Last Straw

Green polit­ics has come along way in the past ten years.

Barack Obama on revamp­ing America’s energy use:

I was just read­ing an art­icle in the New York Times by Michael Pol­len about food and the fact that our entire agri­cul­tural sys­tem is built on cheap oil. As a con­sequence, our agri­cul­ture sec­tor actu­ally is con­trib­ut­ing more green­house gases than our trans­port­a­tion sec­tor. And in the mean time, it’s cre­at­ing mono­cul­tures that are vul­ner­able to national secur­ity threats, are now vul­ner­able to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in com­mod­ity prices, and are partly respons­ible for the explo­sion in our health­care costs because they’re con­trib­ut­ing to type 2 dia­betes, stroke and heart dis­ease, obesity, all the things that are driv­ing our huge explo­sion in health­care costs. That’s just one sec­tor of the eco­nomy. You think about the same thing is true on trans­port­a­tion. The same thing is true on how we con­struct our build­ings. The same is true across the board.

For us to say we are just going to com­pletely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with cli­mate change, deals with national secur­ity and drives our eco­nomy, that’s going to be my num­ber one pri­or­ity when I get into office …

(via Fro­gb­log)