Hillary Clinton: The greenest president ever?

One of many tragedies of this enervating U.S. election race is the manner in which Donald Trump has been able to manipulate the media, allowing him to both dominate the airwaves and ensure that when Hillary Clinton has been discussed at all, it has been to focus on the various (non)scandals that have beset her.

Like a pervy old man in a womens' changing room, Trump has demanded everyone's attention — he may have left many observers feeling sickened, but there has only been one topic of conversation.

What has been true for the campaign as a whole has also been true for the environmental policies and issues, which have remained depressingly and predictably under the radar. So Trump's assertions that he will bring back coal jobs, cancel the Paris Agreement, axe $100 billion of U.S. climate funding and protect the environment without "intrusive" regulations, have all been given an airing.

Meanwhile, the only environmental comment from Clinton that has achieved similar cut through was her guileless declaration that "we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."

The contest between two candidates who take a diametrically opposed position on climate change could reverberate through millennia.

This asymmetrical coverage does American voters and the billions of other interested parties around the world a great disservice. Not just because, as Dave Roberts argues this week, the contest between two candidates who take a diametrically opposed position on climate change could reverberate through millennia, but also because Clinton is on the verge of becoming the greenest president in U.S. history.

This is not hyperbole for two reasons. Firstly, as former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron discovered, the global crash in clean energy costs and the embrace of decarbonization at many of the world's largest companies means the "greenest ever" goal becomes immediately attainable for any head of state who avoids an explicitly polluting strategy. If the polls are accurate and Clinton holds off Trump's challenge in rustbelt states, then historical and technological trends would make her the greenest president in history by default even if she never talked about climate change ever again. 

But this is to continue the depressing campaign trope of damning Clinton with faint praise, because the Democratic candidate is also standing on the most aggressively pro-green platform of any major party nominee in history. 

Clinton is on the verge of becoming the greenest president in U.S. history.

Clinton's environmental strategy has been widely described and accepted as a continuation of President Barack Obama's climate push. This is understandable given her initial climate policy goal will be to defeat the legal challenge against Obama's Clean Power Plan and protect the wider array of executive orders that have delivered a raft of fuel efficiency, energy efficiency and climate resilience initiatives in recent years.

But, again, this is to undersell the policy package Clinton has put together. In addition to defending Obama's various emissions standards on vehicles and power plants, Clinton is proposing a suite of measures to ensure those standards are first met and then exceeded.

For example, her goal to generate enough renewable energy to power every home in America, with half a billion solar panels installed by 2021 goes beyond Obama's plan and beyond most forecasts based on current policies. Similarly, the plan for a Clean Energy Challenge to provide hefty grants to states and cities that promise to lead the low carbon transition is an exciting proposal that promises to create some genuinely low emission testbed economies across the U.S. Big investments in clean infrastructure, R&D and aiding the transition in high carbon coal communities are also planned.

These ambitious new policies will feed into the review of vehicle fuel standards, building codes and the U.S. wider decarbonization strategy, all of which would occur during the first term of a Clinton presidency. The Obama plan, like the national climate action plans being put into place around the world in the wake of the Paris Agreement, includes periodic review periods and the clear assumption that these reviews will result in a ratcheting up of ambition.

If she wins today, Clinton will be in the Oval Office to undertake those reviews, just as she will be the president who sees the Paris Agreement ramp up from 2018 onwards. Some of Clinton's many critics will ask if she is truly committed to this ambitious climate strategy or whether she has pulled it together for narrow political reasons: to win over Bernie Sanders' supporters or harness the goodwill Obama has generated with his inspiring rhetoric on climate action.

Such speculation is understandable given Clinton's reputation as a political operator down to her cuticles. But it is also more than a little unfair when she is the only frontline politician to publicly acknowledge, albeit inelegantly, that coal companies in their current guise will have to close.

She has a long record of being committed to ambitious action on climate change and while this may have been diluted by her stance on a number of issues, she has put together a team with a serious commitment to climate action.

Moreover, if her support for green policies is politically calculated, so what? She has seen precisely the same polls and precisely the same focus groups as Obama and recognized that for the coalition of voters she needs to win and retain the White House climate action is a crucial issue.

Green business leaders today will be desperately hoping Trump loses, amid justifiable fears that he would undermine global climate action and lead an all-out assault on U.S. clean tech. But there are also positive reasons to hope that a Clinton victory will deliver an unprecedented boost to the U.S. and global clean economy, mobilizing additional investment and providing further evidence that decarbonization and economic progress can go hand-in-hand.

A Clinton White House would face staunch opposition from Republicans who are congenitally opposed to climate action, but there are still opportunities available to extend the already successful Obama climate plan and augment it with some exciting policies of Clinton's own. If Clinton pulls off an historic victory today, America's first female president could also be its greenest yet.