Pierce on Climate Change

Pierce pretty much sums up my feelings about Obama’s clear support for the Keystone XL pipeline and the broader failure of this nation to do anything at all about climate change:

This is the argument we get from the oil companies, the extraction industries, and all the politicians they have sublet over the past 40 years — that environmental concerns are the province of the liberal elites, as though small farmers are not being killed by drought, small businesses being killed by what’s killing the small farmers, and small homeowners along both seaboards being killed by increasingly massive storms. The interested parties have done a good job selling this bag of manure to the American people. To see a Democratic president making essentially the same argument — And that’s what he’s doing here. He’s not just assessing the lay of the land. — is more than simply distressing. It’s downright mortifying. Climate change is the single biggest crisis the world has faced since, well, ever. It is moving toward irreversibility at a frightening rate. (And if the president approves that damned pipeline, the acceleration may go into the red zones.) It touches everything, including people’s personal economies. And there is a huge propaganda apparatus in place to convince the public that the problem doesn’t exist at all. And this is awful, too.

This really can’t be overstated. If climate change isn’t the greatest challenge we as a human race has ever faced, I don’t know what would be. From a national perspective, we could call it our greatest problem since slavery and I’d be OK with this. We could call it our greatest crisis since World War II and I would disagree. Climate change is a far greater threat to the United States than our enemies in the 1940s.

And we do nothing except make it worse.