Three weeks away

Today, I was flipping through the Washington Post looking for an article or two of interest, when I found a whole section. Much to my delight, the Outlook section of the Washington Post printed a special issue on climate change today. The cover article, written by Bill Mckibben (a personal hero!), compared Obama's attitude toward climate change with that of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives.

The UN climate change conference in Copenhagen is merely three weeks away. Environmental leaders and organizations are going into overdrive, President Nasheed is going into overdrive, and Obama is.... stalling. Nonetheless, the section in the newspaper gave me hope that people are seeing the importance and urgency of Copenhagen, even if the US government is not.

There were some wonderful quotes in the issue that I'd like to share.

"Copenhagen will be about climate, of course, but in a fundamental sense, it must also be about whether we will have enough to eat"- Lester Brown, highlighting that we as humans will all be affected in a monumental way if nothing is done to curb climate change- sea level rise and increased temperatures will totally devastate the international food economy. If people could see climate change as something that personal, I bet we'd have a much stronger movement mobilizing in the coming weeks.

"doing more than George W. Bush on global warming is like doing more than George Wallace on racial healing. It gives you political cover, but the melting arctic is unimpressed"- Bill Mckibben.
I don't know about how the general public feels, but Obama is letting me down with his attitude toward climate change. Publicly stating that no binding treaty is going to come out of Copenhagen, Obama is steadily changing his image from one of hope and change, to one of pessimism and stagnancy. Too bad, when there was so much promise last January.
"A mediocre health-care bill is one thing; you can probably come back in a generation and make it stronger. People may suffer in the meantime, but the problem won't become logarithmically worse. The climate, on the other hand, is full of traps and tipping points... if there were ever a challenge that called for focus, this is it"- Bill Mckibben
FOCUS, AMERICA! FOCUS, WORLD! I am tired of the arguments with my dad- him saying that it's going to take time, we should take things step by step, me firing back that we have no time, citing potential catastrophic consequences. Where does this slow-moving attitude come from? Is it a failure to understand the urgency, or a refusal to understand the urgency? Is it pessimism, a belief that no matter how hard we try, nothing is going to happen fast? My generation, the one with the optimism and the energy, has to work hard to combat the lethargic attitude. After all, we're the ones with the most at stake.