Obama Blocks Climate Deal In Qatar

December 9th, 2012 | Posted by The Green Man in Barack Obama | Environment | Uncategorized - (4 Comments)

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that, while he hadn’t done much of anything about climate change during his first term in office, that would change if he was re-elected. Obama was re-elected, but in the month since that re-election, he hasn’t abandoned his neglect of climate issues. If anything, President Obama’s climate policies have become even worse.

First, Obama prohibited airlines based in the U.S. from participating in the European Union’s carbon trading system. Then, Obama held a huge auction for new oil drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico – an auction so immense it had to be held in a professional sports stadium.

Now, Barack Obama has succeeded in blocking progress in negotiations for an international agreement to slow down climate change, at a summit held over the last two weeks in Qatar.

Because of the refusal of the Obama Administration to allow climate talks to move forward, the climate summit succeeded only in reducing the scope of the Kyoto Protocol, which was already gravely crippled by Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. Thanks to Barack Obama, the world now has even less effective global climate activism than it had before his re-election.

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U.S. Increases Greenhouse Emissions While Others Reduce

June 2nd, 2010 | Posted by The Green Man in Barack Obama | Environment | Legislation - (0 Comments)

Back in January, President Barack Obama announced a national goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by the year 2010. However, in the Fifth Climate Action Report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change submitted yesterday by the U.S. Department of State, projects that the United States of America’s greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 6 percent between 2010 and 2020 (see table, page 78 of the report).

A national goal is all well and good. It makes for great speeches by President Obama. The national reality in the report just released by Obama’s State Department, however, has a difference of 23 percent of current emissions from that goal.

What explains the difference? The 17 percent reduction goal was based upon hopes of a reasonable climate bill passed by Congress. However, no such bill has been passed. The House of Representatives approved a climate bill last year that actually increased subsidies to coal, and would only establish weak mechanisms to tweak greenhouse gas emissions. The Senate hasn’t approved any climate bill at all – and the most prominent suggestion for a bill, a draft by John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman, would expand use of dirty fossil fuels such as coal and oil, making greenhouse gas reductions actually more difficult.

The dominant excuse for congressional inaction has been that other nations need to take action before the United States can do much about the problem. That excuse rings hollow, however, when one considers that 37 nations actually have been reducing their greenhouse emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, passed 13 years ago, but rejected by the United States.

Postscript: A new analysis by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies finds that the last 12 months have been the warmest 12-month period ever recorded.

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