JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama acknowledged the severity of global warming and that action must be taken to replace industrial polluting energy with clean energy technologies.

The President has made some progress insofar as opening the market to green energy by providing tax initiatives and other good incentives, but with off-the-record hot temperatures, devastating droughts across the mid west and western states, and extremely catastrophic weather conditions, toxic coal, oil and gas chemical polluters are still the major providers of energy. They are killing our rivers, lakes and oceans and increasing CO2 trapped greenhouse gases far more rapidly than scientists have predicted. Given the overwhelming crises, the President needs to take a massive leap of action as he led us to believe he’d do, given his speech, when he announced that if “congress doesn’t act then I’ll take executive action.”

It’s pretty obvious to most Americans that our government is merely an extension of these polluting industries. When you see a senator, a congressman or the president, you are looking at a representative of the oil, coal, gas and nuclear industry. They are the “company men” in office – pretending to represent the people. So we know all too well what an uphill battle it is.

Nevertheless, the President and his State Department-E.P.A. administrators need to take a good long look at this Exxon-Mobil’s Arkansas’ tar sands ruptured pipe video, and how it has forced a suburb of families to evacuate their homes, and then tell us again how safe the Keystone Pipeline is after his administration moved one step closer to approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, concluding in a draft environmental impact statement that the project “would not accelerate global greenhouse gas emissions or significantly harm the natural habitats along its route.”

The report, done by the State Department, suggests that the proposed 875-mile pipeline, which would carry 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Nebraska, has cleared a significant hurdle on its way to President Obama’s desk for final consideration. (ABC report)

This video says it all. It is a huge warning to the President, and that warning includes deepwater drilling in the Arctic, whichObama approved of, where the weather conditions are so turbulent that Shell couldn’t even maintain its ships much less drilling: The company’s two drill ships suffered serious accidents as they were leaving drilling sites in the Beaufort andChukchi Seas last fall and winter.

(Photo: Tarsandsaction/Flickr)



Jacqueline Marcus is the editor of ForPoetry.com and the author of Close to the Shore by Michigan State University Press. She taught philosophy for twenty years at Cuesta College.