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As Climate Disasters Mount, and Temperature Record Are Shattered, Obama Brags About Oil and Gas Production

Canadian Tar Sands – Extreme energy will cook the planet

I was disgusted to watch President Obama’s celebration of his Administration’s promotion of fossil fuel production, when he was in Oklahoma this week to announce his “All of the Above” energy strategy.

Fulfilling every oil and gas industry lobbyists’ wet dream and repeating every lie, Obama said:

So today, I’ve come to Cushing, an oil town — (applause) — because producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy.  (Applause.)

Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.  (Applause.)  That’s important to know.  Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states.  We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.

So we are drilling all over the place — right now. That’s not the challenge.  That’s not the problem. In fact, the problem in a place like Cushing is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas in places like North Dakota and Colorado that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it to where it needs to go –– both to refineries, and then, eventually, all across the country and around the world. There’s a bottleneck right here because we can’t get enough of the oil to our refineries fast enough.  And if we could, then we would be able to increase our oil supplies at a time when they’re needed as much as possible.

Now, right now, a company called TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to state-of-the-art refineries down on the Gulf Coast.  And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.  (Applause.)

I thought Obama’s State of the Union Fossil Fuel Celebration was way over the top, but this new “All of the Above” energy policy goes way beyond that.

Obama’s total collapse demonstrates what Chris Hedges has written:  our political and economic systems are broken, and direct action and civil disobedience are all we have left.

Today, Occupy Wall Street begins to connect the dots between the bankers and the polluters, by kicking off Disrupt Dirty Power – The Eviction of the Fossil Fuel Occupation Begins:

The targets of the actions -which begin exactly three months before the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio – are three-fold, as Occupy connects the dots between dirty fossil fuel giants, the dirty banks that fund them, and the dirty legislation and subsidies those corporations receive from politicians they help to elect with their profits.

On a similar direct action path, Bill McKibben at 350.org – obviously burned by President Obama on the Keystone XL Pipeline – kicked off his “connect the dots” campaign: connecting the dots between global warming and extreme weather events (just as over 6,000 US temperature records broken).

Here’s what McKibben wrote – he was FAR more restrained than I: (watch McKibben on Democract Now!)

Earlier today, Barack Obama wrapped up his first trip to Oklahoma as President. He arrived just after a week of floods, capping off a winter that never came, which followed the hottest and driest summer Oklahoma had seen in thousands of years, perhaps ever.

But he wasn’t in Oklahoma to talk about these climate disasters. He was there to laud his administration’s fast-tracking of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. It’s obvious from his speech today that President Obama isn’t connecting the dots between fossil fuel extraction, climate change, and the extreme weather that has reshaped so much of the American landscape this past year.

It’s a painful reminder that sometimes we must be leaders ourselves, before we can expect our elected officials to do the same. In this case, it’s clearly up to us to connect the dots.

Today 350.org is launching a global day of action to call attention to these and other climate disasters, here on the same day as the President’s annoucement. Across the planet now we see ever more flooding, ever more drought, ever more storms. People are dying, communities are being wrecked — the impacts we’re already witnessing from climate change are unlike anything we have seen before.

If we’re going to do these communities justice, we need to connect the dots between these disasters and show how all of them are linked to fossil fuels. We’re setting aside May 5th for a global day of action to do just that: Connect the Dots between extreme weather and climate change.

You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.