Bill McKibben weighs in with a fine piece in the current Rolling Stone (link to follow), detailing the grim status of climate change action under President Obama. While it won’t come as any surprise if you’ve been watching the White House, it’s still stunning to consider, as McKibben does in his customarily fine fashion, how grievous this administration has been. Want some specifics?

Let’s begin with Obama bragging about a dubious achievement: that the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. While less coal will be burned in the U.S., the country’s exports have climbed to record highs. McKibben observes that “We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine.”

Obama’s apparently proud to have become a fossil fuel booster: “Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some…In fact, the problem…is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas…that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go.”

As McKibben notes, “‘the problem’ is that climate change is spiraling out of control. Under Obama we’ve had the warmest year in American history–2012–featuring a summer so hot that corn couldn’t grow across much of the richest farmland on the planet…We’ve watched the Arctic melt, losing three quarters of its summer sea ice. We’ve seen some of the largest fires ever recorded in the mountains of California, Colorado and New Mexico.”

Sometimes it’s good to be reminded: “Just days before the BP explosion, the White House opened much of the offshore U.S. to new oil drilling.” Obama’s explanation wasn’t soothing then, and it’s even less so now: “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”

The RS piece points out that “In 2012, with the greatest Arctic melt on record under way, his administration gave Shell Oil the green light to drill in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea.” There was more drivel from Obama about our “pioneering spirt” drawing us to the region. More like billions for Big Oil.

The administration even permitted Kentucky to gut a regulation that would have made it tougher for mountaintop-removal coal minting to continue.

There’s much more in the RS story, and McKibben tells it well. It’s not a pretty picture, but then politics in the face of climate change has rarely been pretty. Another reminder this week in Canada, where the National Energy Board has given the Northern Gateway Pipeline the go-ahead. It would carry tarsands oil from Alberta to a port in British Columbia Expect to see fierce–and I mean furious–action against that pipeline from native Canadians and environmental activists.

Okay, here’s the link to McKibben’s piece in Rolling Stone:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obama-and-climate-change-the-real-story-20131217