President Obama’s energy policy shows a dangerous disconnect from the real nature of the current energy crisis, said Green Party candidates and leaders, who promoted the “Green New Deal” as a way to alleviate impending climate change and create millions of new jobs (http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2010/08/11/62-green-candidates-endorse-green-new-deal).
Jill Stein
, candidate for the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nomination:
With his State of the Union speech, President Obama has adopted the ‘Drill, Baby, Drill‘ platform of the Republican Party. He has embraced the energy industry position that our public lands and our environment should be sacrificed for the goal of increasing domestic production. This spin ignores the fact that our most pressing problem isn’t foreign oil — it’s what fossil fuels, both foreign and domestic, are doing to our planet. The President’s ‘all of the above‘ approach is an alarming denial of the climate emergency we face and the urgent need to substantially reduce the amount of carbon we exhaust into the atmosphere. Our nation and human society around the world are already at serious risk for devastating climate disruption. Obama’s proposals make this risk even worse. With the President’s support of the oil company agenda, the Green Party now emerges as the one clear political voice for a sustainable energy policy that our planet and economy so badly need.
• Audrey Clement, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States: “The White House’s plan to expand natural gas extraction on US public lands, which President Obama talked about during this State of the Union, is a menace to public health and the environment. Hydrofracking contaminates groundwater, releases gases from combustion into the air with worse greenhouse gas emissions than coal or oil, and creates severe toxic waste disposal problems. According to seismologists, it’s likely to have caused small earthquakes in Ohio near sites where shale gas drilling has taken place. The Obama Administration has shown extremely poor judgement in its support for hydrofracking, ‘clean coal‘, and offshore drilling in US coastal waters that would place major cities at risk for disasters similar to the BP oil spill in 2010, and its toleration of mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia and other states. We’re pleased that President Obama postponed approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which NASA scientist James Hansen warned would be ‘game over for the planet’. But we remain concerned that the project will get approved in 2013 by the next Obama Administration or by a new Republican president.” Read more »
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Filed under: activism, energy, Global Warming, grassroots democracy, Green Party, News, presidential race, US Politics | Tagged: climate change, Green New Deal, Keystone Pipeline | 5 Comments »
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