A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper
“We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm. And ultimately, we will be judged as a people, and as a society, and as a country on where we go from here.”
– U.S. President Barack Obama, from a speech he delivered on climate change on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. this June 25, 2013.
We don’t have any more time for the flat earth thinkers, indeed! Nor for some of the same scientists who claimed that smoking had nothing to do with lung cancer now saying that some of our earthly activities have nothing to do with climate change.
U.S. President Barack Obama finally aims fire at climate change
Nor, quite thankfully, does U.S. President Barack Obama or anyone else who has been paying attention to more recent, excessively frequent severe weather pattners and who now accepts the possibility that there is such a thing as climate change and that our relentless burning of fossil fuels may have something to do with it.
One government that refuses to accept it, of course, is the Reform/Conservative/Tar Sands Party of Stephen Harper of Canada and his fellow knuckle draggers who have continued to view any evidence, presented by Nobel and other award winning scientists around the world, that we have a growing problem here of global proportions. To Harper and company, any possibility that human activities or that their precious interests in the tar sands and the corporate pirates profitting from them have anything to do with climate change is a commie joke.
Never mind the unprecedented flooding happening in Calgary right now or droughts in the west, flooding in Quebec a year ago or anything else on this continent – unprecendented hurricane conditions in the northeastern U.S. this past fall, ever more forceful killer tornadoes this spring, crop-killing droughts over and over again in recent years, repeated brush fires destroying countless homes, etc, that is costing the rest of us billions of dollars in higher insurance costs and higher grocery prices, etc. The Harper government in Canada has gone so far as to describe anyone who advocates for environmental programs to combat climate change as an enemy of the state or a terrorist.
So thank God that U.S. Barack Obama has finally broken out of the gate with a declaration of action on climate change many of his progressive supporters hoped he would have made four or five years ago. His speech in front of a group of young people at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. this Wednesday, June 25 was unprecedented for any leader in North America on the subject of climate change, and who cares what a knuckle dragger like Stephen Harper has to say.
What Canadians may have found particularly interesting, if they were paying attention above the circus trials of Zimmerman and others going on, is that Obama even went so far as to say that any approval of the XL pipeline that would take Alberta’s tar sands guck to refineries in Texas is contingent on proof that the strip mining of this goo from boreal forest regions in Canada is not adding to carbon emissions contributing to the climate change problem.
Well good bloody luck on that one Mr. Harper. It is possible to see the gases from this shit and the damage it is doing it the landscape from satellites in space. Maybe you can get someone in your PMO office to pay someone not to show any more satellite images of this ecological debauchery.
But who gives a shit about anything a mindless midget like Harper has to say on the world stage. Let’s get back to some of the key things that Obama said in an address that is being received by many leading climatologists and others around the world as critically important. Here are a few more quotes from what may very well go down as a historic speech on one of the most serious challenges facing present and future generations of people in this century, before we provide the link to the whole speech.
“Nobody has a monopoly on what is a very hard problem, but I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real,” said Obama. “We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm. And ultimately, we will be judged as a people, and as a society, and as a country on where we go from here.
“So today, for the sake of our children, and the health and safety of all Americans, I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants, and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants. ….”
I’m also directing the EPA to develop these standards in an open and transparent way, to provide flexibility to different states with different needs, and build on the leadership that many states, and cities, and companies have already shown. In fact, many power companies have already begun modernizing their plants, and creating new jobs in the process. Others have shifted to burning cleaner natural gas instead of dirtier fuel sources.”
“That science, accumulated and reviewed over decades, tells us that our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.”
“The 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come in the last 15 years. Last year, temperatures in some areas of the ocean reached record highs, and ice in the Arctic shrank to its smallest size on record — faster than most models had predicted it would. These are facts.”
“Now, we know that no single weather event is caused solely by climate change. Droughts and fires and floods, they go back to ancient times. But we also know that in a world that’s warmer than it used to be, all weather events are affected by a warming planet. The fact that sea level in New York, in New York Harbor, are now a foot higher than a century ago — that didn’t cause.”
“As a President, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act.”
“I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing. And that’s why, today, I’m announcing a new national climate action plan, and I’m here to enlist your generation’s help in keeping the United States of America a leader — a global leader — in the fight against climate change.”
You might argue that I am wrong, but I doubt we would hear the Neanderthal Canada now has as a prime minister say anything like this in a hundred years. But it doesn’t matter. Harper is an ant on the world stage when it comes to issues so important as climate change. So it should matter to all of us that we have a leader across the border in the United States who is now taking something that may mean a nightmarish future for our children and grandchildren seriously.
Please click on the following link and read Obama’s entire address – http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/25/remarks-president-climate-change .
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