Cause And Defects

In Paris today, President Obama told a gathered climate change conference of world leaders that the US was partially responsible for increasing global warming through carbon emissions, and that it was America's job to do something about it.

President Obama told world leaders who gathered northeast of Paris on Monday for a climate conference that the United States is at least partly to blame for the life-threatening damage that environmental change has wrought, and he urged world leaders to join him in fixing the problem.

“I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter,” Mr. Obama said, “to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

In a speech interrupted by repeated beeps warning that he had exceeded his time limit, Mr. Obama said in Le Bourget that the climate conference represented an important turning point in world history because the leaders attending the meeting now recognize the urgency of the problem.

“No nation — large or small, wealthy or poor — is immune,” he said.

The greatest threat to reaching a binding climate accord may be a loose coalition of developing nations, led by India, who argue that they should not be asked to limit their economic growth as a way of fixing a problem that was largely created by the others, and Mr. Obama conceded that point.

“We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its most destructive effects,” he said.

He promised money to help the poorest nations transition to economies that depend less on burning fossil fuels, but he said a delay was not acceptable.

“For I believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late,” Mr. Obama said. “And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us.”

Imagine any of the GOP 2016 clown car crew saying this.  You'd be far more likely to have the official position of the US government be that climate change is a fraud, that scientists have to be investigated and prosecuted, and that America needed to level sanctions against countries that did believe in the science.

Needless to say, the right will go insane over this.  Watch.