President Obama's Lethal Climate Legacy

President Barack Obama boards Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base for a trip to New Orleans, August 27, 2015. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)

 

By Zhiwa Woodbury, Truthout | Op-Ed

Legacy: anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor.

In The Assassination Complex, the new book by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, President Obama's endless drone warfare is characterized as his "deadly legacy." Now every president can assume the role of judge, jury and executioner in ordering executions anywhere in the world in the name of stamping out terrorism. Legacies, however, can only be judged from the perspective of future generations, and when children of millennials look back from the wisdom of their old age on the presidency of one Barack Hussein Obama, what he is almost assured to be remembered for most is his unconscionable, and frankly, inexplicable lack of leadership on the most pressing issue of this or any other time in our relatively brief history: the climate crisis. Given the corporate media's obsession with anything that can serve to distract us from this existential issue, together with the endless material provided by a Trump/Clinton silly season, now is the time to call Obama out on his withering inaction in the face of accelerating ecological collapse.

In 2008, candidate Obama swept into office with the resounding promise to "turn back the tides" on "a planet in peril." Scientists were crystal clear that the window of time to take drastic action was quickly closing at that time. Nearly 70 million voters, the most ever to vote for a candidate, presented Obama with a clear mandate. The leading climate scientist in the United States, if not the world, former NASA climatologist James Hansen, then took the unusual step of penning a New Year'sletter to Michele Obama at the White House, personally appealing to her as the mother of two little girls to prod her husband to follow through quickly on his promise to the American people. Dr. Hansen noted that:

There is a profound disconnect between actions that policy circles are considering and what the science demands for preservation of the planet. A stark scientific conclusion, that we must reduce greenhouse gases below present amounts to preserve nature and humanity, has become clear to the relevant experts. The validity of this statement could be verified by the National Academy of Sciences, which can deliver prompt authoritative reports in response to a Presidential request.

The first lady's response to our nation's leading climate scientist? The same government expert who first informed Congress about global warming back in 1988? Hansen was effectively blacklisted at the White House, and never granted an audience with either of the Obamas.

Then, just days before his first State of the Union address to the nation, the International Energy Agency (IEA) -- a heretofore conservative intergovernmental organization established in 1974 to monitor oil reserves and energy-related issues -- released a startling report advising world leaders that "Unprecedented climate change has Earth hurtling down a path of catastrophic proportions," warning of "a continual unfolding of climate disasters" and "giant waves of migration and mass mortality" if drastic actions were not taken within the next five years. That is not the kind of language we had been used to hearing from staid scientific organizations like the IEA. What did our newly elected leader have to say about this imminent disaster in his first address to the nation? He barely even mentioned the climate crisis itself, let alone reference the well-timed IEA report.

As a climate activist who enthusiastically supported Obama's historic run for the White House, it did not take long at all for myself or most progressives to realize that we'd been snookered. It may be hard to remember, but back then, we had a Democrat-controlled Congress, and the whole world was ready to follow President Obama's lead. He had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to exercise that mandate at the global Climate Summit in Copenhagen in 2009, weeks after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but instead of addressing global health, he chose to focus on reforming health care back home, in accordance with the insurance industry's wishes. We now know that our delegation to Copenhagen included NSA spying on all other delegations, so as to control negotiations -- and not for the better. Then, just two years later, Obama's climate emissaries traveled to Durban, South Africa, and scuttled any chance of building on the expiring Kyoto Climate Treaty of 1997.

How ironic that our first African-American president should choose Africa to sentence millions of African people and animals to premature death because of the effects of our affluence. With tens of thousands of Africans marching for climate justice, former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu pleaded with world leaders: "We are saying this is the last chance, please, for goodness' sake, take the right decision, this is the only world we have, the only home we have, if it is destroyed, we all sink." Instead, the marching orders from Obama were to extract concessions from all countries present that no enforceable commitments could kick in until after 2020 -- after the IEA climate window would close shut on all future generations. Gushing with unanticipated gratitude, leading climate science denier Marc Morano effused:

Obama has carried on Bush's legacy! So, as skeptics, we tip our hat to President Obama in helping crush and continue to defeat the United Nations process. Obama has been a great friend of global warming skeptics at these conferences!

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