Obama's off to Alaska! He will be the first sitting president to visit Arctic Alaska and therefore the first president probably to use melting glaciers, ocean-swallowed islands, and (fingers crossed, sort of?) sad polar bears as photo opps. And rightfully so. Shit is getting real meltly in Alaska. Permafrost is thawing, wildlife is being threatened, and—if we don't do anything to stop / slow global warming—the state's economy will be destroyed in the not-so-long-run.
Obama's clearly trying to make a bunch of noise about climate change while he still commands the bully pulpit, but critics have pointed out that his administration's recent approval of Arctic drilling suggests that he's not willing to do anything about it.
Spokespersons for Obama remind us that the country still relies on fossil fuels. During our transition to greener energy sources, then, we should rely on domestic production of oil and gas so that we can impose our superior safety standards on the refining process, emissions, etc. Obama says he "shares people's concerns about offshore drilling," citing the BP spill in the Gulf, but, you know, there's "reality" to contend with.
I asked Emily Johnston, ShellNo Coordinator for 350 Seattle, how she felt about Obama's trip given his approval of Arctic drilling. She said she's "mostly depressed."
Johnston believes that we can and must quit fossil fuels by—at the latest—2050, a date set by NASA climate scientist James Hansen, which would hold us to 1.5-degree Celsius warming. The administration green-lighting Shell's offshore exploits, however, signals that Obama doesn't share her view.
She admits that, compared to any other president, and given the mess he inherited and the Congress with whom he's forced to negotiate, Obama has done "a great job" fighting climate change. I asked her to give the president a grade on a scale from A to F, and she said, "On some days I might give him a D; if he rejects the Keystone XL Pipeline this weekend, as is (again) rumored, I might even feel expansive, and give him a C-."
However, she points out that, as Bill McKibben suggests in a recent article about climate change, "physics doesn't give a damn." Based on the current pace of climate change, "nature could only give him an F."
But what about the reality that we live in a country whose blood runneth oil? That we should drill here, in places like Alaska, where we can have some control, rather than there, where we don't?
She points back to Hansen's figure: "What reality demands, we have to do, and drilling in the Arctic makes no sense if we're doing all we can to get off of fossil fuels. None."
