Obama Green examines environmental policy during President Obama's first two years in office. It tracks the environmental promises of the Obama Campaign to the environmental actions of the Obama Administration, across multiple issues, including, climate change, green jobs, renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean air, clean water, transportation and agricultural issues. The personalities and inter-personal relationships of the major political players involved in setting federal environmental policy are also highlighted. Obama Green looks at who played the heroes, and who played the villains, among Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of House Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader John Boehner. In addition, Obama Green takes you behind the White House gates, to see the power struggles among: chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; senior adviser, David Axelrod; energy and climate czar, Carol Browner; green jobs czar, Van Jones; and director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers. You may be surprised at who utters the four-letter words - or maybe not. In Obama Green, author David B. Bancroft, analyzes President Obama's environmental leadership through four overarching questions. How has President Obama utilized the tools of the presidency - nominations and appointments; relationships with Congress; and direct appeals to the American people - to move forward his environmental agenda? Is he an under-achieving environmental president, a good environmental president or a transcendent environmental president? Has President Obama been implementing an unprecedented environmental agenda that is so wide, and so deep, that it will ultimately steal all your power, your freedom and your wealth? Or is President Obama a charlatan and poseur, carrying out a modern day version of the 1970s movie, Soylent Green; where he has ground up the hopes and dreams of environmentalists and fed them into the political machine, in order to achieve and maintain power - in a latter day, Obama Green?
About the Author: David B. Bancroft, who has over two decades of experience in the environmental nonprofit community, is the Founder and President of Council on Environmental Affairs (COEA). COEA provides a forum for innovative policy ideas on clean air, clean water, renewable energy, sustainability and climate change. During 2008, he served on the Obama Campaign as a member of the Energy and Environment Work Group Prior to that, David was President of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. At the Alliance, his dynamic leadership revitalized the organization, and began a period of programmatic growth addressing agricultural, stormwater and watershed restoration issues. In addition, he devised and performed the Institutional Governance Analysis: The Role of the Headwaters States in Chesapeake Bay Cleanup. That study resulted in states of Delaware, New York and West Virginia being invited to play a leadership position in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Chesapeake Bay Program. As Executive Vice President of the Solar Energy Industries Association, David helped spearhead the creation of the Million Solar Roofs program. That initiative was announced by President Clinton at the United Nations in 1997, as the first U.S. commitment to help fulfill the global climate change goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Earlier in his career, David spent five years as the Deputy Executive Director of the Council of Great Lakes Governors, a consortium of eight governors and two Canadian premiers focused on the environmental protection and economic development of the Great Lakes Basin. He was instrumental in the success of several multi-state agreements including the implementation the Great Lakes Charter and the genesis of the Great Lakes Toxic Substances Control Agreement. While at the Council, David formed a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, creating of the Great Lakes Regional Biomass Energy Program, an advanced biofuels commercialization program. He fostered the groundbreaking study, Biomass Resources: Generating Jobs and Energy, adopted by six Midwestern governors as a green jobs and economic development strategy, twenty years before it became federal policy in the Obama Administration. David did graduate work in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a Masters degree in Technology and Policy from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and Bachelors in Environmental Science from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.