The President In The Movie THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT Was A Bad President

Let us analyze the legislation in Aaron Sorkin's film.

The core legislative tension in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is which of two bills the president will spend his political capital on: the Crime Bill or 455. The Crime Bill is some watered-down gun control measure rebranded because they think “gun control” makes them sound like pussies. 455 is an energy bill that requires the US to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 20% over ten years.

In the end, the president chooses 455 because of love.

So: is 455 a good bill?

The film gives us almost nothing to work with, so we have to reverse-engineer it. There is no “reduce emissions” button. The only real hint the movie offers is fuel standards for cars. Michigan hating the bill comes up repeatedly, and if you watch casually, you might think 455 is basically a CAFE bill. But cars don’t get you anywhere near a 20% cut in total emissions. Still, we know CAFE standards are definitely in there, and let’s also assume a bunch of other efficiency mandates. This was the era of negawatts, the idea that a watt saved is a watt earned, and though most of the low-hanging efficiency gains were already happening in 1995 because of previous laws, there’s still some fruit left. Mandatory Energy Star requirements, tighter building codes, that kind of thing. Let’s be generous about the implementation timeline and say all of this together gets you a 10% cut.

Great! But also: not 20%.

To get the last 10%, you have to start shutting down coal plants. Coal was half of US electricity generation in the mid-1990s. All of the early climate proposals that went nowhere envisioned a transition to natural gas, which makes sense—natural gas is almost always better for the climate and is unambiguously better for air quality. At this moment in history coal was cheaper than gas, but only barely. Coal plants are expensive to build and hard to permit, and once you factor in the scrubbers and pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act, gas was effectively competitive. On Earth-1, this transition was already beginning to happen on its own.

But 455 has to force it. And it can’t just ban new coal plants—that won’t get you the additional 10% you need in 10 years. It has to start retiring existing plants. There are various mechanisms for doing this: a carbon tax, a legislative Clean Power Plan, a hard mandate, cap-and-trade, etc. The details of the mechanism don’t actually matter much, because the end result is the same: you are closing coal plants. And since whatever regulatory scheme you design to do that is going to sweep across the whole fleet, you’re probably going to close most of them. So, the good news is you’ll probably cut more than 20% of emissions!

The bad news is everything else.

The immediate human cost falls hardest on places that are also about to get hammered by NAFTA. This would be a double tap. But the pain isn’t limited to coal country. In 1995, natural gas is not abundant. The moment you pass 455 and start implementing it, you are spiking demand for natural gas with no near-term supply response available. How much do prices rise? Natural gas peaked at $13 per million BTU in 2008, just before the shale boom, driven by comparatively modest supply pressure. This would be an order of magnitude larger shock. $20? $30? I don’t know, but it’s a lot, and it hits everyone’s utility bill, not just Appalachia’s. The available remedies are all terrible. Price controls just produce rolling blackouts. Nuclear was politically toxic in 1995 and takes a decade to build anyway. Renewables were real but tiny and not remotely capable of filling the gap at scale.

But that isn’t the worst part.