Today, I was searching different blog sites, when I stumbled upon Gristmill, an environmental blog which provides news and commentary about the most recent environmental issues affecting us today. While reading the blog, I stumbled upon a very interesting post regarding President Obama's trip to Canada to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Part of the meeting agenda was to discuss climate change and ways to fight the ongoing problem. Now the issue of climate change has been heavily debated for years, and with former Vice President Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, it has been given more public exposure. Scientists and members of academia have been fighting over what is fact and what is fiction (sometimes very aggressively). According to Gristmill, the "clean energy dialogue" between the two heads of state really did not provide any real answers as to how either government would deal with the energy and climate change situations in the short term. While there were discussions about investing money in new technologies, many environmentalists want to hear more from Obama and his ideas.
As part of the recently passed economic stimulus bill, the US has allocated 3.4 billion dollars towards reducing carbon emissions and environmental protection. This is a vital step towards cutting the United States emission rate, which is considered the world's largest emitter along with China. The money will hopefully be used towards finding new energy technology which we are in desperate need of. Not only will this investment produce new jobs in clean energy, we may be taking the first steps in halting the progression of global warming. I applaud Obama in recognizing that global warming is a pressing issue, unlike the previous administration (who did not want to look at the facts and chose rather to ignore it completely). Lets just hope that the environment does not get taken off the agenda, when more and more people are struggling in the US.
