January, 23 2012, 11:22am EDT
Climate Crisis Should Be Front and Center in Obama's State of the Union Speech
WASHINGTON
Unmistakable signs of the global climate crisis were seen around the world in 2011: epic droughts, record high temperatures, massive wildfires, flooding, food shortages, a gathering humanitarian crisis and increasing numbers of animals and plants pushed toward extinction. President Barack Obama has an important opportunity Tuesday to address the climate crisis in his State of the Union speech to Congress.
"Climate change is the challenge of our lifetime and should be a major theme of Tuesday's State of the Union speech," said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "More than any other person on the planet, the president has the power to set a course for immediate, tangible progress on the most devastating problem facing life on Earth. Delaying action will virtually ensure a climate catastrophe."
2011 was the 11th warmest year on record since 1880. Climate change is having profound effects: Polar bears are starving and drowning; coral reefs are suffering massive die-offs; people are struggling against wave after wave of extreme weather, including record heat, floods and blizzards. Food and water supplies are becoming unstable, and hundreds of thousands of people die climate-related deaths each year. Scientists estimate climate change will commit one-third of the world's plant and animal species to extinction by 2050 and threaten up to two-thirds with extinction by 2100.
"The world needs the United States to help solve this global crisis, and President Obama should do just that," Suckling said. "Without his leadership now, all living beings on Earth risk dangers that belong in science-fiction novels, not reality."
Obama's scientific agencies -- notably the EPA, Department of the Interior and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- already possess the legal authority to reduce greenhouse pollutants such as carbon dioxide, methane and black carbon. The Clean Air Act is the best existing law to begin making the significant cuts in carbon emissions needed to avoid catastrophic, runaway climate change. Abroad, Obama's constitutional foreign-relations powers already enable him to enter into meaningful, binding agreements with other countries on cutting greenhouse gases.
"Ignoring climate change in his State of the Union speech would be a deeply troubling sign that Obama is disengaging from a crisis with profound consequences for not only all Americans, but all people," Suckling said. "He should build on his smart decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline and finally launch a visionary plan to address climate change and move us toward safer, cleaner, saner sources of energy."
The current president finds himself in a position similar to that of President Abraham Lincoln, who faced great tumult during the months leading up to his own re-election. In Lincoln's December 1863 State of the Union Address -- his last before the presidential election -- he said this about slavery and the emancipation proclamation issued in January 1863:
When Congress assembled a year ago ... the tone of public feeling and opinion, at home and abroad was not satisfactory. With other signs, the popular elections then just past indicated uneasiness among ourselves, while, amid much that was cold and menacing ... By the proclamation a plan is presented which may be accepted by them as a rallying point, and which they are assured in advance will not be rejected here. This may bring them to act sooner than they otherwise would.
President Obama must now courageously, steadily chart a path to a healthy and vibrant America, free of the fossil-fuel pollution that is driving global warming across the planet as it lines the pockets of oil and gas corporations. Rejecting the dirty Keystone pipeline was clearly a step in the right direction; but the president can and must do far more to lead the world out of a climate change disaster that threatens all people and will have devastating impacts on vulnerable populations.
Congress has previously spoken, with the highly successful Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act. It is time to put President Obama's 2011 Earth Day Proclamation into real motion: "The United States can be a leader in reducing the dangerous pollution that causes global warming and can propel these advances by investing in clean energy technologies, markets, and practices that will empower us to win the future. While our changing climate requires international leadership, global action on clean energy and climate change must be joined with local action."
"You said it, Mr. President -- now let's actually do it," Suckling said.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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Russia's Putin Secures Another Term
The controversial leader won a record number of votes for a post-Soviet candidate even as opponents organized a protest at noon on the election's third and last day.
Mar 17, 2024
Despite protests on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin won reelection with more votes than any candidate since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Exit poll the Public Opinion Foundation (POF) put the final tally after three days of voting at 87.8%, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) at 87%, and Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) at 87.3%. Putin will now serve another six-year term, meaning he will have been at the helm of the Russian state for longer than any leader since Catherine the Great, surpassing Josef Stalin.
The election comes less than a month after the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and is likely to lead to more tensions between the Russian and U.S. governments.
"It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what's happening in Russia."
"For a U.S. administration that hoped Putin's Ukraine adventure would be wrapped up by now with a decisive setback to Moscow's interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects that there will be many more rounds in the geopolitical boxing ring," Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Russia Matters project.
With most of Putin's prominent opponents either dead, imprisoned, or in exile, the elections results were considered a foregone conclusion by both friends and foes of his administration.
A Putin spokesperson said in 2023 that the election was "not really democracy" but instead "costly bureaucracy," according to CNN. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said the election was "obviously not free nor fair."
However, Russian opponents of Putin did find a way to demonstrate their position with a protest called "Noon Against Putin." The protest was called for by St. Petersburg politician Maxim Reznik, according to The Guardian. Participants were instructed to head to a polling place at noon and cast a paper ballot for one of the candidates running against Putin, or to write-in another candidate or spoil their ballot.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had endorsed the protest before his death last month in a Russian prison, leading the Independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper to dub it "Navalny's political testament."
The action drew crowds to polling places both in Russian cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg and at Russian embassies around the world.
"This is the first time in my life I have ever seen a queue for elections," one woman waiting in line in Moscow told
CNN. Russian journalists reported that the lines at some stations within the country reached the thousands, according to Reuters.
Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who had also endorsed the protest, voted at the embassy in Berlin, while several protesters gathered outside the embassy in London.
"I expected there to be a lot of people, but not this many," London-based participant Maria Dorofeyeva told The Guardian, adding, "It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what's happening in Russia. And we want to stop it."
Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation told Reuters:
"We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia (and) that Putin has seized power in Russia."
"Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude—many people saw they were not alone," Shaveddinov said
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The Maryland senator defended the organization on CBS and said there was no evidence that it was a "proxy for Hamas."
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"The claim that Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and others are making that somehow UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas are just flat out lies, that's a flat out lie," he told journalist Margaret Brennan.
The U.S. was one of many Western countries that paused funding for UNRWA after the agency announced in January that it had fired 12 staffers over Israeli allegations that they had been involved in Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel. However, some countries including Canada, Sweden, the European Union, and Australia have since restored funding. A report has also emerged that Israel tortured UNRWA staffers into falsely confessing to involvement in the Hamas attack.
"Netanyahu has wanted to get rid of UNRWA because he had seen them as a means to continue the hopes of the Palestinian people for a homeland of their own."
Van Hollen's remarks on Sunday come days after he argued for the restoration of UNRWA funds on the floor of the U.S. Senate and criticized Republican legislators who wanted to permanently end funds for the organization that supports some 6 million Palestinian refugees in countries across the Middle East, including around 2 million in Gaza.
During his speech, he pointed out that the Netanyahu government had not shared the underlying evidence that UNRWA staffers participated in October 7 with either UNRWA itself or the U.S. government. He also urged his colleagues to read a classified Director of National Intelligence report on Netanyahu's claims of UNRWA complicity with Hamas.
On "Face the Nation," Van Hollen said that the person in charge of operations on the ground in UNRWA was a 20-year U.S. Army veteran.
"You can be sure he is not in cahoots with Hamas," the senator told Brennan.
He also repeated claims that Netanyahu has wanted to eliminate UNRWA entirely since at least 2017.
"Netanyahu has wanted to get rid of UNRWA because he had seen them as a means to continue the hopes of the Palestinian people for a homeland of their own," Van Hollen said, adding that the right-wing Israeli leader's "primary objective" was preventing the formation of a Palestinian state.
However, the dismantling of UNRWA would be especially catastrophic amid Israel's ongoing bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has killed more than 31,000 people and put the survivors at risk of famine. No other organization has the infrastructure in place to distribute the necessary aid.
"If you cut off funding for UNRWA in Gaza entirely, it means more people will starve, more people won't get the medial assistance they need, and so it would be a huge mistake," Van Hollen said.
He also said that only 14 of the agency's 13,000-strong staff in Gaza had been accused of participating in the October 7 attack.
"We should investigate it, we should hold all those people accountable, but for goodness' sake, let's not hold 2 million innocent Palestinian civilians who are dying of starvation... accountable for the bad acts of 14 people."
Van Hollen also repeated his call for President Joe Biden to condition the sale of offensive military weapons to Israel on the country obeying international law and allowing aid into Gaza. While Israel sent the U.S. a letter saying it was in compliance with the law, "the day it was signed, clearly the Netanyahu government is not in compliance, because we see that they're continuing to restrict humanitarian assistance," he told Brennan.
Also on "Face the Nation" Sunday, United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Chief Executive Catherine Russell described the impact that a lack of aid was having on the children of Gaza.
"We know now that children are dying of malnutrition in Gaza," she told Brennan.
Russell said that not enough aid was reaching those who needed it, calling both air drops and sea deliveries "a drop in the bucket."
She also called for greater transparency into what was actually happening in Gaza and the difficulties of delivering aid.
"The world should be able to see what's happening and make their own judgments about what's going on," Russell said.
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"They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people's eyes just in the name of greed," the former vice president said.
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In reflecting on nearly 50 years of climate advocacy, former Vice President Al Gore said that he had "underestimated" the greed of the fossil fuel industry.
The remarks came in an interview published in USA Today on Sunday. When asked if he had any regrets, Gore responded that he had "put every ounce of energy" he had into climate advocacy, but added:
"I was pretty slow to recognize how important the massive funding of anti-climate messaging was going on. I underestimated the power of greed in the fossil fuel industry, the shamelessness in putting out the lies."
"They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people's eyes just in the name of greed," Gore continued.
"What's at stake is so incredible."
Gore, who tried to raise awareness about the climate crisis in the U.S. House of Representatives as early as 1981 and brought the issue to national attention in 2006's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has taken a harsher tone against oil, gas, and coal companies in recent months. In August 2023, he said that the "climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis," and in September, he implored the industry to "get out of the way." In December, he lamented that the industry had "captured the COP process," referring to the appointment of the United Arab Emirates national oil company CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber to preside over the United Nations' COP28 climate conference in that country.
In the USA Today interview, Gore also named the fossil fuel industry when asked about his greatest frustration.
"Well, that we haven't made more progress," Gore answered, "and that some of the fossil fuel companies have been shameless in providing, continuing to provide lavish funding for disinformation and misinformation."
"What's at stake is so incredible," he added.
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"We've got all the solutions we need right now to cut emissions in half before the end of this decade," he said. "We've got a clear line of sight to how we can cut the other 50% of emissions by mid century."
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