Al Gore Faults Obama for Climate Inaction

For a brief moment the media perked up and took notice that no attention is being paid to the climate problem, but only because Al Gore wrote an article that criticized the President. In fact, this 7,000 word piece in Rolling Stone lambasted the media, the corporate world and legislators far more.

Dramatic and often violent climatic events abound. Gore cites 9 of the 10 hottest years being among the last 13; floods that displaced 20 million in Pakistan, inundated an area of Australia as big as France and Germany combined and overflowed the Mississippi’s banks all along its course; drought and fires that killed an estimated 56,000 in Russia and now record fires in Arizona, and several more examples – but says the media simply report on them as news events and move on to the Donald Trump or Charlie Sheen story. “Most of the news media completely ignore how such events are connected to the climate crisis, or dismiss the connection as controversial”, says the former Vice President.

And all the while the polluting corporations fund pseudo-scientists to “manufacture doubt” and pressure Congress with four lobbyists for every member. The media cite their need to be objective by giving equal time to telling both sides of the story, but “all things are not equally true”. With the Supreme Court decision that allows corporations and unions to make unlimited donations to election campaigns, there is no question that the power of free speech has been given over to the power of money. Elections having become hopelessly expensive, politicians owe payback to the corporations whose contributions bought them their office. Thus is legislation born that ignores the will of the people (who are largely unaware that it is even happening).

When he gets to Obama, Gore is careful to credit him with several accomplishments – his “help” to secure passage of a cap-and-trade bill in the House (which he then never pressured the Senate to take up), heightened fuel efficiency standards for autos, regulation of greenhouse gases by the EPA, “green” projects as part of the stimulus package. But there was no follow-through, no fight in him when Congress then sabotaged those projects by stripping their funding.

Above all is Gore’s complaint that, “President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change”.

That has been the President’s conduct in a host of issues. We have come to picture him as a president who prefers to preside, who visits auto plants, or military bases, or elementary school classrooms, leaving the crucial issues of the day without a champion. He seems evermore a politician than a leader, one who will not get out in front of an issue that is doomed to fail in Congress even though bellowing from that pulpit would educate the public, build support and rally outrage against that Congress. “President Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis. He has simply not made the case for action”, Gore says in the article.

So the climate issue languishes — a threat to the planet that reduces all other matters to penny-ante, a growing crisis that begs for a national energy policy to reduce our oil dependency and foreign debt, and to create new industries and jobs in the United States. Yet from a President who had made it one of his key goals when running for that office, we get silence.