In his victory speech after winning the Democratic Party nomination for president over Hillary Rodham Clinton on June 4, 2008, Barack Obama declared that history would remember that "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal." Yet five years later, as President Obama begins his tour of upstate New York this week, nothing could be further from the truth.
The president believes the climate is warming. He's said so. When he sympathized with the millions of New Yorkers who lived through the climate change-exacerbated Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy, he was sincere. Yet Obama will not be receiving a hero's welcome in New York.
Instead, New Yorkers across the state will turn out to protest the president's support for hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and his unwillingness to recognize the relationship between fracking and climate change. By coming out so strongly for natural gas fracking in recent years, the president is assisting the gas and oil industry's political and propaganda machine.
While claiming that the gas currently being fracked will lead to "energy independence" for the U.S., the reality is that Obama stands ready to approve building enormous liquefied natural gas export facilities on our coasts to ship the gas overseas to China and Europe, where it can bring five times the price. For many of us who supported the president, it is devastating to watch him lead us down this destructive path instead of aggressively building a renewable energy infrastructure and economy.
In his much-hyped climate change speech at the end of June, Obama spoke of how science dictates that we have the courage to to address the worst impacts of climate change. Yet the president somehow manages to ignore the science that shows fracking operations release significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas at least 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide, over a 20-year period.
A growing body of scientific research — including that from the president's own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — shows that expanding fracking will result in climate catastrophe. Just like the ideological climate-denier extremists, the president is choosing to dismiss the science showing that fracking is a no-win process, especially for the climate, and instead has vowed to work with the oil and gas industry to make fracking safer and cleaner.
This is the same industry that: orchestrated exemptions to the Safe Drinking Water Act under the Bush-Cheney Administration; that won't disclose the hundreds of secret toxic chemicals that are pumped through our groundwater supplies during fracking; that bullies and pays off politicians to gag doctors treating fracking victims; and that forces children to sign non-disclosure agreements after being poisoned.
On fracking and climate change, the president is not being honest with us or himself, and is certainly not offering the leadership we need. New York is left to do it our way.
The nation and the world are watching and waiting for New York to lead the country by banning fracking and building the renewable energy infrastructure and economy that can actually create the real "moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal."
Real action on climate change requires more than just reading the words on a teleprompter.
Let's hope New York will set a proud example before it is too late.