Is Obama A Good Man For The Environment?
The Exit Glacier has retreated more than 800 feet since 2008, and the nearby Bear Glacier has lost more than two miles in only 15 years. President Obama visited the Exit Glacier in Alaska in the middle of his three-day trip north. Signposts with dates are marking the ground and showing how quickly the glacier is disappearing. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet, so climate change and its devastating effects are immediate concerns.
On Monday, he spoke at an international conference, where he admitted that neither the U.S. nor other countries with major stakes in climate issues were working fast enough to stop catastrophe on a global scale. But, last month, the White House approved plans to expand oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean, despite the fact that the environmental risks of drilling are extremely high in that region, and despite Obama’s calls for a shift in how Americans use energy.
In a blog post on Monday, Greenpeace staffer Ryan Schleeter said, “The fact that President Obama thinks he can forge a climate legacy while allowing Arctic drilling shows that he isn’t in tune with the demands of people around the United States and the world to keep Arctic oil in the ground. “To avoid worsening our climate catastrophe, we must leave large reserves of fossil fuels where they are and where they belong — in the ground. Going to further extremes to exploit fossil fuels is the surest sign of our unrelenting addiction,” Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA wrote in USA Today.
Administration officials and the president himself have defended the plan, saying that it wouldn’t be realistic to stop drilling completely, and that there will be more oversight of Shell than there have been of past plans.When it’s already possible to see the drastic effects of what humans have already done to the planet, it’s important to ask why we’re not doing more to stop using — and looking for — more fossil fuels……
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Photo: Bob Hallinen/Anchorage Daily News/MCT/Getty Images