While handing out tax-paying citizens' cash to less tax-paying (but still voting) citizens in his latest bailout (of the student loan bubble) may seem to some just big-hearted, the quid pro quo appears to have just been unleashed. In a commencement address yesterday to graduates of UC Irvine, Bloomberg reports that Obama delivered one of his feistiest critiques of lawmakers; calling on Americans coming of age to demand that politicians respond more aggressively to climate change, comparing those skeptical about man-caused alterations to the environment to a belief that the moon is “made of cheese.”
In a commencement address yesterday to graduates of the University of California at Irvine, Obama delivered one of his feistiest critiques of lawmakers who, in objecting to environmental regulations he’s pushing to reduce carbon emissions, question the need for such action.
Obama said rising temperatures and sea levels and intensifying storm patterns define “one of the most significant long-term challenges that our country and our planet face.”
...
“The question is not whether we need to act” on climate change, Obama said. “The overwhelming judgment of science, accumulated and measured and reviewed over decades, has put that question to rest. The question is whether we have the will to act before it’s too late.”
...
“When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it,” Obama said. “But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anyone saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”
Today’s Congress, “is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence,” he said. “They will tell you it is a hoax, or a fad.”
Obama also had harsh words for those who “duck the question” of climate change.
He said they say, “Hey, look, I’m not a scientist.”
Said Obama: “I’ll translate that for you. What that really means is, ‘I know that man-made climate change really is happening, but if I admit it, I’ll be run out of town by a radical fringe that thinks climate science is a liberal plot.”
...
While Obama didn’t provide any names, he added: “One member of Congress actually says the world is cooling. There was one member of Congress who mentioned a theory involving ’dinosaur flatulence’ -- which I won’t get into.”
In conclusion: I'll bail you out... if you spread my good word.
Perhaps President Obama should listen to the real questions that graduating students are asking... as summed up by John Boehner:
“Americans are still asking, ‘Where are the jobs?,’"
