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Obama: The sham environmentalist
Despite the liberal media’s veneration of the former US president, Obama did very little indeed to protect the environment. Trump and co, however, represent a serious threat to the survival of our species, says IAN SINCLAIR

WHAT grade does former president Barack Obama deserve for his environmental policies? According to the BBC the Obama administration should be awarded an “A-” for negotiating the 2016 Paris climate agreement, introducing new regulations governing pollution from US power plants and designating 548 million acres of US territory as protected areas.

The Guardian anticipated this positive assessment of Obama’s actions on the environment with a 2014 leader column asserting that “President Obama’s commitment to fighting climate change has not been in doubt.”

This support for Obama was taken to extraordinary lengths by last year’s BBC documentary series Inside Obama’s White House. With the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen heralded as the final chance to save the planet from dangerous levels of climate change, the BBC’s one-sided account explains Obama worked to solve the climate crisis in the face of Chinese intransigence. The Chinese — and not the US, apparently — “were afraid of the impact on their economy.” 

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