If we’re going to take control of our energy future and can start avoiding these annual gas price spikes that happen every year — when the economy starts getting better, world demand starts increasing, turmoil in the Middle East or some other parts of the world — if we’re going to avoid being at the mercy of these world events, we’ve got to have a sustained, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.  Yes, oil and gas, but also wind and solar and nuclear and biofuels, and more.

President Obama gave a speech at the University of Miami on Thursday discussing his energy plan — assuming that one can use the word “plan” to describe a strategy devoid of any judgment. Obviously, all-of-the-above = more of everything = more fossil fuels = Hell and High Water.

The president has come a long way from his 2008 declaration that this is “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Now it’s more like “Après nous, le Déluge” (see “JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050“).

Just a year ago, “all-of-the-above” was actually a standard Republican talking point, so much so that Democrats routinely mocked it (see Markey slams oil-above-all” approach). It is certainly true that when the president says it, he means it, whereas the Republicans merely say it and then bitterly oppose all of the clean energy programs that Democrats put on the table.  I’m not sure future generations will notice the difference.

Obama’s all-of-the-above energy speech took a none-of-the-above approach to environmental problems: It ignored them all, including the most important of them all, global warming.

Obama is currently in the midst of a failed presidency from a historical perspective because of his abandonment of the climate issue, which is the only issue future generations are going to care about if we don’t act now, as I’ve said many times.

Obama will probably get only one serious shot at redemption, the grand bargain on tax and the deficit at the end of this year (see “Bipartisan Support Grows for Carbon Price as Part of Debt Deal“).  Speeches like this provide no evidence whatsoever that Obama even understands the stakes anymore.

Here are two other places in the speech where he repeats his new slogan:

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Tomorrow, the D.C. Court of Appeals will hear arguments from carbon polluters and their political allies that the EPA scientific endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution should be overturned. This case — brought by the state of Virginia, the industry front-group Coalition for Responsible Regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Tea Party-industry front Southeastern Legal Foundation — is based on the right-wing myth that global warming is a hoax. Holland & Hart attorney Paul Phillips, representing the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, told InsideClimate News that “man-made climate change is not certain,” according to “a compelling amount of science and facts out there”:

There’s a compelling amount of science and facts out there that suggest man-made climate change is not certain. EPA needs to accurately and honestly those certainties as well as the uncertainties.

The Coalition for Responsible Regulation, established in 2009, has not disclosed who its member companies are.

The EPA endangerment finding, Inside Climate News notes, “is based on more than 100 published scientific studies and peer-reviewed syntheses of climate change research” by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program/U.S. Global Change Research Program, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Essentially every scientific society in the world — and every agency of the United States government — recognizes that the threat of man-made global warming is a fact. As the National Academy of Sciences wrote in 2010, man-made global warming is a “settled fact“:

From a philosophical perspective, science never proves anything—in the manner that mathematics or other formal logical systems prove things—because science is fundamentally based on observations.

Any scientific theory is thus, in principle, subject to being refined or overturned by new observations.

In practical terms, however, scientific uncertainties are not all the same. Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small.

Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

Since 2010, the science attributing the unequivocal warming of the planet to fossil-fuel pollution has grown even stronger. It’s now considered “highly likely” that all of the observed warming since 1950 is manmade (and “extremely likely” that most of the warming is manmade).

Call it the reverse Midas touch. Everything homo sapiens touches turns to acid.

A study led by the U.S. Geological Survey finds, “Human use of Earth’s natural resources is making the air, oceans, freshwaters, and soils more acidic.”  The USGS news release explains:

This comprehensive review, the first on this topic to date, found the mining and burning of coal, the mining and smelting of metal ores, and the use of nitrogen fertilizer are the major causes of chemical oxidation processes that generate acid in the Earth-surface environment.

These widespread activities have increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, increasing the acidity of oceans; produced acid rain that has increased the acidity of freshwater bodies and soils; produced drainage from mines that has increased the acidity of freshwater streams and groundwater; and added nitrogen to crop lands that has increased the acidity of soils.

Previous studies have linked increased acidity in oceans to damage to ocean food webs, while increased acidity in soils has the potential to affect their ability to sustain crop growth.

In short, global acidification is one more threat to global food security, which is already under grave threat by climate change, our idiotic biofuels policies, population growth and demographic changes (see Oxfam Predicts Climate Change will Help Double Food Prices by 2030: “We Are Turning Abundance into Scarcity”).

Here’s more background on the study and its findings:

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