![]() We can’t be locking in more planet-heating pollution when we’re already experiencing the hottest months on record." Biden has also ramped up drilling on public lands and overseen the expansion of fossil gas exports, whose emissions could outpace the gains from Biden’s climate actions. She observed that scientists overwhelmingly agree extreme weather events like storms, floods, fires and heat will only get worse unless humanity rapidly phases out fossil fuels, "yet the Biden administration has continued to approve massive fossil fuel projects like the Willow oil drilling complex in Alaska and the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. "President Biden has taken some important climate steps like boosting renewable energy investment and strengthening auto emissions rules, but they fall far short of what’s needed," Maya Golden-Krasner, deputy director of the Climate Law Institute at the conservation nonprofit the Center for Biological Diversity, told Salon by email. Throughout his administration, he has followed what might be called a hybrid approach to tackling climate change - mix genuine steps toward climate-based reform with sops to the wings of the Democratic Party that, for one reason or another, depend on worsening the planet's problems through overuse of fossil fuels. It is not merely his involvement in foreign wars that calls Biden's policy priorities into question. "If Biden declares an emergency on climate, it legitimizes a Republican president using an emergency declaration to, say, outlaw abortion." Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. ![]() "Indeed his overdone commitment to wars around the world - all of which worsen both climate-focused problems and inflationary problems - suggests his full participation in the projects of those who do not want what Thunberg and so many millions of others want and seek," Wolff told Salon. The emergency could enable collective efforts achievable probably in no other way." Yet Wolff expressed skepticism that Biden "ever could do such a thing," citing the president's pro-war foreign policies as one reason for this. The emergency could spark real global efforts to reduce fossil fuel usage, pool resources for all the other projects now being started or stopped according to each nation's political economy, relocate production and distribution systems to reduce pollution. ![]() "There would be some real leadership to offset the fast-growing global image of a declining U.S. "Of course Biden should since it is so threatening to the whole world," Wolff told Salon by email. Richard Wolff, author of "The Sickness is the System" and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, agreed with this assessment. Kalmus concluded, "He should initiate the biggest federally-funded public information campaign in US history, to educate on science, on fossil fuel industry disinformation (which is a well-documented fact), and on solutions."ĭr. (He emphasized he is only speaking on his own behalf.) "It's one of those things in life that is hard in the short term - Biden may pay a political price, although I think it would be less than he fears - but far, far better for everyone in the long term."Īfter reviewing how billions of human lives and countless species are at risk due to climate change - and in particular because of humanity's continued overuse of fossil fuels - Kalmus asserted that by declaring a climate emergency the president could "use his bully pulpit and federal funding to push back against fossil fuel industry disinformation and help the world realize that we are all genuinely in grave danger." Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an associate project scientist at UCLA's Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering, in an email to Salon. "Global heating is an emergency - the greatest emergency humanity currently faces, despite ongoing public apathy - so it's incredibly foolish that President Biden still hasn't declared a climate emergency," explained Dr. Why isn't this the top news story around the world?
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