{"id":41286,"date":"2018-12-05T06:54:05","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T11:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41286"},"modified":"2018-12-05T06:54:05","modified_gmt":"2018-12-05T11:54:05","slug":"climate-crisis-made-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41286","title":{"rendered":"Climate Crisis Made Worse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Climate Crisis Made Worse<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Barack Obama,\u00a0speaking to the Baker Institute<\/a>, made sure the audience of wealthy Texans, many in the oil business, gave him credit for making\u00a0the United States a world leader for\u00a0oil and gas production. He said,\u00a0\u201cAmerican energy production . . .went up every year I was president. And . . . suddenly America\u2019s like the biggest oil producer, that was me, people,\u201d eliciting cheers.<\/p>\n

Throughout this century, even though the climate science was clear, presidential leadership has escalated the dependence on oil and gas, built infrastructure for pipelines and compressor stations, encouraged fracking in the US and around the world and prevented a global response to reducing carbon gas emissions.<\/p>\n

This dereliction of consistent misleadership has put the planet on a dangerous path of climate crisis. In a just world, the political and corporate leadership of the United States would be held accountable. As it is, leadership for confronting the climate crisis must come from the people, not from political leaders.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s Sordid History of Undermining the Climate<\/strong><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s legacy confuses some people because, unlike President Trump, he did not deny climate change and, unlike President Bush, he did not come from the oil industry. But in reality, Obama watered down global climate agreements and grew oil and gas output and infrastructure in the United States.<\/p>\n

As a newly elected president, Obama came to the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 with\u00a0the goal of weakening the agreement<\/a>\u00a0so there would be no internationally enforced reductions of climate gases.\u00a0Ban Ki-moon, the UN general secretary, warned leaders that they held in their hands \u201cthe future of this entire humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden<\/a>\u00a0showed that the US monitored communications between countries before the summit, and planned to spy on the negotiations during the conference.\u00a0The NSA knew of China\u2019s efforts to line up its negotiating position with India.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Climate Crisis Made Worse Barack Obama,\u00a0speaking to the Baker Institute, made sure the audience of wealthy Texans, many in the oil business, gave him credit for making\u00a0the United States a world leader for\u00a0oil and gas production. He said,\u00a0\u201cAmerican energy production . . .went up every year I was president. And . . . suddenly America\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3306,141,1053,5493,328,17009,17010,1729],"class_list":["post-41286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-barack-obama","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-crisis","tag-counterpunch","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-kevin-zeese","tag-margaret-flowers","tag-oil-and-gas-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41287,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41286\/revisions\/41287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}