After Four Years, Green Activists & Scientists Voice Frustration On Obama's Climate Record

EDIT

Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist and the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, for example, criticized the president for doing precisely this during his 2010 State of the Union speech. "I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change," Obama said at the time. "But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future." Mann was unimpressed. "How far we had regressed in the 10 years since President Bill Clinton's 2000 State of the Union address, in which he issued a call to arms in confronting the climate change threat based on the strength of the science, not in spite of a conceded potential weakness in it."

Other critics were quick to point out that it was only a few months after that State of the Union address that Obama unveiled historic plans to expand oil and gas drilling up and down the Atlantic coast, as well as in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the northern coast of Alaska. Those plans, which raised the ire of environmentalists, were quickly shelved when the well under BP's Deepwater Horizon drill rig began unleashing an unprecedented torrent of oil into the Gulf.

The administration quickly reformed federal oversight of offshore oil and gas drilling, but critics say the administration has since made haste to burnish its record as a friend to oil and gas, touting historic expansions of land-based domestic oil and gas development and approving new forays for oil in the icy and environmentally sensitive waters off the coast of Alaska. "Instead of ramping up fossil fuel exploration, we should be doing the opposite," wrote J. Mijin Cha, a senior policy analyst with the nonpartisan research and policy organization Demos, in an essay last month. "It will take some time to have a renewable energy infrastructure in place and instead of spending time and money on extreme energy sources, we should be investing in our future."

EDIT

"On the climate bill, the president was just stepping back and not leading," said Phil Radford, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, in a recent phone call. "And in that absence of that leadership, the bill just became a piñata for polluters. "I had senior members of Congress say to me, 'I'm all alone here,'" Radford added. "They said, 'I'm not getting any help from the White House.'" In the minds of those who would argue that there is no longer time to waste in addressing the looming threat of global warming, all of this has left Obama's first-term climate legacy as something of a patchwork of high and low moments. The last four years, they say, have sometimes been punctuated by lofty, if brief, assertions that climate change is a real threat. But the president has also hobbled himself, they say, by too often seeking the middle on energy, and by refusing to present the threat of climate change as a problem so real and so immediate that the nation can no longer afford to dither over whether and when to make drastic cuts in the amount of fossil fuel it burns, and make much more aggressive investments in clean energy.

EDIT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/barack-obama-climate-change_n_1951965.html?ref=topbar