In another powerful article just published in Rolling Stone Magazine entitled Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story, Bill McKibben makes the compelling case that the President and his Administration, to put it mildly, aren't doing enough to deal with the devastating reality of climate change.
When the world looks back at the Obama years half a century from now, one doubts they'll remember the health care website; one imagines they'll study how the most powerful government on Earth reacted to the sudden, clear onset of climate change.
He argues that instead of becoming a leader in weening the world off fossil fuels, the United States, while taking some positive steps like investing in green technology, better mileage standards, and stricter EPA regulations on coal-fired plants, is fueling the global warming machine.
He quotes the President himself from a speech he gave in Cushing, Oklahoma last year.
"Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We've quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem . . . is that we're actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don't have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go."
During ordinary times, of course, the current administration's actions would be mostly welcome incremental changes, but McKibben argues that these are not ordinary times, that we simply cannot afford to keep taking one renewable step forward and two fossil fueled steps back.
In any event, building more renewable energy is not a useful task if you're also digging more carbon energy – it's like eating a pan of Weight Watchers brownies after you've already gobbled a quart of Ben and Jerry's.
To stay within the stated goal of a maximum two-degree rise in global temperature, McKibben says that every reputable group that has looked into the question concurs that "we'd need to leave undisturbed between two-thirds and four-fifths of the planet's reserves of coal, gas and oil."
But the President's talk does not match his actions, and that might be the biggest problem in that it gives people concerned with climate change the false hope that he's "got this" and we can all just relax a little because he understands the gravity of the problem and is on our side.
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.
I noticed that kind of attitude when I joined a passionate group of climate activists last month to tell the President to approach this unfolding catastrophe with more urgency, when he chose to poke fun at the protesters without actually addressing the content of the protest. Yes, it's hard to pay attention to every little interest group, but for fuck's sake, we're talking about an existential threat to all of humanity here. Even his rich donors are yelling in his ear to be more bold!
McKibben says it's not too late for the President to show that he really understands the urgency, and even though he's already given the oil industry half of what it wanted and Keystone South is already 95% completed, a rejection of Keystone XL would still be a powerful message to people and governments around the world that he is willing to make the tough decisions becoming of a leader with the courage to defy powerful short-term profit interests and laying out a larger vision for a sustainable future on planet Earth.
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.
In short, if your house is on fire, retrofitting your wooden foundation is not going to help you.
Meanwhile, in the Arctic...