If two wars and an economic meltdown weren't enough for Obama to face, the reality is even more daunting, says longtime environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben.
In a letter to the members of www.350.org, McKibben makes it clear what the No. 1 urgent issue is facing Obama and the world:
Our eight-year interlude from reality draws to a close, and the job of cleaning up begins. The trouble is, we're not just cleaning up after a failed US presidency. We're cleaning up after a two-century binge.
Barack Obama won an historic victory this week, and with it the right to take office under the most difficult circumstances since Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Maybe more difficult, because while both FDR and Obama had financial meltdowns to deal with, Obama also faces the meltdown meltdown - the rapid disintegration of the planet's climate system that threatens to challenge the very foundations of our civilization.
McKibben goes on to say that the scientific consensus is forming that if we don't reduce C02 in the atmosphere from 385 parts per million to a maximum of 350, the feedback loops of black water in polar regions, the melting Siberian tundra, and on and on will release enough C02 to disrupt civilization to be unrecognizable and kill millions of mostly poor, innocent people. And that reduction to 350 has to happen in a few VERY short (4-6) years.
This new number -- 350 -- is a drastic change from previous scientific estimates that said we must reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Scientists have discovered the earth's climate is much more finely balanced than previously assumed, and the rate of polar melt and other observable phenomenon is happening much more rapidly than they ever projected.
The problem is that the public is unaware of this new urgency, which makes it almost politically impossible for Obama to take the necessary measures to meet the challenge.
George W. Bush was so terrible on this issue that the bar has been set incredibly low - Obama will get all the political points he needs with fairly minimal effort. Doing what actually needs to be done will be politically…unpopular isn't even the word. It might well wreck his political future, because it would involve - directly or indirectly - raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now.
What may save us, McKibben writes, is that Obama is a very smart man. But we need to help him get educated in a public way. That's why the 350.org group is telling everyone to urge Obama go to the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland next month.
I had the privelege of hearing Bill give this message in person at an environmental conference in Orange County, of all places. It's a great conference put on every year by the Orange County Interfaith Coalition for the Environment (OCICE).
Again, the link to Bill's letter and the organization 350.org.