Today is the second debate between the US election candidates
Obama and Romney.
You’re really not going to believe this blog, and I wish I had
taken screen captures to show - two different Obama campaign platform websites in two days.
Two days ago I was feeling really down that there was still no
sign from the candidates or the media that global climate change, the most
important issue that humanity has ever faced, will be allowed to even show up
in the United States presidential election.
My mood was raised only slightly when I received an email from
the United States friends of the Earth to lobby for the inclusion of climate
change. Good for FoE. However there was
no great appropriate outrage from the environmental community as a whole at
this absurd grossest negligence of the democratic process in the United States.
What had really brought me down was that I'd checked through
the Obama.com website to find what the Obama campaign’s
issues were. Incredibly, global climate change was not even listed among the
issues. I checked the energy issue page but climate didn’t even show up there.
Energy An unprecedented
boom in domestic production has led to cheaper natural gas, and President Obama
will take every possible action to safely develop this abundant source of
American energy to support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.
U.S. oil production is at a 14-year high and President Obama has charted a
course to cut net oil imports in half between 2008 and 2020, lowering imports
by 5.5 million barrels per day and reducing our reliance on foreign oil to its
lowest level in almost three decades.
I just didn’t have the spirit to write about this
ridiculous situation.
In the evening I decided to check the Obama.com
platform one last time and much to my pleasant surprise found a very different
website, one that featured global warming and climate change fairly prominently. I
felt elated.
Wow, the Obama campaign had listened to the little outrage at no climate
change mention, and climate change would be in the campaign from now on.
Today, just before the second debate, I checked the
campaign platforms again. Holy crap – the previous no-climate-change / no-environment site was
back. What a fool I felt.
I had already emailed to say we had a small victory getting climate change on the election
agenda. Maggie Zhou took me to task with an outraged Oh Heavens! pointing out that Obama’s record on mitigating climate change
was dismal and he couldn’t be trusted. The
only candidate who could, Maggie said, is Jill Stein for the Green Party and I
agreed, having written my first US election blog on Jill’s best-ever-from-anyone climate change platform.
So because it is totally unbelievable here is the Obama
campaign list of issues, again, by screen capture.
That leaves the Energy platform as covering the Obama
climate change position.
"... domestic production has led to cheaper natural gas, and
President Obama will take every possible action to safely develop this abundant
source of American energy."
That means fracking for gas. Natural gas is mainly methane,
a deadly, powerful greenhouse gas. Plus, cheap fracked gas is squeezing out zero
carbon renewable energy, making American gas fracking a planet killer.
"U.S. oil production is at a 14-year high."
This is a blatant pro-oil corporation policy and to hell
with the climate. To avoid global climate catastrophe, according to the IPCC,
we have to be burning less oil by 2015 at the latest, making increasing US oil
production a planet killer.
The mysterious 2012 US election continues. Why would the Obama campaign change to a global warming / climate change look-what-Obama-has-done-for-climate website, only to change it back again? Now you see climate change, now you don't. Are they fracking with us?
Is the responsible American climate voter caught between a rock and a hard place?
There is no indication from any media sources that climate change will be allowed in this second debate. All we can do is Hope for Change from the Obama 2012 campaign.
Jill Stein is looking better than ever and the future worse than ever.
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ReplyDeleteGreat article Peter,
ReplyDeleteI am an Australian, but I was so disgusted after the second debate that I emailed the Whitehouse to beg them to put climate change back on the agenda. For Chist's sake even Romeny agrees that his "best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences".
What is the problem guys. Are you scared that US citizens don't have the brains to understand that this is a serious issue?
However, we can do something. I have just started a petition on the Whitehouse website to get climate change and emissions back on the agenda. You can sign it here:
http://wh.gov/k10u