Samantha Power’s Climate Silence


Samantha Power (left), a former national security staffer and the next UN ambassador, leaves the Rose Garden. Fang Zhe/Xinhua/ZUMAPRESS.com

Samantha Power, Obama’s UN ambassador-in-waiting, frowned modestly as the president heaped lofty praise on her this week when he announced a major national security reshuffle.

“One of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy, she showed us that the international community has a moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving conflicts and defending human dignity,” he said. “I think she won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 15 or 16,” he joked. (Power won in 2003, in her early 30s, for A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a rationale for American intervention in international atrocities.)

In accepting the president’s nomination—the Senate still needs to approve—Power argued for a strong American role in the UN: “As the most powerful and inspiring country on this Earth, we have a critical role to play in insisting that the institution meet the necessities of our time. It can do so only with American leadership.”

But will Samantha Power’s brand of leadership extend to advocating climate action from her powerful position at the UN? After all, climate change is a top priority in the UN: While development has been grinding, members at the Doha climate conference last December reaffirmed a previous decision to reach a global pact to replace Kyoto by 2015; secretary general Ban Ki-moon himself has listed climate change at the very top of his 2013 “to do” list (up there with stopping the bloodshed in Syria). By contrast, there’s very little evidence that climate change has motivated Samantha Power’s career or featured in her public comments, leaving foreign policy experts confused as to how she might rise to the challenge. The people in the know…don’t know.

“I don’t think she has ever illustrated particular views one way or another on the environment,” said a former colleague of Power’s.

“I don’t think she has ever illustrated particular views one way or another on the environment,” said former colleague Robert Stavins, an expert on environmental economics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“I don’t think we have any information,” said Joshua W. Busby, at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. On climate change, “I didn’t find anything she’s ever said.”

What clues we do have lie in her critique of the United Nations. She told a 2004 audience at Harvard—where she was also a professor—that the UN was as marred by international distrust and suspicion as the US was, making international relief and intervention in humanitarian disasters tricky. “The guardian of international law legitimacy is itself seen to be something of a relic,” she said. What is needed, she argued, was a reinvestment in the UN. This would make the UN, once again, a body through which the US expressed foreign policy, in order to start “restoring the legitimacy of US power.”

In a 2008 interview with Harry Kreisler of the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, Power appeared to group climate change with other insanely difficult global problems like nuclear proliferation and terrorism. All, she said, require negotiations between many nations, rich and poor, that all want totally different things. The US can’t simply snap its fingers and get what it wants, she argued. Collaboration is key: “What’s important is to embrace the recognition that you need others by your side in order to get anything done.”

Another clue to Power’s stance on global warming: She admires the Brazilian-born United Nations worker Sergio Vieira de Mello. In her book Chasing the Flame, Power notes that Vieira de Mello foresaw an effective UN not only using its powers to “deepen and broaden the rules governing international and internal state practices on such vital concerns as global warming,” but also embracing alternative arrangements, like regional partnerships and working with NGOs, not as competitors, but as partners.

I found one other tiny insight in Power’s account of her first big conversation with her future boss, Senator Barack Obama, as told to The Nation. “He really pushed me…He’s very aware of the tectonic plate shifts in the global order—the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, the loss of influence by the US—and how those affect your ability to get what you want, on anything from global warming to getting out of Iraq to stopping genocide.”

In the absence of other evidence of her approach to climate change—I approached the White House to comment directly on her climate record for this article—experts have suggested looking at her husband, Cass Sunstein, who has written a lot about climate change and America’s need to act, and Secretary of State John Kerry, for whom climate change is a major priority, and who will no doubt help set a lot of Power’s agenda through the State Department.

But these little hints are few and far between. In the end, Power’s appointment seems to put other concerns above climate, says Busby. “They may have higher priority items, like what to do in Syria, that they are thinking about.” And in the end, orders will come from the top, says Stavins: “Whether or not climate change is a priority for her, I assume, will depend on the White House.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate