Has Obama failed to deliver on climate change?

Tara Lohan, a senior editor at AlterNet, it travelling around the United States chronicling extreme energy extraction for a project entitled, Hitting Home. Given her experiences and reports so far, she provides wise council when it comes to judging the recent speech by US President Barack Obama on what he and his government plan to do about climate change and protecting the environment.

Although some environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have welcomed Obama’s speech at Georgetown University in Washington DC on July 25, Lohan expressed serious concern.

Writing in AlterNet, she said Obama’s new plan included three main goals. The first is to cut carbon pollution by directing the EPA “to work closely with states, industry and other stakeholders to establish carbon pollution standards for both new and existing power plants.” This is a noble and necessary goal but will be politically challenging to say the least, even though Obama did his best to shame the GOP and its industry friends.

The second is to help communities prepare for the inevitable impacts of climate change — and the extreme weather we’re already seeing. And the third is to be an international leader. His plan calls for America to “help forge a truly global solution to this global challenge by galvanizing international action to significantly reduce emissions, prepare for climate impacts, and drive progress through the international negotiations.” Does this mean that perhaps we’ll stop obstructing international climate talks?

The most notable parts of his speech were where he touched on “controversial” topics such as the Keystone XL pipeline and natural gas. He reaffirmed his commitment to wanting to go with burning “cleaner natural gas instead of dirtier fuel sources.” We can only assume the dirty stuff here is coal, but he tactfully avoided saying so directly. Of course he failed to talk about the dirty and dangerous process of extracting gas via fracking — the technology responsible for our current gas boom that Obama proudly mentioned numerous times.

Lohan has seen the effects of fracking, how it can damage water tables and the health of people and animals. “It’s hard to imagine that Obama has ever visited with communities who are in the crosshairs of natural gas extraction — a process that has proven already to be anything but clean and safe,” she says.

And yet the US president promised to “strengthen our position as a top natural gas producer” and even to use our private sector to help other countries “transition to natural gas.” This translates to exporting fracking worldwide — a process already underway in Poland, South Africa, Australia and other countries. The hypocrisy of Obama’s allegiance to the gas industry and his pledge to fight climate change was called out by actor-director Mark Ruffalo, a spokesperson for Americans Against Fracking, who said, “President Obama can’t claim to seriously address climate change and expand fracking for oil and gas—that’s a stark contradiction.”

Lohan says the protests against the Keystone XL pipeline may be paying off, including growing movement dubbed, Fearless Summer.

Obama had this to say about the project: “Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. The net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward.”

Yet the State Department’s draft environmental impact statement, co-authored by the oil and gas industry, claims the pipeline will not increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama’s speech may have been stirring but there is no clear indication he will say no to a project that will deliver dirty tar sands oil from Canada to refineries on the Gulf, a product that will then be shipped abroad.

For more comment, including from Al Gore and Van Jones, please check Obama’s climate speech: ‘It is time for Congress to share his ambition’