Obama is planning to present the nation with his long-awaited plans on how to address Climate Change on Tuesday. For environmentalists like myself, this announcement is coming five years late! Hell, we've already exceed 400 ppm, locked in several centuries of temperature rise, doomed thousands of species and likely caused enough climate perturbations to make life difficult for ourselves and many generations to come, such that a broad swath of us are truly despairing for our future. However, the silver lining is that Obama has had ample time and a bird's eye view to see just how bad things are with the climate—and how little appetite we have for paying to rebuild failed nation-states. First of all, he saw what the mishandling of Katrina did to Bush, so when Sandy hit, Obama did things much differently. The Feds agreed to pay for climate "terror" in excess of $100 Billion for Sandy alone! Obama has saved billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars pulling out of Afghanistan but knows that here in the U.S. we need to repair infrastructure, build smart grids, shore up our computer defenses. How can he get all of the Republican-approved military budget into play where we need it? Let's call all of the climate skirmishes that we are experiencing—record-breaking floods, droughts, monster tornadoes, wildfires, and crop losses, etc.—climate "terror" so the defense budget can be used. Obama can make a pretty good case for what the costs of not battling climate change will be for the U.S. in the future. He understands the symbolic importance of the Keystone Sands Pipeline, which has risen in profile because it is the "line in the sand" for environmentalists and scientists over the course that the U.S. needs to take, which is in direct opposition to that which the fossil fuel funds-imbued lobbyists and politicos are fighting for. There is already the verbiage of war in the air, so read below the fold for an idea to enable him to gain traction and finally overcome the political roadblocks to achieve an "all hands on deck" response to climate change.
The solution: President Obama needs to formally and sincerely declare War on Carbon! Then he could really reframe the problem to Americans and set us on a whole new path, using the power of the Executive Office to coordinate U.S. military programs, some working domestically, engage industry and academia, and challenge citizens to commit our energies and resources to truly solving the problem. Obama could then oversee the re-design of our Military into a clean energy-based operation—which they already want to be and reformulate national defense strategy. We could throw everything we have as a nation against this enemy, to re-orient all carbon-related policies, including U.S. Foreign Policy, based upon the anachronistic concept of shoring up failed nations that serve our petroleum addiction. A declaration of war would overwhelm the political squabbling, make it nearly irrelevant and allow us to get on track with the right economic and industrial policies that will enable us to change our direction fast enough to avoid the worst climate impacts, many of which we as a nation are already feeling.
Obama is the right kind of leader who can make the case to send our nation into war against this common enemy. This solution is the right one for Obama, to present the country with mechanism to do what we all want him to do, which is politically overcome the evil, hegemonic forces that prevent us from taking big action on multiple fronts as a nation and heeding the warnings coming from 99% of global scientists about the coming horrific planetary disaster. Declaring War will require loyalty to the fight, upsetting the vested interests of those fossil fuel business barons and profiteers who aide and abet the enemy with attempts to sew doubts where there are none, failing to acknowledge the truth of the scientific consensus about these clear climate impacts.
A declaration of war will pull the plug on the petroleum industry lobbying to thwart the discussion of scientifically-informed, democratic efforts to develop economically sound responses to the threats posed by climate change. By declaring war, we will be able to use our funds to mount the coordinated effort that we need to fight this complex challenge on the international, national, state and local level with a comprehensive, smart, funded and committed global effort that benefits us as a nation, rather than impoverishing us, to shore up Petroleum producers.
So many of us are as depressed and worried about the fate of the planet as could possibly be. We need for the U.S. to jump in and join the existing global fight for what's right. Global temperature is already poised to rise several degrees. We need to kick-start a revolution in nuclear, to convert all conventional (bad) nuclear reactors to LFTRs, which are good and safe nuclear designs, which provide carbon-free energy, without the risk of meltdown, explosion, terrorist threats or even radioactive waste pile-up. We need a total paradigm shift to quickly organize coordinated global solutions across many disciplines and areas of technical expertise to solve urgent and heretofore intractable problems and to do so, we need the this action by the president, the one man who can allow all of this to happen!
This afternoon, there has been a petition launch at White House.gov, asking Obama to Declare War on Carbon. Please take a look at it and sign it to join me in urging Obama to launch the U.S. into "World War C," and take the lead in coordinating an all-hands on deck response to Climate Change to convert our democratic way of life from being a self-defeating carbon-intensive dependency to being clean energy-based and affirmative of our obligations to our children!