Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumRahm Emanuel Response To Climate Speech: "If You Don't Kill Chu, I'm Going To"
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The reason for fighting Keystone all along was not just to block further expansion of the tar sands though that's required, given the amount of carbon contained in that expanse of Alberta. We also hoped that doing the right thing would jump-start Washington in the direction of real climate action. Instead, the effort necessary to hold off this one pipeline has kept environmentalists distracted as Obama has opened the Arctic and sold off the Powder River Basin, as he's fracked and drilled. It kept us quiet as both he and Mitt Romney spent the whole 2012 campaign studiously ignoring climate change.
We're supposed to be thrilled when Obama says something, anything, about global warming he gave a fine speech this past June. "The question," he told a Georgetown University audience, is "whether we will have the courage to act before it's too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren. As a president, as a father and as an American, I'm here to say we need to act." Inspiring stuff, but then in October, when activists pressed him about Keystone at a Boston gathering, he said, "We had the climate-change rally back in the summer." Oh.
In fact, that unwillingness to talk regularly about climate change may be the greatest mistake the president has made. An account in Politico last month described his chief of staff dressing down Nobel laureate and then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2009 for daring to tell an audience in Trinidad that island nations were in severe danger from rising seas. Rahm Emanuel called his deputy Jim Messina to say, "If you don't kill Chu, I'm going to." On the plane home, Messina told Chu, "How, exactly, was this fucking on message?" It's rarely been on message for Obama, despite the rising damage. His government spent about as much last year responding to Sandy and to the Midwest drought as it did on education, but you wouldn't know it from his actions.
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None of that cures the sting of Obama's policies nor takes away the need to push him hard. Should he do the right thing on Keystone XL, a decision expected sometime in the next six months, he'll at least be able to tell other world leaders, "See, I've stopped a big project on climate grounds." That could, if he used real diplomatic pressure, help restart the international talks he has let lapse. He's got a few chances left to show some leadership. But even on this one highly contested pipeline, he's already given the oil industry half of what it wanted. That day in Oklahoma when he boasted about encircling the Earth with pipelines, he also announced his support for the southern leg of Keystone, from Oklahoma to the Gulf. Not just his support: He was directing his administration to "cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done."
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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obama-and-climate-change-the-real-story-20131217?page=2
GoneFishin
(5,217 posts)in high gear by the pipeline profiteers so that they could gain the public's support to sway Washington.
The deafening silence is the guarantee that it is already in the bag.
newfie11
(8,159 posts)This is NOT what I voted twice for.
PamW
(1,825 posts)I wonder whether Obama will be able to redeem himself ala' former President Jimmy Carter.
Carter did an awful lot of good as an ex-President; but the public was none too happy with him when he ran for re-election.
One of the most lop-sided landslides in the history of Presidential elections was Reagan's defeat of Carter.
At least Obama was able to hold it together for the election; but if the country, and in fact that world, suffer because of it; then what are we accomplishing?
PamW
newfie11
(8,159 posts)The Keystone pipeline AND TPP are unbelievable that a democratic president is pushing it.
pscot
(21,024 posts)Become extremely wealthy by dubious means. He can always front the relief effort for some AGW driven catastrophe.
happyslug
(14,779 posts)As to the election defeat of Carter, in 1980, that was the 28th closest election in Presdential election history since 1820. There are 19 elections with the loser received a lower percentage of the votes since 1820 then what Carter received in 1980. Reagan only defeated Carter by 9.74% (and had Carter NOT conceeded so early, that may have been lower, he conceeded before California had closed its polls and many voters on the West Coast thus did not vote). Of the elections CLOSER than Carter's in 1980 include the following (I am using WWII and after elections only):
Nixon lost to Kennedy by less the .17% of the votes:
Humphrey loss to Nixon in 1968 by less then .7% of the vote
Ford Loss to Carter in 1976 by 2.06%
Kerry loss to Bush in 204 by 2.46% of the vote.
Romey loss to Obama by 3.86% of the vote
Dewey loss to Truman in 1948 by 4.48%
Dewey loss to FDR in 1944 by 7.5%
Bill Clinton defeated Dole in 1996 by 8.51% of the vote
Thus we are NOT talking about double digit Victories like Harding's in 1920 (26.17%), Colledge's, 25.22% in 1924, FDR's in 1936 at 24,26%, Nixon's in 1972 at 23.15%, LBJ's in 1964 at 22.58%, Theordore Roosevelt's in 1904 at 18.83% and Reagan's in 1984 at 18.21%. We are talking about less then 10% of the vote, not shaby given that Carter was in the middle of a bad recession (a recession that would clean up the inflation of the 1970s so Reagan can win on the subsequet boom in the economy in 1984).
Thus Reagan did defeat Carter solidly, it was not in the top 10 defeats, thus not a lop sided as the GOP tries to make it out to be. The 1980 election is the 20th worse defeat out of 49 elections since 1820., i.e. there are 19 elections out of 49 that are WORSE defeats. Thus it is in the bottom half of all elections, but it is also in the middle 10 of the 49 elections since 1820. A solid defeat by not lopsided (and this is also shown by the fact in the 1980 election the House remained Democratic, through the Democrats did lose the Senate).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/
hatrack
(59,587 posts)Well past the mid-terms, and no one will hear a peep amid footage of people trampling each other at Old Navy and Target.