Obama’s Second Term Is All About Climate Change - by Jonathan Chait

When President Obama leaves office three years from now, the major policy story of his second term — barring some kind of unforeseen invasion — is likely to be climate change.  I made this argument at feature length last year, and the evidence continues to mount.  Coral Davenport reports today about Secretary of State John Kerry’s “systematic, top-down push to create an agencywide focus on global warming.”

Kerry is a longtime climate obsessive.  (Ten years ago, I attended an off-the-record discussion with Kerry alongside several journalists, and our main takeaway was that he understood and cared about climate change more than any other issue.)  His appointment to run the State Department is one of several Obama second-term moves that signal the high priority he assigns the issue.  This is true not only of the figures Obama has appointed to posts that inherently concern climate change, like the his green appointees to run the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, but also to general political advisers, like Denis McDonough and John Podesta, both committed environmentalists who will drive Obama’s climate focus.

Obama’s Second Term Is All About Climate Change - by Jonathan Chait