We Now Know the Full Extent of Obama’s Disastrous Apathy toward the Climate Crisis.
Columbia University’s oral history of the Obama presidency consists of interviews with 470 people ranging from administration officials to activists who tried to shape Obama era public policy. It’s the “official” oral history, conducted with funding from the Obama Foundation, which I would argue makes the entire project unethical at its core. Academia has a duty to pursue truth uncorrupted by financial influence, which you can hardly do if your project is funded by the personal foundation of the controversial figure you’re supposed to be studying. Nevertheless, any giant repository of interview data will contain some revealing information, and there’s much to be learned about Obama by reading official accounts, like memoirs by sycophants or his own gargantuan self-exonerative autobiography.
The official oral history is mostly still unreleased, but Columbia has just put out a special preview of 17 interviews related to climate and the environment. Even though, predictably, it’s full of people praising Obama’s statesmanship and humility and wisdom and so forth, it also reinforces what critics have said for years: Obama mostly did not take the climate crisis seriously until far too late in his presidency, and activists had to fight him tooth and nail on issues where anyone who cared about the fate of the planet should have been on their side to begin with. Bill McKibben, in an interview for the project, has a damning verdict: “No matter how much I liked him, it was very clear he could care less about any of this stuff at some deep level, and wasn’t willing to sacrifice—suffer any political pain in order to raise the issue.”
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Link to | Obama’s Climate Failure.