Being president of the USA isn’t just about the inbox; presidents are judged more for the “vision thing”. It is their vision that forms their legacy and it is their legacy for which they are judged. Take Bill Clinton; in the first term of his presidency he tried to pass global health insurance for all American citizens, yet by the end of his term he had to settle for breaking the power of the tobacco industry. In health terms an important achievement, certainly, but hardly the New Deal. In fairness he also managed to balance the US budget. But the point of legacies is that time filters out the prosaic (balancing the budget) leaving only the poetic (winning the Cold War: Ronald Reagan). 

Barack Obama’s legacy is now starting to look substantial. The general consensus is that his first terms started hesitantly, yet even a Nobel laureate in the dismal science of economics could be forgiven for equivocating in their response to the unfolding financial apocalypse: yet when Lehman Brothers was declared bankrupt, and when AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were all nationalised (September 2008), he hadn’t even won the election (November 2008). He then had to wait a further two months before his inauguration as president, while George Bush’s government managed the immediate response. Further it was hardly his fault that he negotiated with the Republicans in good faith and the spirit of national unity, at a time of crisis.

His primary legacy item will clearly be Obamacare (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) which has revolutionized healthcare in the USA by expanding health insurance to millions of Americans too poor or sick to afford it. This was indeed, as Joe Biden said (in slightly more ripe language) “a big deal”. But furthermore, as this paper has reported in detail, Barack Obama is pressing hard to get the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreed with Europe. Binding the EU and the USA together in a grand trade partnership will create a geo-strategic alliance of shared business and cultural ties that will be better able to promote the values of liberal democracy, as many emerging economies dabble with a social contract that is high on economic laissez-faire but low and political and personal freedoms.

President Obama has now identified the third plank of his legacy: his plan is to reignite America’s commitment to environmental responsibility by forcing a 30% cut in CO2 emissions from America’s power stations, from 2005 levels, by 2030. As with Obamacare, in imposing massive restrictions on the quantity of pollution emitted by US power stations he will have achieved something that many Americans have wanted, but which presidents were unwilling or unable to deliver. To put this ambition in perspective, the USA is the World’s largest energy consumer using 10^20J per annum. Measured per head of population the USA is the 11th largest consumer of energy per capita, consuming 301*10^12J per capita per annum. The USA uses around 19% of the World’s energy and emits around 17% of the carbon dioxide.

Initial estimates by the US’s Environmental Protection Agency itself are that this reduction would cost $8.8 billion per year in 2030, but his might be unduly pessimistic, since it is impossible to factor in the impact that new technologies will have on the cost of electricity production. Carbon sequestration may become cheap and effective; new technology may overcome public discomfort with nuclear power (for example Thorium, or pebble bed reactors); photovoltaic cells drop in price and increase in efficiency to become a significant contributor to the nation’s energy requirements. Furthermore there could be additional health savings as the nation moves away from dirty sources of energy to less polluting ones. Certainly this plan only talks about cuts from power stations, which account for 38% of America’s CO2 emissions (and which have already delivered reductions of 13% since 2005) and around one third of the carbon emitted by the USA, but it is an important and overdue step.

Obviously nothing is guaranteed yet: the Republicans are up in arms and will try to do everything they can to stop this bill being implemented, and some Democrats from poorer mining areas may also feel queasy about this legislation. Notwithstanding this, the advent of fracking and the arrival of shale gas to the US economy means that the USA could more easily start replacing coal and oil fired power stations with lower CO2 emitting gas-fired power stations which means that the USA will find it easier now than ever before to meet demanding emissions targets. 

This also means that instead of blocking progress in the achievement of a universal and binding agreement on climate change, the USA can attend the 2015 Unite Nations Climate Change Conference as a major player. While Europe has the moral authority on climate change, some of Europe’s efforts have either been quixotic (the obsession with windmills), strategically short-sighted (closing down nuclear power stations and increasing reliance on Russian gas), or superficial (as heavy industry moved to Asia, Europe’s per capita was bound to reduce even if nothing was done). 

It is America that is the leader in this area, having not signed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This has given China and other Asian nations the excuse they need not to make significant efforts to meet their own Kyoto targets. China now takes the environmental consequences of its rapid industrialisation far more seriously and might be prompted to take significant steps if America were to take the lead. 

Now, were the President of the USA to ratify the Kyoto agreement in Paris in 2015 then he could reasonably be said to have delivered another “big deal” this time for the environment. Three “big deals”, universal healthcare, free trade with Europe, and ratification of Kyoto (not to mention extracting the nation from foreign wars) adds up to a major legacy.

As a post script, whatever happened to the $418 billion of “Troubled Asset Relief Programme” funds disbursed by George Bush and Barack Obama’s governments to underpin the global economy throughout the financial crisis? Well the US managed to recover $405 billion of it, which is to say that the program cost “only” $13 billion, which when you consider what was at stake, is probably the cheapest $13 billion dollars spent in history.