The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Mr. Obama, visiting Alaska, skipped the painful facts on climate change

September 4, 2015 at 5:19 p.m. EDT
President Obama during his visit to Alaska on Sept. 1. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

The core argument in Stephen Stromberg's Sept. 2 PostPartisan blog excerpt, "No, the president isn't a climate hypocrite," is a shell game, a political convenience to skirt the main issue, which is avoiding climate catastrophe later this century.

To avoid such catastrophe, we must keep the vast majority of existing un-combusted fossil fuels literally in the ground. We can’t keep blithely drilling in Arctic Alaska for a resource — oil — in which we are awash and that will inevitably cause toxic and damaging spills.

Plus, significantly, the Arctic is already heating up at twice the rate as the rest of the world. Drilling in Arctic Alaska is a horrible idea for a variety of reasons and bad for the climate specifically. For the president to fail even to acknowledge these massive risks is cynical and sad. And it makes him hypocritical given his lofty rhetoric on global warming this week in Alaska.

William J. Snape III, Washington

The writer is a senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity.