Alaska Is More Than a Photo Op
Barack Obama has no long-term, consistent strategy for Alaska.
Barack Obama has no long-term, consistent strategy for Alaska. Well, other than his climate agenda. He’s visiting The Last Frontier this week to plug for an even more aggressive approach to “man-made” global warming, as he spoke before an international conference in Anchorage Monday. As The Washington Post pointed out, Obama simply used the wilderness as a visual aid for his arguments. Ahead of the conference, titled GLACIER, NASA said sea levels are rising faster than expected, and Obama matched that level of alarm. “We’re not moving fast enough,” Obama warned. “None of the nations represented here are moving fast enough.” Obama’s comments quickly descended into adolescent sniping, as he completely belittled skeptics to his regulation-heavy, Big Government “solutions” to climate change. “The time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is past,” he continued. “The time to plead ignorance is surely past. Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone. They’re on their own shrinking island.”
If Obama wants to talk about shrinking islands, he should reconsider the threat Russia poses in Arctic waters. Just like the situation in Ukraine, Russia is pushing boundaries in the Arctic, trying to grab the natural resources that lie under the ice. Currently, Russia operates 40 icebreakers and is making 11 more. The U.S.? It has only two and Obama proposes the U.S. buy one more. But Obama ignores the long-term significance of Alaska and its waters for our nation’s security and energy policies to yammer about the temperature and to take a hike with reality TV star Bear Grylls.