Yesterday, President Obama announced his new Climate Action Plan in a nationally televised speech.<\/p>\n
He described the emerging climate crisis and its impacts\u2014both past, present and future, while be suffered the heat of an abnormally warm June day in Washington, DC. His arguments for climate action were compelling and hard to argue with. \u00a0Unfortunately his actions do not match his words.<\/p>\n
Unlike Bill McKibben, I do not believe that \u201cthe solutions agenda [Obama has] begun to advance moves the country in a sane direction.\u201d (Did you read the actual Climate Action Plan, Bill?!?) \u00a0No, what I read in Obama\u2019s Action Plan was a rehashing of the same old dangerous false solutions that many of us have been fighting for years and years. \u00a0But what\u2019s really criminal is that even though Obama clearly understands both the science and implications of climate change, he still pushes an agenda that will drive us all over the climate cliff.<\/p>\n
First the plan\u2019s \u201cCase for Action\u201d reiterates Obama\u2019s pledge to decrease carbon emissions by a paltry 17% below 2005 levels by 2020\u2014but only if all other major economies agree to do so as well. Climate scientists are not calling for 17% reductions by 2020. \u00a0In fact, countries like the US need to reduce our emissions by 80-90%. And not in seven years, but immediately. Last year preferably.<\/p>\n
The main takeaway from Obama\u2019s horrific bit of greenwashed nonsense? We can continue our unsustainable way of life indefinitely with just a few key tweaks.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeploy clean energy.\u201d<\/b>\u00a0Ain\u2019t nothin\u2019 clean about this. Obama\u2019s \u201cclean energy\u201d plan includes more fracking, more oil, more nukes, more biofuels and \u201cclean coal.\u201d Yes, Obama wants to stop climate change by screwing over rural communities through promotion of more hydrofracking and increased natural gas exports; expanding domestic oil production\u2014including the hellish Bakken shale oil fields (but don\u2019t worry, it will be clean Bakken oil\u00ad\u2014no really, that\u2019s in there); devoting more land to growing feedstocks for plant-based liquid fuels (i.e. less land for biodiversity, growing food or for peasant communities to survive on); protecting forests that store carbon while cutting down trees to burn for electricity production; building more nuclear power plants (apparently never heard of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima); and maintaining the fantasy of that wonderful oxymoron \u201cclean coal.\u201d Sane direction?<\/p>\n
Spur Investment in Advanced Fossil Energy Projects.<\/b> Like \u201cclean\u201d coal, we can burn our fossil fuels and stop climate change too!<\/p>\n
Maintain Agricultural Sustainability.<\/b>\u00a0For this one, Obama wants us to trust the vehemently pro-GMO US Department of Agriculture to \u201cdeliver tailored, science-based knowledge to farmers, ranchers and forest landowners.\u201d \u2018Climate ready\u2019 GMO crops anyone?<\/p>\n
Negotiate Global Free Trade in Environmental Goods and Services.<\/b> Right, cuz global free trade has served biodiversity, ecosystems and the 99% so well!<\/p>\n
But the most ludicrous item is the last on the menu:\u00a0\u201cLeading efforts to address climate change through international negotiations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>(I know, I know, stop laughing)<\/b><\/p>\n
This section excels in its newspeak. It highlights the disastrous 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Conference as \u201chistoric progress,\u201d and insists that the secretly negotiated Copenhagen Accord (that was booed even by reporters when Obama announced it late in the negotiations) was a breakthrough in developing \u201ca new regime of international transparency.\u201d Omitted is the fact that this Accord was never actually consensed upon, but merely \u201cnoted\u201d by the official body. Well history is \u201chis story\u201d after all\u2026<\/p>\n
The section goes on to trumpet the accomplishments of the equally disastrous UN Climate Conference in Durban in 2011\u2014about which\u00a0Nature Magazine<\/i>\u00a0wrote \u201cIt is clear that the science of climate change and the politics of climate change, now inhabit parallel worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nnimmo Bassey, Chair of Friends of the Earth International similarly condemned Durban\u2019s outcomes, \u201cdeveloped countries, led by the US, accelerated the demolition of the world\u2019s international framework for fair and urgent climate action. And developing countries have been bullied and forced into accepting an agreement that could be a suicide pill for the world. An increase in global temperatures of four degrees Celsius, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid whereby the richest 1% of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99%.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Obama\u2019s Climate Action Plan insists Durban was \u201ca breakthrough\u201d\u2014because countries agreed to come up with some kind of new climate agreement that would not go into force until 2020.<\/p>\n
Gee, guess who won\u2019t be in office anymore in 2020\u2026<\/p>\n
This article first appeared at ClimateConnections.org<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n