As Barack Obama’s tenure as president comes to a close, his administration is not backing off the apocalyptic climate-change rhetoric. The same week that the president used executive action to ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in federally controlled areas of the Arctic and and Atlantic oceans, the White House posted a short essay on its Medium page by Paul Nicklen, a Canadian biologist, conservationist and photographer. Nicklen writes that, in his experience,”telling people the ice is melting doesn’t work.”
Nicklen’s essay is accompanied by some photos of polar bears, sea lions, and other polar creatures, but no pictures documenting his dire assertions of “struggling, starving and drowning” animals, or of cities submerging.
More than eight years ago, then-presidential nominee Obama declared that, if the American people were willing to work with him, his election could mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” This week, the White House appears to have conceded that the president has fallen short of his own expectations.
