President Obama is one of the best presidents of the country’s history. He has improved the economy significantly by creating jobs, improved foreign relations, better funded healthcare and education across the nation; these are just a few of the hundreds of achievements Obama has accomplished as president of the United States. Amongst his greatest achievements is his “The Clean Power Plan” where Obama set out to “reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030”. Obama’s plan set out not to only slow down the harmful effects of climate change, but also to improve our economy through investing in renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, and wind power.
Carbon emissions is the number one factor that contributes to global climate change. So it is reasonable to assume that Obama’s primary concern would be to reduce carbon emissions in any way possible. Obama is doing this by creating standards and regulations for Power Plants to reduce how much they produce carbon emissions, an important step in the write direction. As previously stated, the hope is to reduce carbon emissions by 32% by 2030. The second largest contributor to carbon emissions are motor vehicles. What Obama has done, is the same as for power plants, he is regulating the Carbon emissions in this industry as well. How he is doing this is by setting a standard for passenger vehicles to have a fuel efficiency of 54.5 mpg by the year 2025.
Another primary focus of Obama is by expanding the clean power economy, and hopes to raise clean power generation by 30%. He has secured billions of dollars in funds to go towards renewable energy sources, including solar and wind. Especially solar, in the past couple years the number of houses and buildings that use solar power has greatly increased. This is not from reading an article either. Simply from walking walking around my own neighborhood. Many houses have begun implementing solar panels to their roofs, and new houses especially. As an example new housing complexes along Hyde Park avenue have implemented solar panels.
Obama is a president that truly cares about the state of our planet. He was the first president to visit the arctic circle in order to truly observe, first hand, the effects of what we had done to our planet. He realizes that climate change is no longer something to be concerned about in the future, it is happening now. “‘we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair: submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields no longer growing’” (Obama). Obama is not yet satisfied with what we have done. The numbers are impressive feats, compared to what any president has done before, but Obama will not stop until he has completed everything he can in the year he has left as our president.