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Fire up Air Force One. President Barack Obama’s headed to Paris to try to save the world.
After a year of quiet diplomacy ahead of next month’s 190-country climate change conference, Obama took the most public, contested step yet in his second-term transformation into the greenest of U.S. presidents: rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline.
But by the time he was wrapping up his remarks Friday morning in the Roosevelt Room, Obama pivoted away from chiding environmentalists and Republicans to argue that Keystone XL was important in a different way: "Approving this project would have undercut our global leadership on climate.”
The president and his aides repeatedly talked about the decision Friday in terms of global leadership. That global leadership, Obama confirmed after months of speculation, is going to take him to France right after Thanksgiving for the Paris climate talks, where he will try to seal what would be the biggest, most significant international agreement on combating carbon emissions and climate change — arguably bigger and longer lasting than anything else he or anyone else has ever done in office.
originally posted by: angeldoll
If Obama found the cure for cancer, R.Paul would start a filibuster; Ted Cruz would file an appeal, and they'd take it to the Supreme Court to have the cure ousted. People on ATS would make multiple threads accusing him of ruining our lives.
Welcome to the 21st century.
The common man has no friends in Washington DC.
originally posted by: IAMTAT
Yeah,...gee..without the Keystone Pipeline all that oil and gas will have to be transported by train.
Wait a minute!...Who owns Berkshire-Hathaway Rail system?...Why isn't that huge Obama Donor Warren Buffett????
Gosh. I wonder if there's cronyism afoot in Obama's decision.
President Barack Obama’s decision to withhold approval of the Keystone XL pipeline will hugely benefit one of his largest supporters – Warren Buffett. Buffett made a $34 billion dollar investment in the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad (BNSF) one year after Obama was elected.
BNSF essentially invented the business of carrying crude oil by rail when it launched its first long oil train in 2009. Rail shipments from North Dakota have surged from fewer than 100,000 barrels a day in 2010 to 800,000 barrels a day last October.
No wonder Buffet has such a good friend in the White House.
Mr. Obama sites environmental issues as the key reason to hold up the Keystone XL Pipeline. But his rhetoric is more fiction than fact. Three years of State Department environmental impact studies have found “no significant impacts”. The truth is that the pipeline poses a far smaller environmental risk than moving oil by train.
Actions speak louder than words, and Obama just hasn't delivered any real change.
originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: jaws1975
Actions speak louder than words, and Obama just hasn't delivered any real change.
Are you sure? I'm not that big a fan of the current administration but there does seem to have been a decrease in CO2 emissions.
instituteforenergyresearch.org...
The CMO (Chief Misinformation Officer) of the climate ignorati, Joe Nocera, has a new piece, “A Real Carbon Solution.” The biggest of its many errors comes in this line:
A reduction of carbon emissions from Chinese power plants would do far more to help reverse climate change than — dare I say it? — blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Memo to Nocera: As a NOAA-led paper explained 4 years ago, climate change is “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”
This notion that we can reverse climate change by cutting emissions is one of the most commonly held myths — and one of the most dangerous, as explained in this 2007 MIT study, “Understanding Public Complacency About Climate Change: Adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter.”
The fact is that, as RealClimate has explained, we would need “an immediate cut of around 60 to 70% globally and continued further cuts over time” merely to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 — and that would still leave us with a radiative imbalance that would lead to “an additional 0.3 to 0.8ºC warming over the 21st Century.” And that assumes no major carbon cycle feedbacks kick in, which seems highly unlikely.
We’d have to drop total global emissions to zero now and for the rest of the century just to lower concentrations enough to stop temperatures from rising. Again, even in this implausible scenario, we still aren’t talking about reversing climate change, just stopping it — or, more technically, stopping the temperature rise. The great ice sheets might well continue to disintegrate, albeit slowly.
So now Obama gets credit for lowering carbon emissions before he got into office??? Give me a break!