Oh, you know how men exaggerate about size:
On Monday at the UN climate talks in Doha, the US claimed credit for “enormous” efforts on climate change.
Jonathan Pershing, a senior negotiator for the US, said: “Those who don’t know what the US is doing may not be informed of the scale and extent of the effort, but it’s enormous.”
Whether the US has taken enormous steps on climate change is open to debate. What we do know is that we have a newly re-elected President who in his acceptance speech said “We want our children to live in a world without the destructive power of a warming planet”.
In order to tackle climate change, the US cannot continue on a path of relentless oil and gas drilling, as currently espoused in the President’s Energy plan, known as “All of the Above”, which advocates a mix of oil, gas, nuclear, renewables and the contradiction which is clean coal.
As Steve Kretzmann and I pointed out in the aftermath of Obama’s re-election: “The President cannot simultaneously fight climate change and support an All of the Above/Drill Baby Drill energy strategy. It would be like launching a war on cancer while promoting cheap cigarettes for kids. Leadership on climate requires understanding this.”
