In the opening of President Obama’s June 25th remarks on climate change at Georgetown University, he said to the younger audience members in the crowd: “It was important for me to speak directly to your generation, because the decisions that we make now and in the years ahead will have a profound impact on the world that all of you inherit.”
The President then went on to lay out a scary picture of a year’s worth of climate-related impacts in the U.S. alone: “Here at home, 2012 was the warmest year in our history. Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, and then drenched by the wettest spring on record. Western wildfires scorched an area larger than the state of Maryland. Just last week, a heat wave in Alaska shot temperatures into the 90s.”
And just days after the President’s speech, 19 elite firefighters were killed in an unusually erratic and hot wildfire in Arizona after a blistering and dry spring in the area.
Meanwhile, recent reports from scientific and financial experts suggest that if we do not change the trajectory we are currently on, our fossil fuel energy use is going to make the extreme weather we see today seem tame. At the end of 2012, the International Energy Agency released an analysis concurring with previous reports from experts such as those at the Carbon Tracker Initiative who have suggested that a vast majority of the world’s proven reserves of fossil fuels must stay in the ground if we are to have any hope of maintaining a climate suitable for a healthy society.
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