Obama’s “Environmentalism” Is Killing the Planet

Updated February 18, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Explosion of the BP oil well that caused a massive, destructive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, April 2010.

President Obama is increasingly eager to portray the U.S. as “leading on climate change” and himself as the “environmental president.” In his recent visit to India, for example, Obama called on Indian Prime Minister Modi to do more on climate change, saying, “[E]ven if countries like the United States curb our emissions, if countries that are growing rapidly, like India, with soaring energy needs don’t also embrace cleaner fuels, then we don’t stand a chance against climate change.”

Well, what is the reality of what the U.S. and its “environmental president” have done and are really doing?

• Under Obama, U.S. oil and gas production has risen so sharply that the U.S. now has overtaken Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of both natural gas and oil—the fossil fuels whose burning is the leading source of the climate crisis. And Obama has further locked in the burning of fossil fuels based on the environmentally destructive practice of fracking.
• Obama lauds how the U.S. is switching from burning coal to gas (what he calls a “bridge fuel to the future”). He doesn’t mention, though, that under his administration the U.S. is just increasingly shipping the coal overseas to be burned! Obama has made the U.S. the world’s fourth-largest exporter of coal.
• Obama expanded oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—which in 2010 was the site of the most massive oil spill in U.S. history, a spill that is continuing to cause terrible devastation of Gulf ecosystems.
• Just a few short years after the horrendous Gulf oil spill, Obama recently announced the opening of huge areas of the Atlantic Ocean off the Eastern Seaboard for oil and gas drilling. In 2013, the Obama administration held 30 sales of leases for oil and gas drilling on 5.7 million acres of federal lands—the most such sales in a decade.
• Under Obama, as with every other U.S. president, international negotiations on climate change have been sabotaged and/or turned into meaningless charades. At a time when ecosystems and humanity have been thrust into the crosshairs of the most devastating environmental emergency in our history, U.S. representatives have repeatedly twisted climate talks into efforts to expand U.S. strategic and economic interests at the expense of rival powers.

All of this comes on top of the fact that the U.S. is the largest contributor of atmospheric greenhouse gases that come from the burning of fossil fuels, and thus is more responsible than any other country for causing the climate catastrophe.

Obama’s “environmentalism” is killing the planet.

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