The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

Environmental Concerns and Disaster in the Gulf 875

China, the worst air polluter in the world—were
exempted from its costly provisions. President
Clinton never submitted the treaty for ratification. In
2001, President George W. Bush withdrew the
United States from subsequent negotiations. But in
2006 the mayors of over 200 U.S. cities, struggling
with smog and air pollution, signed a Climate
Protection Agreement pledging to meet the Kyoto
targets for greenhouse gas reductions by 2012. But if
Obama intended to move in the direction of the
Kyoto agreements, the economic crisis of 2008–2009
changed his mind. With the nation’s economy in
recession, Obama thought it unwise to impose new
environmental restrictions. In late 2009 he quietly
withdrew support for an international arrangement
on atmospheric pollutants.

By then, political economic realities had already

caused Obama to backtrack on another environmen-

tal issue. Originally an opponent of oil drilling off the

Atlantic coast, he changed his position during the

2008 presidential campaign: The nation needed

cheap oil and gasoline (see introduction, Chapter 30,

pp. 796–797). On April 21, 2010, disaster struck in

the Gulf of Mexico. Workers aboard a British

Petroleum (BP) oil platform forty-one miles off the

coast of Louisiana were drilling for oil at a depth of

5,000 feet. This was not exceptional; for over a

decade, global oil companies had been sinking hun-

dreds of wells into the Gulf of Mexico, which gener-

ated one-fourth of all oil produced in the United

States. But that day, a drill hit a pocket of methane

gas under high pressure; it shot upward through the

In 2010 protesters in Washington DC demanded that the Obama administration support liberalized immigration policies.