Photo credit: Reuters

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Obama's Greatest Crime Against Humanity

Dearr Mr. President,
I read today that Congress allocated $50 billion in disaster relief for victims of Superstorm Sandy. About the same amount was handed out after Katrina. That’s more than $100 billion for devastation from natural disasters. However, these are not really natural disasters, they’re man-made from the burning of fossil fuel, a topic some politicians deny outright and others, including you, refuse to address. Impending doom is not a subject anyone wants to talk about but still, it will not go away in spite of our ignoring it. For 30 years the U.S. has subverted any meaningful progress on reducing global emissions and when you came along in 2008 and promised to address the issue, you were like a breath of fresh air and people backed you. You could have done something significant but you were in Big Oil’s pocket and adopted their mantra of Drill Baby Drill; after all, global warming doesn’t give campaign contributions. The Solyndra debacle killed the last hope for change and at the Doha conference last year, you sent the same old hit men to sabotage the talks and they were effective; no progress was made. But still, global warming will not go away and the climate scientists have gone from warnings to hard facts that it’s happening faster and with more deadly results than any of them had imagined a few years ago. Now some speculate that it may be too late to prevent catastrophic climate change, that we have already passed the tipping point but still, nothing from the political class in Washington. You pore over Kill Lists but ignore the real enemy—pollution of the planet. You open Arctic waters to Big Oil and do nothing to regulate fracking while you de-fund solar and wind research. How is this any different than the Bushes? Mr. President, you were not hired to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity but to identify the real threats to the country and address them and those threats are not some sandal-clad Kalashnikov toting militant in the mountains of Waziristan or the deserts of Yemen or Somalia but the rape of our planet and impending ecological disaster. Why do we spend trillions on war against a phantom enemy and almost nothing to fight the heating of our planet, the pollution of our air and the poisoning of our water? This is beyond irresponsible, Mr. President. You are dooming future generations to misery, to unnecessary suffering and want, to a life filled with chaos and uncertainty. It is your greatest crime yet against humanity.

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