Year 2, Month 6, Day 6: Take A Deep Breath. Now Cough, Please.

The President was in England recently, and addressed Parliament — without, apparently, mentioning climate much at all:

“No country can hide from the dangers of carbon pollution, which is why we must build on what was achieved in Copenhagen and Cancun, to leave our children a planet that is safer and cleaner,” Obama said in one of only two references to climate change brought on by human activity.

In a reference to the ongoing struggle to emerge from economic recession, Obama added, “The successes and failures of our own past can serve as an example for emerging economies: that it’s possible to grow without polluting, that lasting prosperity comes not from what a nation consumes, but from what it produces and from the investments it makes in its people and its infrastructure.”

The latter comment appears to be directed in part at China and India, whose spectacular economic growth threatens to multiply emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. The negotiations to renew a global climate pact, held in Copenhagen in 2009 and last year in Cancun, have been thwarted by tensions among developed and developing economies.

I had a version of this letter a while back in the Boston Globe. Sent May 25:

The Obama administration’s reluctance to address the problems of climate change is by now hardly a surprise. Given the vociferous nature of the denialist forces in Republican politics, and the pusillanimity of the media which should by rights be sounding the alarm, it is hardly surprising that the President has chosen to avoid the issue whenever possible. But this is not only because the GOP ranks are filled with “climate zombies,” ideologically fixated on absurd anti-science conspiracy theories, and it’s not only that the fourth estate has abdicated its responsibility to genuine journalism. Mr. Obama’s reluctance to use the phrase “climate change” must be understood diagnostically, as an indicator of the extent to which both political parties are controlled by the same corporate interests. Transforming our energy economy will be all but impossible until the fossil fuel industry can be persuaded that planetary survival is as profitable as species suicide.

Warren Senders