Month 6, Day 16: No Teeth in this Tea…

The President gave his big Oval Office Speech today. I was teaching, so I didn’t see it. I gather it was, alas, pretty weak tea. Newsweek ran a story on it…so I sent them a letter, trying to be evenhanded.

The President is correct: our nation must end its dependence on fossil fuels — and it must do so sooner rather than later. If we keep demanding oil to fuel our lives, we’re going to see more drilling rig disasters, more contaminated seas, more destroyed ecosystems — because oil is dirty, and there’s no way to make it clean. Furthermore, as the President pointed out, there is a finite supply of oil, and we’ve already gotten the stuff that’s easy to get; extracting what’s left is guaranteed to yield catastrophe after catastrophe. And, as oil company executives revealed in hearings on Capitol Hill, their plans for disaster cleanup are pathetically inadequate, amounting in essence to hoping for the best. What President Obama unfortunately chose not to emphasize was the single most important reason to get off oil: the slow-motion catastrophe of global warming caused by carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Warren Senders