Year 2, Month 7, Day 7: There’ll Be One Guy Left, But He’ll Be VERY RICH.

The New York Times reports on Al Gore’s June 21 article in Rolling Stone, in which he criticizes Obama on climate:

In the 7,000-word article in Rolling Stone, Mr. Gore says that Mr. Obama clearly understands the threat to the planet posed by global warming and that he has appointed a number of qualified and committed advocates to key positions.

But Mr. Gore charges that in the face of well-financed attacks from fossil fuel industries and denial and delay from Republicans in Congress, Mr. Obama has failed to act decisively to alter the nation’s policies on climate change and energy.

Sent June 22:

The contrast is striking: whereas his predecessor was an intellectually lazy faux cowboy, Mr. Obama is a thoughtful, scientifically literate incrementalist. But there are some areas in which incremental progress is inherently unsatisfactory, and our response to the deepening climate crisis is one of these. What with the shockingly rapid deterioration of our oceans (as detailed in the IPSO report), the continuing increase in greenhouse emissions, the collapse of regional ecosystems worldwide, and the dramatic increase in extreme weather events, it is self-evident that tiny steps in the right direction won’t get us out of trouble. We need to move fast, and we need to move dramatically.

However valid Mr. Gore’s criticisms of President Obama, the real story is that the corporate forces controlling the economy won’t abandon their profit margins, despite mounting evidence that this strategy will subject their customer base to what biologists euphemistically call an “evolutionary bottleneck.”

Warren Senders