Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Remarks at the White House - by James Hansen

Remarks at the White House1

15 January 2013
James Hansen, screenshot

Let us return for a moment to election night 2008. As I sat in our farm house in Pennsylvania, watching Barack Obama's victory speech, I turned my head aside so my wife would not see the tears in my eyes. I suspect that millions cried. It was a great day for America.

We had great hopes for our new President. It is appropriate, it is right, in a period honoring Martin Luther King, to recall the hopes and dreams of that evening, and the hopes and dreams that we…will… never  -  give up.

We have a dream – that our President will understand the intergenerational injustice of human-made climate change – that he will recognize our duty to be caretakers of creation, of the land, of the life on our planet – and that he will give these matters the priority that our young people deserve.

We have a dream – that our President will understand the commonality of solutions for energy security, national security and climate stability – and that he will exercise hands-on leadership, taking the matter to the public, avoiding backroom crippling deals with special interests.

We have a dream – that the President will stand as firm as Abraham Lincoln when he faced the great moral issue of slavery – and, like Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, he will speak with the public, enlisting their support and reassuring them.

It is not easy to find an Abraham Lincoln or a Winston Churchill. But we are here today looking to find that in you, Mr. President. And until you summon it within yourself, let me assure you that we will return, and our numbers will grow.

Mr. President, we will be here until the promise of a safe world for our children and grandchildren, and your children and grand children – is not a dream. We will be here until we are assured that the history books will rightfully record – that you were the person we were looking for  - the person who turned these dreams…into reality.

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1 Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, Pray-in at NY Ave. Presbyterian Church and the White House
(www.interfaithactiononclimatechange.org) on Martin Luther King's birthday.
"We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now…" Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

1 comment:

  1. Surely people realize that placing all your hope in one person does not make sense. Even if Obama had wanted change as soon as he did he would have been ousted in one form or another.

    They key to solving the climate problem and most of the other ones is to understand how utterly bankrupt and corrupt the political system is and how the media is part and parcel of that system controlling and shaping public opinion.

    Until we have an informed and mature public who actually want to learn anything and decide to think outside the box, they might then see through the hoax of our economic/political system and strive for a better and of course sustainable world. -i.e. the change has to come from within the body of humanity itself.

    Alas though it should be clear that isn't going to happen and therefore we can conclude that we don't meet the necessary criteria to advance humanity to the next level of living in an sustainable and intelligent society and so these simple tests like can you handle nuclear energy peacefully and responsibly, can this society have enough self-control to allow room for other species and can we spot, stop, reverse and repair a planet that is having its biosphere destroyed. It would be a foolish mistake if somehow an intelligent species could evolve and become sufficiently technically advanced to then go and contaminate not just the Earth but even further afield.

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