Obama

Words matter: a politician tells the truth

by Bryan Walker March 26, 2012

“The land we call our home, the land owned by this sweet funny brave people is being transformed, as is the rest of the planet. And yes, since the late eighties I have been an unapologetic believer in the grim reality that human activity is changing the earth’s climate.” These words were spoken by the [...]

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Prat Watch #4: Foundation and Empire

by Gareth March 20, 2012

While the noble Lord, Viscount Christopher “I’m no potty peer” Monckton tours the USA and Canada at the behest of his friends at the Heartland-lite Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (aka the Billionaire Liberation Front), his Australian admirers, led by former Climate Sceptic Party candidate Chris Dawson, have announced the creation of… wait for it… [...]

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Stuck in the muddle with Obama

by Bryan Walker January 27, 2012

I look back with some embarrassment on my enthusiastic posts when Barack Obama was in the early days of his presidency.  I thought he was offering strong political leadership in addressing climate change.  His words seemed unequivocal. Here he is speaking at the UN in September 2009: That so many of us are here today [...]

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Al Gore: denial derails the democratic conversation

by Bryan Walker June 24, 2011

Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason, which followed An Inconvenient Truth, was published in 2007 and revealed an impressive intelligence in its analysis of how America was losing the rule of reason in democratic discourse, the Enlightenment ideal which was a founding principle of the new republic in the 18th century.  America’s people were [...]

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Telling the whole truth

by Bryan Walker April 9, 2011

Not infrequently when reading and reviewing a book I find myself wishing there was some way of lingering longer on what it has to say before the spotlight moves on. David Orr’s Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, published in 2009 and reviewed here, was one such book, and it was therefore with pleasure [...]

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Tell it like it is

by Bryan Walker November 8, 2010

Whether denial of climate science was what the Americans thought they were voting for when they cast their ballots for many of the Republican candidates in the mid-term election, or whether they had other things on their mind, the end result is that the US now has an apparent majority of legislators who flatly deny [...]

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McKibben’s long and winding road

by Bryan Walker September 8, 2010

“We will keep fighting” vowed Bill McKibben at the end of his book Eaarth. Today in an article on Yale Environment 360 he gives a promising account of what that might involve. He writes from a road trip to Washington, D.C., towing a solar hot water heating panel from the roof of the Carter White [...]

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After the defeat

by Bryan Walker July 31, 2010

“Sometimes dead really is dead — and for this Congress, barring a miracle, climate action is finished. With an ugly election looming in November, it may be years before we get another chance to debate a bill that prices carbon.”   That’s Eric Pooley writing this week in Yale e360. He’s the author of The [...]

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Obama’s failed climate strategy

by Bryan Walker July 30, 2010

Obama must take a different tack, says economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, writing in the Guardian. The President has been pursuing a failed strategy of negotiating with senators and key industries to try to forge an agreement, making no headway in the back rooms of the White House and [...]

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The Climate War

by Bryan Walker June 20, 2010

The climate change rhetoric when Obama came to power was exciting. It sounded as if he would lead from the front and the US would soon have a federal cap-and-trade system. “Delay is not longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”  Certainly we have seen an end to denial from the White [...]

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