My Response to Eugene Robinson’s Column on Obama and Climate Change

Response to Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column on Obama and climate change.

Dear Mr. Robinson,

Thanks so much for addressing climate change. I’m glad you’re encouraging President Obama to go it alone, but I am not optimistic that he will. In his last election, he didn’t speak about climate change until Sandy forced him to. Instead, he was in a spitting competition with Romney over who was more pro natural gas. His words on climate change in his inaugural address gave me hope that Sandy had set his hair on fire about climate change the way Sandy Hook had set his hair on fire about gun control. Unfortunately, that didn’t prove to be the case. When 40,000 of us were in D.C. on one of the coldest days of the year to send him a message on climate change, he wasn’t there to receive it. He was in Florida playing golf with oil & gas executives. He is likely to approve KXL. He has given the green light to exploration for even more fossil fuels when the industry already boasts to investors that it has reserves 5 times the 565 gigatons of CO2 we must stay within to avoid the 2 degree line. And he is a disaster on natural gas drilling.

When DOE Secretary Moniz was sworn in this week, he followed the President’s lead making important-sounding remarks about climate change while articulating his support of natural gas and avoiding KXL altogether. Every climate scientist worth his or her salt is saying the same thing about natural gas. In the short time we have left to avoid the 2 degree mark, methane is not the solution. Natural gas is cleaner burning, not clean burning, so it contributes CO2 to the problem when burned, just about half as much. The methane that is able to leak into the atmosphere as a result of shale gas exploration is at least 51 times more potent in the short 20-year time scale, the only time scale that matters now. This is not the time to be relying even more on natural gas. And when President Obama parrots the industry’s talking point about 100 years of gas in the shale, something disputed by his own USGS and EIA, it sounds less and less like a “bridge fuel” and more and more like the latest excuse to not get serious about renewables. The case against KXL and tar sands has been made even more clearly, yet has been ignored.

We are long past the time when we can settle for what would have once been important steps in the right direction, like improved fuel economy standards. They are now baby steps. We’ve been talking about climate change for decades now. The problem’s all grown up. Time for us to grow up, too.

Sincerely,
Karen Feridun
Founder, Berks Gas Truth
and
Founder, 350 Berks & Lehigh Valley Climate Action
Kutztown, PA