I wonder if Obama listens to anyone who doesn’t work for Wall Street?
The former vice-president and climate champion, Al Gore, has called on Barack Obama to seize the moment and use his re-election victory to push through bold action on climate change.
The president has faced rising public pressure in the wake of superstorm Sandy to deliver on his promise to act on global warming.
But none of those calling on Obama to act carries the moral authority of Gore, who has devoted his post-political career to building a climate movement.
Now, Gore said, it is the president’s turn. He urged Obama to immediately begin pushing for a carbon tax in negotiations over the “fiscal cliff” budget crisis.
The vice-president’s intervention for a carbon tax could give critical support to an idea that has gained currency since the election – at least among Washington thinktanks. The conservative American Enterprise Institute held an all-day seminar on the carbon tax on Tuesday.
“I think all who look at these circumstances should agree that president Obama does have a mandate, should he choose to use it, to act boldly to solve the climate crisis, to begin solving it,” Gore told the Guardian in a telephone interview.
“He has the mandate. He has the opportunity, and he has the inherent ability to provide the leadership needed. I really hope that he will, and I will respectfully ask him to do exactly that.”
Gore will ratchet up his own pressure on Wednesday evening when he hosts a 24-hour live online broadcast from New York city on the connections between climate change and extreme events such as Sandy.
The Dirty Weather Report, produced by his Climate Reality Project, will kick off with footage from New Jersey’s devastated shore and interviews with governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo. It begins at 8pm eastern time.
Nobody from Wall Street was inveted to Obama’s meetings this week. Labor was. Corporate heads were. Congressional leaders were. But nobody from Wall Street. Wall Streeters are livid. Obama got the voters message. He wants $1.6 trillion in new taxes from the 1% and from corporations. He’ll settle for $1.2 trillion.
Caught most of the President’s press conference today, including one of the questions about climate change. And the response was (paraphrasing) ‘well, we’re going to get elected leaders together, and scientists, and we’re going to look at big technologies our top researchers are coming up with, etc. But first we’ve got to get the economy stronger, because people want to see us pursuing more jobs, as opposed to take time out to do something for the environment’.
Well, it’s nice the subject was broached, but all in all, no. This isn’t a matter that you push off on your greatest researchers and say “solve this”. This is a thing where you give some sort of tax break or credit at the individual level to anyone who invests in these marvelous low tech devices that pull CO2 out of the air – otherwise known as trees. And to anyone or any group who makes an effort to do low tech reverse mining to put carbon back into the soil – otherwise known as composting.
And the point about ‘but we’ve got to fix the economy first’. No. It is time we realized that if we want to use the resources provided by Nature, we’ve got to put something back into that resource base.
We put 99.9% of our economic remedial efforts into making sure a highly abstract portion of the economy as epitomized by fractional reserve banking gets top priority. It is nonsense to give top priority to a collection of pixels worth nothing outside of some abstract system. That is why our efforts at fixing the economy now fail.
Approach the problems by altering how we deal with the primary portion of the economy, those basic services that come from nature that we too often take for granted, and we will be fine.
hmmm almost a 50 – 50 popular vote. Mandate? No!
Oh and Al Gore is nut, and global warming or climate change or whatever the new pop phrase becomes all equals one thing – BULLSHIT!
Notice that in all this posturing about the top bracket, no mention is made of Romney/hedge fund bracket.