Obama Ignores Obama on Climate Change

President Obama is once again contradicting himself on climate change.  His new push for offshore oil and gas drilling is just the latest instance.

Last week, in his State of the Union address, Obama reiterated at length the urgent threat climate change presents and the importance of taking decisive action to address it.  “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” he said.  “We should act like it.”

But Obama himself isn’t acting like it.  This week, his administration released a draft of its next five-year plan for offshore drilling.  It would open up a previously off-limits area along the Southeastern coast, from Virginia down to Georgia, as well as offer many new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico.  And while it would protect some key areas north of Alaska from drilling, it would open other Arctic areas up.

So, after bragging in the State of the Union that “we’ve set aside more public lands and waters than any administration in history,” Obama is inviting fossil fuel companies into previously undisturbed public waters.  This was a quick turnaround from just two days before, when environmental groups were singing Obama’s praises after he proposed to permanently protect much of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil development by declaring it a wilderness area.  Now, those groups are criticizing him for threatening the very same region.

The Alaska Wilderness League expressed relief that Obama is at least protecting the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic, but the group’s executive director, Cindy Shogan, insists that the administration needs to “take all Arctic leasing off the table.”

Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Marissa Knodel points out that oil and gas under the Arctic Ocean, much like the Canadian tar sands, cannot be extracted if we are to avoid ruinous climate change.  Like other unconventional or “tight” fuel sources, Arctic oil is more energy-intensive and risky to access than the stuff that used to bubble up from the soil in Texas.

“A major study that just came out in Nature said if we’re serious about avoiding climate catastrophe, drilling in the Arctic has to be off the table,” says Knodel.  “Drilling in the Arctic requires more energy to get [oil] and transport it because it’s so remote and such a dangerous environment.”

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