Year 4, Month 4, Day 9: 25 or 6 to 4

The Holland Sentinel (MI) runs an AP article discussing the President’s legacy:

Washington, D.C. —

The issue:

Slowing the buildup of greenhouse gases responsible for warming the planet is one of the biggest challenges the United States and President Barack Obama face. The effects of rising global temperatures are widespread and costly: more severe storms, rising seas, species extinctions, and changes in weather patterns that will alter food production and the spread of disease.

Politically, the stakes are huge.

Any policy to reduce heat-trapping pollution will inevitably target the main sources of Americans’ energy: the coal burned by power plants for electricity and the oil that is refined to run automobiles.

Those industries have powerful protectors in both parties in Congress who will fight any additional regulations handed down by the administration that could contribute to Americans paying more for electricity and gas at the pump. There’s also the lingering question of how much the U.S. can do to solve the problem alone, without other countries taking aggressive steps to curb their own pollution.

The promise:

“My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet, because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke.” — Obama at the Democratic National Convention, Sept. 6, 2012.

Idealism in the service of cynicism. March 27:

President Obama’s natural political instinct is to seek compromise; the Platonic ideal of broad bipartisan agreement on core issues is central to his philosophy. This is a perfectly sensible notion, given a few shared assumptions about the rights of citizens and the responsibilities of government.

Historians evaluating the trajectory of the Obama administration won’t be able to ignore the inescapable fact that this skillful builder of consensus is facing two profoundly different forces with which negotiation is fundamentally impossible. The Republican party’s ideologically rigid and firmly oppositional stance towards the President’s initiatives has everything to do with the desires of their corporate and theocratic paymasters, and nothing to do with the national interest.

But a compromise with the hypothetical “reasonable Republicans” is at least imaginable. By contrast, there is no middle ground when it comes to the accelerating greenhouse effect and its likely consequences for our nation, our species, and our planet. The melting point of permafrost, the rapidly acidifying ocean waters, and the methane clathrates now entering the atmosphere are implacable, caring neither for President Obama’s eloquence or the bluster of the most anti-science conservative.

Warren Senders