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A Vote for Barack Obama

A Vote for Barack Obama

I voted for Barack Obama’s reelection last week despite doubts outlined in our April 26, 2012 post tagged “I May Vote for Mitt Romney.” That post argued that a second-term President Obama could not do anything big to slow climate change because (1) Democrats reject anything that would make gasoline prices higher, such as a high carbon tax that “would hurt the middle class,” and (2) Congressional Republicans seem to hate Obama, and to hate big government action, so much that they would fight any government moves to curb global warming that Obama might propose.

In April I saw Mitt Romney as intelligent, unprincipled and pragmatic, and I hoped that a President Romney would look objectively at human-caused global warming and decide to act. Effective legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions would require “big government” action that Romney’s Republican base vehemently rejects, but Romney might get Republican Congressional votes if he pushed climate-change legislation as part of a bold, revised agenda to save America.

Unfortunately Romney’s campaign has featured persistent attacks against government solutions to big problems, except for military ones, and he’s probably sincere. Romney proposed diminishing FEMA and leaving disaster relief to states and private enterprise; then the disasters Hurricane Sandy visited on a hundred million Americans produced yet another embarrassing Romney flip flop. Obama toured stricken New Jersey with her grateful Republican governor while speeding federal help to New Jersey and many other states from a funded, competent FEMA, and Romney back peddled from his privatizing mantras.

The presidential choice is far from ideal, but Hurricane Sandy has forced the American public to pay more attention to climate change. Let’s push a reelected Barack Obama to capitalize on that new attention to enact legislation which curbs greenhouse gas emissions.  If this happens, at least all the devastation and destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy won’t be completely for nothing.

Image by Pauljoffe at en.wikipedia [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

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