Note: Will Bennington, featured in the article below, is Development and Campaigns Associate with Global Justice Ecology Project’s Vermont office. He is also a volunteer organizer with Rising Tide Vermont. Bennington has not listened to Obama’s speech, and doesn’t plan to. Instead, along with GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann, he went straight to the actual policy document. Apparently, other environmentalists in Vermont would prefer to chew on the rhetoric instead of digesting the facts, which are more coal, more nukes, more fracking, more industrial biofuels and more false solutions taking us over the climate cliff.
-The GJEP Team
By Joel Baird, June 25, 2013. Source: Burlington Free Press
Energy efficiency isn’t a bold, new idea in Vermont. Nor is the quest for renewable energy and cleaner air.
But Green Mountain environmental activists took keen notice of President Obama’s unveiling Tuesday afternoon of a new, national climate action plan.
Within minutes of the speech’s conclusion, author Bill McKibben, a Ripton resident and founder of the global 350.org movement, issued a single, simple email.
In response to Obama’s remark that approval of the Keystone XL tar-sand pipeline from Alberta, Canada, hinged on its contribution to increases in greenhouse gas levels (a widely acknowledged outcome), McKibben wrote: “This is an appropriate standard that the president appears to be setting.”
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