Environmentalists Turn On Obama As Compromiser

New York Times:

For environmental activists like Jessica Miller, 31, the passage of a major climate bill by the House last month should have been cause for euphoria. Instead she felt cheated.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[RomeoMD25]

David Wojick, expert reviewer for U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

"The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming."

A new study using methods endorsed by the Al Gore crowd concludes that there is no "consensus" among scientists that man is contributing to global warming. Also can 31,000 scientists be wrong?

* over 2/3rds of the signatories had advanced degrees,
* 2,660 were physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists
* 5,017 were scientists whose fields of specialization in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and other life sciences

Hardly a bunch of "flat earth" types as the global warming mass hysteria crowd likes to call anyone that dares to challenge their scientifically weak viewpoint that man is destroying the planet by causing global warming.

So the next time you hear the media throw out the terms "consensus view" or "scientific consensus" regarding man-made global warming (or CO2 causing global warming) you'll know they either haven't done their homework or they've drank the Al Gore Kool-Aid and don't want to report the truth.

[mioffe]

Dear RomeoMD25, "So the next time you hear the media throw out the terms "consensus view" or "scientific consensus" regarding man-made global warming (or CO2 causing global warming) you'll know they either haven't done their homework or they've drank the Al Gore Kool-Aid and don't want to report the truth."
I agree with you that science is not politic and "consensus view" in science is nonsense.
What I found in your statement "man-made global warming" sound for me that you will agree do not fight if nature responsible for that GW.
If you read my points about properties of water, which actually cool the air, we have possibilities to keep earth in balance by growing forests, not only to increase evaporation of water, but also for wood energy with zero emission.

[RomeoMD25]

So, what happens when a state becomes a “green” dream like the people advocating for all of this energy control?

It ceases to be industrial, businesses suffer, manufacturing and production of goods and services crash.
Production of natural resources crash. Protection of natural resources crash. Welfare roles swell.
Government agencies increase their oversight of pretty much everything. California is the archetype.

[leduck]

you don't need to blame environmentalists for starving industrialism
natural depletion will take care of that, if we continue on our present path

[BlackbirdHighway]

It is frustrating. All through the "W" years, there was no compromising at all. Bush had it all his way. Not only was alternative energy not promoted, but climate science was suppressed and expanded fossil fuel use was actively encouraged. Even energy conservation was discouraged. Anyone remember tax breaks for Hummers? We got to pay taxes to the federal government, and it used the money to subsidize Hummers!

Now we need to make up for all that lost time. We should be moving at top speed on switching from fossil fuels to alternatives. In 2008 the voters were pretty darn clear about what they wanted. Instead were are now compromising with the same folks we voted against.

[gs425]

glug glug glug.....a­hhhhh

[ElsaIndy]

I get the sense that everything Obama touches is in disarray. He has taken on too much.
A simple Stiff Carbon Tax is the way to show he is serious about environmental issues and would have been an immediate stimulus bringing in billions of dollars. But it would have required doing something unpopular. It would have meant working in Congress to pass a Carbon Tax on all Americans , not just rich Americans.
Obama should have then focused on the economy and healthcare reform because both are linked together in crisis mode.
Instead he is waffling all over everything. He does not enunciate one single simple prinicple in any area that his policies can be formed. He leaves our disfunctional Congress to come up with policies based on confused and contrary principles.

Obama has shown NO leadership skills.

[sueinmn]

Obama not fighting on the strong campaign promises? How can he, he is so busy trying for world peace to be here and be active in keeping Congress on the desired road to recovery. He prefers to accept what they come up with and being all the lobbying going on, they dont come up with much. Some majority of power we Dems hold. Put 100 seats in our favor and they will never agree to real change. Obama will suffer the "change" of peoples beliefs in him. The we will see real change and not for the better. He has the constituents, he has the senate majority and he is not using it to his best uses. He is too detatched.

[vippy]

Our oil wells put out more damage than we humans can do with our cars. Who is behind this stupid Cap and Trade that was abandoned by other countries already? Let us clean up our garbage and start from there. Our government only wants more tax money, it can't be good. More taxes don't do
anything to help the earth.

[marinade]

There is so much energy waste. If carbon was taxed, consumers could easily make up the difference with conservation. The government could use the revenue to research other forms of energy and conservation.

[marinade]

650,000,000 cars can do plenty of damage. Add to that the coal burning power plants and it is plain to see that humans can damage the Earth with very little effort.

[BlackbirdHighway]

I was sure your figure was wrong, way off actually. There couldn't possibly be that many. But then I looked it up.

WOW!!!

[bradwieser]

Lower our carbon footprint, drown environmentalists.

[lbrty 2112]

surely you mean carbon mouthprint

[leduck]

someday you'll realize how insane your comment is
true environmentalists have been fighting the good fight,
and trying to prevent disaster

[starkcr31]

If it was up to environmentalists we'd all be living in caves again.

[armadillious2002]

Well, we can't all live in an earth ship, drink sun tea, and own our own wind turbine so until that day arrives I feel Obama has brought us a hell of a lot closer to what progressives want than bush and cheney.

[lvdragonlady]

Thank you, very well said.
He is having to deal with a bunch of people(dem and rep) that have been in the game a whole lot longer then he has and the fact that many of them have made deals with the companies that are now on the receiving end of this bill, he has no choice but to compromise. You can not expect everyone to agree on everything, that is humanly impossible.

[smchp]

co-sign

[EndRacismNow]

Just like how Bush betrayed conservatives Obama will betray progressives. Politicians pretend to fight over little issues to make the public believe there are big differences between Democrats and Republicans but when you examine the past Presidents foreign policy and economic policies they are virtually the same with vain differences. Both parties need to be brought down. They have a lock on the majority of the public by tricking us into believing one side is bad and another is good. Until then ALL Americans will be unhappy with their government.

[wyomingredneck]

why do you call them progressives it should be liberal or regressives since most of their ideas are regressive.

[sueinmn]

Just continue the divide and America will NEVER recover.

[smchp]

just continue to post your idiotic statements. That will solve the problem.

[Marcospinelli]

Director of NASA: "G-8 failure reflects US failure on climate change. Other nations are unlikely to make real concessions on emissions if the United States is not addressing the climate matter seriously. With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-james-hansen/g-8-failure-reflects-us-f_b_228597.html

[HappyRabbit]

The issue is not so much that Obama compromises to get a "good" bill at the expense of a "best" bill. It is that he does not fight passionately for the best bill before he accepts compromise. He is rapidly descending into the hell of actually being "just another pollination", abandoning campaign promises, one by one, as quietly as possible.

One must thank the blogosphere and the progressive activists for not allowing him to get away with it. I could not have been prouder then I was yesterday when the HIV/AIDS, needle exchange activists chained themselves in the Rotunda. It took me back to the '70s
when we filthy liberal hippy freaks chanted from the Ellipse and helped end the war in Vietnam.

[Marcospinelli]

Yes.

Before negotiations even begin, Obama cedes ground from the left. He's brought no liberals into his administration, none to the table, and right off the bat he gives away positions that really aren't his to give away.

Obama has earned the distrust the left has developed toward him, as has the Democratic party in general.

[ElsaIndy]

He also did not try to bring Republicans and Democrats together to forge a strong stimulus package as I thought he might. In our polarized Congress it was crucial that the two sides talk and try to work together. Instead his stimulus was so poorly designed that it did not even meet the basis standards for a stimulus package that his advisor as his economic advisor, Summers, advocated.

His budget also was filled with promises that could only be fulfilled with borrowed funds from China. Both have met with legitimate concerns. Had he worked with both sides, he might have pounded out a compromise budget and stimulus package that actually worked.

