Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s EPA head, has threatened to use climate change to justify her agency taking over regulation of virtually the entire eonomy, and Ken Salazar, his Interior Secretary has done more than any other public official in decades to set back fossil fuel production in America.
But that’s not enough for a significant corner of the Big Green environmental movement.
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Under a headline proclaiming that “Environmentalists need a new president,” Grist columnist Glenn Hurowitz proclaimed that Obama’s refusal to restore solar panels to the White House might seem like an unimportant decision, but it “clearly exposed, more than any big policy ask ever would, President Obama’s unwillingness or inability to confront our great planetary crisis.”
Not only that, but, according to Hurowitz, “Obama responded in a way that was a caricature of his failure-by-committee administration: sending mid-level officials to tell the greatest American environmental activist of our time that the president was rejecting their request out of hand in favor of a continued ‘deliberative process.'”
The Grist columnist cites a modest list of items on which the Obama response has been the wrong one when viewed through Big Green eyes, a fact that leads him to the conclusion that the time has come to give up on Obama:
“Like many environmentalists, I’ve long criticized President Obama for not doing enough to protect the planet — but now I fear that he is not only not doing enough, he is actively going out of his way to fight climate action on many fronts. It’s sad to say it, but he seems to prize the possibility of an unholy and illusory accommodation with polluters over a solution to the great environmental crisis that confronts us,” Hurowitz said.
Solution? Environmentalists must start looking for a new president:
“As enthralled as environmentalists and progressives once were about Obama’s promise, we cannot ignore that for all his fine rhetoric, his accomodationism and reserve are allowing the planetary crisis to deteriorate and leaving America behind in the race for a clean energy economy,” he said.
“It pains me to say it, but success will require a new president – and that means that after the midterm elections, we need to start looking for a primary challenger who has the heart and soul required to save the planet from catastrophe and rescue American from its economic morass – even as we throw ourselves into grassroots action to do what we can to save the planet despite the president’s interference.”
Is this for real, or merely a wily tactical move to give Obama more room to his left, thus allowing him to pose more credibly as a moderate? Will Ralph Nader come back for yet another quixotic run for the Democratic presidential nomination? Has Hurowitz met recently with the Secretary of State?
I don’t know, but you can read Hurowitz entire column and decide for yourself. Grist is a significant publication for the Big Green environmental movement, claiming to draw half a million unique monthly visitors.
