environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility
by Warren
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 1: Maybe He Was Talking Them Into Taking A Pay Cut?
The San Antonio Express-News runs an AP article on Obama’s seeming readiness to embrace the climate cause:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is talking about climate change like it was 2009.
The president, who rarely uttered the words “climate change” or “global warming” during the second half of his first term and during the re-election campaign, has re-inserted it boldly back into his lexicon. In his latest State of the Union address before Congress, Obama sounded like he did in his first, urging lawmakers to limit gases blamed for global warming “for the sake of our children and our future.” Those words followed his inaugural address, in which he said, “We will respond to the threat of climate change.”
The difference between then and now is that Obama knows Congress is unlikely to agree. He said that if Congress won’t act, he will through executive action. The question is: What will he do?
But then, we read this:
WASHINGTON — On the same weekend that 40,000 people gathered on the Mall in Washington to protest construction of the Keystone Pipeline — to its critics, a monument to carbon-based folly — President Obama was golfing in Florida with a pair of Texans who are key oil, gas and pipeline players.
[snip]
But on his first “guys weekend” away since he was reelected, the president chose to spend his free time with Jim Crane and Milton Carroll, leading figures in the Texas oil and gas industry, along with other men who run companies that deal in the same kinds of carbon-based services that Keystone would enlarge. They hit the links at the Floridian Yacht and Golf Club, which is owned by Crane and located on the Treasure Coast in Palm City, Fla.
Oh, fuck it. Go ahead and have your apocalypse, but don’t expect me to cheer. Sent Feb. 20:
So President Obama finally brought up climate change in his State of the Union address. Given that the rapidly transforming planetary atmosphere has the potential to render all other political concerns irrelevant within a few generations, it’s only appropriate for the leader of the world’s most powerful nation to address the problem.
So far, so good.
But it’s extremely troubling that last Sunday, as 40,000 people filled Washington for the country’s largest-ever environmental demonstration, the President chose to spend his time golfing with Jim Crane and Milton Carroll, leading figures in the Texas oil and gas industries. Fossil-fuel’s grossly disproportionate influence on American politics can’t be nullified with words, no matter how forceful or eloquent, and since policies robust enough to have a positive impact on climate change will certainly hurt the quarterly profits of Big Oil and Big Coal, these corporate actors will fight tooth and nail against meaningful action.
Warren Senders
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