Obama is really just another politician aiming for the lowest common denominator so he can say he has a bill on this or that. His anxiety is his own re-election. He does not care about quality or substance in his bills. Indeed he never enunciates any principles upon which he can form policies in any area preferring to take all sides of every issue and leaving it to our disfunctional Congress to do the hard work.

[Chernynkaya]

You are absolutely correct. Obama's goal is to get ANY bill passed. Eff that BS about "don't let the perfect... blah blah... enemy... blah blah."

[Marcospinelli]

If TheBushYears taught us nothing else, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid & relentless in your sales pitch & tactics. It's not that Bush(Rove) was a genius & knew something that nobody else knew; Bush was just more ruthless (clumsy & careless many political graybeards would say) in doing what politicians & the parties had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans.

Obama didn't get to be the first black president, vanquish the Clinton machine & the oldest, most experienced politicians in our nation's history (including the Rove machine) by not having mastered these skills. Nor do Democratic politicians (more incumbents than ever, in office longer) not know how to do it. How do you think Democrats managed to keep impeaching Bush and Cheney off the table & have us still reelecting them, not marching on Washington with torches&pitchforks?

Obama&Democrats know how to do it -- They don't want to do it.

The trick for them has been to keep the many different populist groups believing that they really do support our issues, but that they're merely inept. And to get us to keep voting for them in spite of their failure to deliver on any of our alleged shared objectives.

Our mistake has been to believe Democrats want to pass any of it.

[Marcospinelli]

THOM HARTMANN: From the GreatDepression until basically the ReaganAdmi­nistration­, well actually from 1793 when Congress passed what Alexander Hamilton proposed, a national industrial policy, from then until Reagan, & then it really blew out with BillClinton, NAFTA, GAT & NTO, but it really began during the ReaganAdmi­nistration­, or arguably you could even put it back with Nixon&China, but I still place the beginning of it or the last two years of the CarterAdmi­nistration with deregulation, we had a national industrial policy where we made things in the UnitedStates. We no longer have that.

And when we combine the fact that we no longer protect our economy here in the UnitedStates with the fact that we've moved from a manufacturing economy to a service economy (& there's an absolute limit to how many times we can call it creating wealth -- "if you mow my lawn and I wash your car") & then on top of that you put in place what David Stockman (Reagan's chief economic adviser) said was overt, that they ran up a $3 trillion debt (they tripled the national debt, borrowed more money than every president in the history of the UnitedStates combined) specifically so that when the ReaganAdmi­nistration left office there'd be so much debt that the Democrats wouldn't be able to expand social security or have a national health care program. Now that "starve the beast" strategy is coming back -- I don't see a way out of this, do you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fff2t1IA1mQ&feature=channel_page

[mioffe]

We need combine our efforts to fight GW, be energy independent and provide 100% of health insurance by 100% of employment. It is not so difficult task.
In huge power plants we are using only electricity. 80% of fuel energy we are loosing in vain.
If we will start new policy to build relatively small plant to use as electricity, as heat our need for energy will reduce at least 4 times. Wood in this case will provide more useful energy than oil products. All GHG from oven could be solved in water to watering forests surrounding these power plants. Together with ash it will be the best nutrition to grow forests.
If we will achieve not so difficult task to harvest 5 dry ton/acre/year of wood we need 300,000,000 acres of forest to feed all projected energy needs in 2010 year.

When one person with weight around 200 Lb. is moving to job and back on car weighting around 2000 Lb., real efficiency of movement of person will be less than 1% (calculate efficiency of engine, gasoline production, stops on the road, heating or cooling etc).
We can’t gather all GHG from millions of cars. Only electrical power without any batteries could provide as economically as environmentally friendly movement.
Small carts (20 Lb.) moving by road, absolutely automatically on road without intersection must to be direction of our transportation future.

It will be energy and transportation solutions with ZERO EMISSIONS, 100% of employment and insurance.

[AngieMom57]

I've been reading your posts and first let me say I'm impressed, second am I understanding your point?

[mioffe]

Dear AngieMom57,please ask any questions.