would cross treaty territory, its construction would blatantly violate the “bad man” clause, an arrestable offense the Great Sioux Nation will not abide. President Obama knows this because the presidents of the Oglala Sioux and Rosebud Sioux tribes declared on national television their people are “willing to die” to stop it. He also knows this because his senior counselor, John Podesta, visited the “Reject and Protect” tipi encampment on the National Mall in April where this declaration of nonviolent civil resistance was made.
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:{:{Just this past December, The Obama Administration announced that the President will have a new White House adviser to help him navigate the tricky issues about energy and climate: }:John Podesta:{. While Obama has privately expressed skepticism toward environmentalists’ claims about the XL pipeline, one of his closest counselors will now be a committed advocate for cancelling it. Naturally, proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline are nervous about Podesta’s new job, while Podesta’s allies in the anti-Keystone movement are ecstatic.}:
Read the full story: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/12/john-podesta-and-the-keystone-xl-pipeline.html?intcid=obnetwork}:
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Shortly after the 2012 election, John Podesta was invited to speak at a board meeting of the American Petroleum Institute. Podesta is an outspoken environmentalist who served as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and then founded the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank. A.P.I. represents the interests of the oil-and-gas industry.
At the meeting, Podesta was paired with Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and the two men discussed the November election results. “He was despondent and I was very cheery,” Podesta told me in August. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity to address his political opponents, Podesta told the oilmen that Republicans had made a “horrible error” in how they handled the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
Keystone opponents, like Podesta, insist that the project would significantly increase carbon emissions by rapidly accelerating the development of the oil sands. Supporters of the project argue that with or without the pipeline, the Alberta oil sands will still be exploited, and therefore there would be no difference in emissions. With the help of heavy lobbying from A.P.I., Republicans in Congress tried to force the Obama Administration to approve the project. But in 2012, the State Department, which is in charge of the permit process for the pipeline—because it crosses an international border—opted to delay its decision instead.
Podesta argued that Keystone XL had been “rolling toward approval” before the G.O.P. put pressure on Obama. Their forceful efforts to get it approved, he argued, had backfired spectacularly on A.P.I. “The Republicans did the President a humongous favor by forcing a decision that he could only say no to, which was in fact their intention,” he told me, recapping his remarks at A.P.I. “They wanted to force him to say no, so they could campaign against him. And they spent a ton of fucking money in 2012 running advertising against [Democratic] members and against the President on this question, to no effect. All they did was put off the decision long enough so that you could mount a serious campaign against it.”
As I reported in September, in an article about the billionaire anti-Keystone activist Tom Steyer, Podesta helped organize that campaign.
“I told them that changed the odds from a virtual certainty—ninety-five to five—that he’d approve it, to probably fifty-one to forty-nine that he would not approve it,” Podesta said. “And so the blood drained from their heads! I probably said that for effect. I probably didn’t quite believe what I was saying. It probably actually had been reduced to sixty-forty that he’d approve it. But I think now it’s a fifty-fifty proposition.”
Earlier this year, the State Department, in a draft environmental-impact statement, said the pipeline wouldn’t have much impact on climate change. But the Environmental Protection Agency challenged that assessment, and State is now completing a final study of the competing claims that is expected to be released in the coming weeks or months. (The State Department refuses to give an exact date.) Once the report is finished, the ultimate decision about whether to build the pipeline will rest with Obama. In a speech in June, Obama said he will approve Keystone only if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”
On Tuesday morning, the Obama Administration announced that the President will have a new White House adviser to help him navigate these tricky issues about energy and climate: John Podesta. While Obama has privately expressed skepticism toward environmentalists’ claims about the pipeline, one of his closest counselors will now be a committed advocate for cancelling it. Naturally, proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline are nervous about Podesta’s new job, while Podesta’s allies in the anti-Keystone movement are ecstatic.
Podesta told me earlier this year that his case against Keystone was twofold. One, he believed the weight of the evidence suggested that the pipeline would indeed accelerate the production of oil from the oil sands and increase greenhouse-gas emissions over the long term. “There’s a lot of oil flowing from there, right? They’re not gonna stop doing that. But do we want to facilitate supercharging that?” he said. “That’s the question. And the answer to that I think is no, because of the climate impact.”
He was emphatic that Obama’s own test cannot be met. “I think he should not approve it,” Podesta said. “I’m of the view that you just can’t meet the standard now that Obama set out: Does it or does it not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution? What are the net effects? And I think a fair review of that would say the net effects are big and they’re negative.”
In his interview with me, Podesta also argued that if Obama wanted to get anything accomplished in a second term, the President had to be expansive in his use of executive power. Climate-change policy, Podesta believes, is fertile ground. Without any involvement from Congress, Obama’s E.P.A. can implement regulations to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, and the President could set a new course on energy policy by cancelling Keystone.
“We don’t know at the end of the day how you change the national and global mindset,” Podesta told me. “But if Obama did say no, what does that do to finally force some tough decision-making into the climate world? It could have a fairly significant impact on people’s understanding about what the problem is and the cost of adapting to a warming planet.” For Podesta, a decision by Obama to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline could be a turning point in the larger fight against global warming—a moment, he said, that could begin “to reverse” the effects of climate change.
Update: A White House aide e-mailed late on Tuesday to say that Podesta would recuse himself from working on the Keystone Pipeline decision.
“In discussions with Denis,” the aide said, speaking of the White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, “John suggested that he not work on the Keystone Pipeline issue, in review at the State Department, given that the review is far along in the process and John’s views on this are well known. Denis agreed that was the best course of action.” Podesta’s climate-change portfolio will therefore be limited largely to overseeing the implementation of E.P.A. regulations, which are already moving along, and not the far more controversial and politically sensitive decision about the pipeline.
Still, Podesta is on the record as strongly opposing the pipeline. If Obama approves the project, he will have to do so knowing that he is contradicting the assessment of his new climate-change adviser.