It has seemed all along that Obama lacks background in the natural sciences. He often appears to lack the understanding that would let him fully accept the real dangers of global warming. Instead, he believes the topic is important because of the concerns of his advisers and voters. Thus, it is something that he can use politically for bargaining and negotiations.
Tag Archives: obama
38 federal agencies reveal their vulnerabilities to climate change — and what they’re doing about it
GR: Interesting that NASA worries that climate change might interfere with the agency’s ability to launch. Good. Shut ’em down and focus on Earth until we resolve the multitude of crises we have right here.
Chris Mooney,The Washington Post: “The Obama administration published a small library’s worth of climate change documents on Friday, outlining 38 federal agencies’ vulnerabilities to global warming and how they will address them — as well as a separate and even larger set of new government-wide plans to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and achieve new targets for sustainability.
“In sum, the reports represent over a thousand pages of climate change threat assessment and sustainability planning by a vast federal complex that collectively operates 360,000 buildings, maintains 650,000 vehicles and spends $25 billion on energy costs per year.
“In many cases, the vulnerabilities revealed are stark. The Department of Agriculture, for instance, sees “the potential for up to 100 percent increase in the number of acres burned annually by 2050″ by wildfires, according to its new adaptation report. The agency notes that fire suppression expenditures have already grown from 13 percent of the Forest Service’s budget in 1991 to 40 percent of it today, and says the service’s other operations are imperiled by the continual demand to throw more resources at fires.”
Source: trove.com
White House OKs Underwater Seismic Surveying
Photo by Hannes Grobe (talk)
“This is the propaganda that lulls the public into thinking that a meaningless balanced approach which juggles the rights of polluters to profit and the rights of helpless animals to live is tantamount to ethical policy.
“And here’s the part where the oil cartel hilariously pretends to be very, very miffed at the government’s outrageous strong-arm “humanitarian” tactics:
“The American Petroleum Institute, the National Ocean Industries Association and other groups were unable to persuade the Interior Department to scale back proposed time-outs to watch for animals before starting testing and requirements that companies shut down activities when dolphins and other animals are nearby.”
Source: www.truth-out.org
GR: Harsh? I don’t think so. This administration seems to hold no love for animals or the Earth environment. As Karen Garcia points out, it isn’t really negotiating when the argument is over profits vs. life. It’s pseudo negotiating intended to convince the masses that our leaders are being fair and balanced.
GarryRogers Nature Conservation 
Earlier this week President Obama made one of the worst decisions of his presidency. He decided to ignore the concerns of thousands of protesters and more than 60 percent of the American public over the issue of climate change. He decided to approve a dangerous plunging of new wells into unstable, clathrate-laden seabeds in the Arctic. Effectively, he’s deciding to play a dangerous game of chicken with a natural world that’s been riled and wounded by climate change. And in this game he puts us all at risk.
It’s a bad move that sends all the wrong signals. It demonstrates an attachment to the old, limited resource dominance based, policies that cause so many problems and that keep us dependent on fossil fuels for far too long.
(Shell is now approved to poke holes into the Arctic seabed in a mad, climate-destroying, quest for oil. The Arctic, overall, is…