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babylonsister

(170,964 posts)
Thu Sep 8, 2016, 07:42 AM Sep 2016

Obama on Climate Change: The Trends Are ‘Terrifying’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/politics/obama-climate-change.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

Obama on Climate Change: The Trends Are ‘Terrifying’

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, MARK LANDLER and CORAL DAVENPORT
SEPT. 8, 2016

snip//

Climate change, Mr. Obama often says, is the greatest long-term threat facing the world, as well as a danger already manifesting itself as droughts, storms, heat waves and flooding. More than health care, more than righting a sinking economic ship, more than the historic first of an African-American president, he believes that his efforts to slow the warming of the planet will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency.

During his seven and a half years in office, Mr. Obama said, a majority of Americans have come to believe “that climate change is real, that it’s important and we should do something about it.” He enacted rules to cut planet-heating emissions across much of the United States economy, from cars to coal plants. He was a central broker of the Paris climate agreement, the first accord committing nearly every country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.



snip//

To his successor, Mr. Obama leaves an ambitious and divisive legacy: a raft of new emissions rules that promise to transform the United States economy but are likely to draw continuing fire from Republicans, and an aggressive — some say unrealistic — pledge made in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050.

All of this, he acknowledges, could be undone at the ballot box. “I think it’s fair to say that if Donald Trump is elected, for example, you have a pretty big shift now with how the E.P.A. operates,” he said.

Mrs. Clinton has embraced Mr. Obama’s go-it-alone approach, promising to meet and in some cases exceed his goals without trying to pass cap-and-trade legislation. She is proposing marquee projects like installing 500 million solar panels by 2020 and giving states and cities $60 billion to invest in energy-efficient public transportation and buildings.

“It will be first-order business,” Mr. Podesta said.

But Mrs. Clinton will face the same partisan fire Mr. Obama has. He noted that, like him, Mrs. Clinton had been pilloried in coal country for acknowledging that coal mining would have a declining role in a 21st-century economy. Mr. Obama’s bet is that as his regulations get woven into the fabric of the economy, they will be harder for anyone to unwind. He says that his successor should promote past victories, including those of Republicans like Richard M. Nixon and George Bush.

For his part, Mr. Obama said he planned to stay active in fighting climate change in his post-presidential life. During his tour of the wildlife on Midway, he paused to make an improbable remark.

“My hope,” he said, “is that maybe as ex-president I can have a little more influence on some of my Republican friends, who I think up until now have been resistant to the science.”
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Obama on Climate Change: The Trends Are ‘Terrifying’ (Original Post) babylonsister Sep 2016 OP
makes you wonder why any sane person would want to be president lapfog_1 Sep 2016 #1
Trump on climate change: It is all a hoax. pampango Sep 2016 #2

lapfog_1

(29,166 posts)
1. makes you wonder why any sane person would want to be president
Thu Sep 8, 2016, 07:59 AM
Sep 2016

Since there is so little political will to do anything and so little (right now) technological or economic solutions to the problem (the problem now being that if we all NEVER burned another hydro carbon that we extracted from the ground we are likely facing serious environmental hardship in the next decade or two)

If we wanted to do something about this that is based on no generating more CO2 and methane... we should have done 20 years ago and phased out generating new greenhouse gases 10 years ago.

At this point we need to look into ways to remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and do so on a massive scale.

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