bemused_leftist (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bemused_leftist) wrote2011-08-28 10:40 am
bemused_leftist) wrote2011-08-28 10:40 am
Obama to the right of Nixon? On environmental issues, yes....
http://faultline.org/site/item/why_im_not_voting_for_obama_in_2012#58610
Now I wish I could vote for the 1972 Nixon instead of any of the choices we have now. It took a while to realize that with the exception of Carter, every single President we’ve had since has been to Nixon’s right. Nixon who signed — and more importantly, fought for — the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. Nixon, who in between waging undeclared wars in three countries brokered peace with China and detente with the Soviet Union. Nixon, who tried to get universal health care enacted. If not for Watergate, we might have had socialized medicine in the US.
I celebrated when Obama was elected, in part because Bush was such a nightmare and in part because of the historic importance of the US’s First Black President. But Obama, derided by the Know-Nothing Sector of the US electorate as a “Socialist,” who holds Reagan as the former President he most admires, is emphatically to Nixon’s right.
[....]
In environmental matters, the arena I know best, Obama is demonstrably worse than Bush. He talks a better game about climate change, but has nonetheless continued to do the bidding of the oil and coal companies, flogging “clean coal” (which does not exist except in coal company PR strategies), pushing to allow Canadian tar sands extractors to pipe their superpolluting oil into the US, and vowing to increase offshore oil drilling even while the BP Deepwater Horizon spill was in progress, on which matter his administration utterly screwed the pooch.
In the realm of endangered species, Obama falls short of Bush as well. As near as I can determine in a short survey of the news, the Obama administration has protected 66 species under the Endangered Species Act in the two and a half years since the inauguration. Of those, 48 are Kauai endemics cleared for listing by the Bush administration for which the Obama administration gets credit due merely to the timing of the paperwork, and six are birds not native to the United States that were listed a few months back so as to streamline enforcement of international trade violations. Listing of domestic species, which is the main point of the ESA and the main irritant to American businesses, ground to a halt in the last two years.
Obama’s one big environmental initiative, a huge program of subsidies for developers of “alternative” energy sources, in fact constitutes one of the largest Federal pushes for de facto privatization of Western public lands in the last 100 years. millions of acres of the West, and of eastern National Forests and shorelines as well, have been put on the auction block for energy developers to choose among. While such a policy might be understandable in the context of a 180-degree U-turn away from fossil fuel development, no such U-turn is happening. Big Solar and Big Wind aren’t replacing anything: they’ve merely become one additional way for business to extract value from public lands while the coal mining and oil drilling and natural gas fracking go on as scheduled.
I’ve been tracking environmental assaults on the western landscape since the late 1980s. Obama’s energy policy is, for the California deserts and a number of other places, pretty much the Apocalypse. We’re talking about the complete industrialization of many millions of acres of public land — your land and my land, as the song has it — on a scale Bush never would have been able to get away with.
Now I wish I could vote for the 1972 Nixon instead of any of the choices we have now. It took a while to realize that with the exception of Carter, every single President we’ve had since has been to Nixon’s right. Nixon who signed — and more importantly, fought for — the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. Nixon, who in between waging undeclared wars in three countries brokered peace with China and detente with the Soviet Union. Nixon, who tried to get universal health care enacted. If not for Watergate, we might have had socialized medicine in the US.
I celebrated when Obama was elected, in part because Bush was such a nightmare and in part because of the historic importance of the US’s First Black President. But Obama, derided by the Know-Nothing Sector of the US electorate as a “Socialist,” who holds Reagan as the former President he most admires, is emphatically to Nixon’s right.
[....]
In environmental matters, the arena I know best, Obama is demonstrably worse than Bush. He talks a better game about climate change, but has nonetheless continued to do the bidding of the oil and coal companies, flogging “clean coal” (which does not exist except in coal company PR strategies), pushing to allow Canadian tar sands extractors to pipe their superpolluting oil into the US, and vowing to increase offshore oil drilling even while the BP Deepwater Horizon spill was in progress, on which matter his administration utterly screwed the pooch.
In the realm of endangered species, Obama falls short of Bush as well. As near as I can determine in a short survey of the news, the Obama administration has protected 66 species under the Endangered Species Act in the two and a half years since the inauguration. Of those, 48 are Kauai endemics cleared for listing by the Bush administration for which the Obama administration gets credit due merely to the timing of the paperwork, and six are birds not native to the United States that were listed a few months back so as to streamline enforcement of international trade violations. Listing of domestic species, which is the main point of the ESA and the main irritant to American businesses, ground to a halt in the last two years.
Obama’s one big environmental initiative, a huge program of subsidies for developers of “alternative” energy sources, in fact constitutes one of the largest Federal pushes for de facto privatization of Western public lands in the last 100 years. millions of acres of the West, and of eastern National Forests and shorelines as well, have been put on the auction block for energy developers to choose among. While such a policy might be understandable in the context of a 180-degree U-turn away from fossil fuel development, no such U-turn is happening. Big Solar and Big Wind aren’t replacing anything: they’ve merely become one additional way for business to extract value from public lands while the coal mining and oil drilling and natural gas fracking go on as scheduled.
I’ve been tracking environmental assaults on the western landscape since the late 1980s. Obama’s energy policy is, for the California deserts and a number of other places, pretty much the Apocalypse. We’re talking about the complete industrialization of many millions of acres of public land — your land and my land, as the song has it — on a scale Bush never would have been able to get away with.