President Barack Obama is about to launch a new high-profile “climate change” initiative, according to a personally-signed Sunday tweet from the White House’s Twitter account.
“We owe it to our kids to do something about climate change. Share this video and join me Tuesday … –bo,” the tweet reads.
The tweet included a link to a short video, in which Obama touts the impending initiative, but the president offered no details on the plan’s goals, costs or spending.
“This Tuesday, I’ll lay out my vision for where I believe we need to go — a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change and lead global efforts to fight it,” Obama said in the video.
The Washington Post reported that the plan will include promise regulations to force down carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. Those rules likely will drive up the cost of electricity.
The planned June 25 speech at Georgetown University is one of a series of high-profile media events that the president’s team scheduled for June and July.
This week, he attended a G8 summit in Ireland and travelled to Berlin to give an outdoor speech to several thousand invited guests on the landmark Brandenburg Gate.
Next week, starting on June 26, he and his wife will travel through telegenic spots in Africa for six days.
The Africa trip will keep him — and much media coverage — outside Washington D.C., where his allies in the Senate are trying to push through an controversial bill that would double the immigration rate for the next 20 years.
The details of the immigration bill are very unpopular. In 2007, last-minute public protests derailed a similar effort.
On Monday, Senators are expected to vote on a critical cloture vote to end debate on the 1,200-page bill, prior to a final up-or-down majority vote by June 27.
If it is also approved by the House of Representatives, the immigration plan would add 46 million immigrants to the nation’s population of 313 million.
Most of the new immigrants are low-skilled and are expected to vote Democratic in elections starting in 2020.
The plan would also double the inflow of temporary guest workers over the next decade. The 15 million guest workers will work in agricultural, blue-collar and professional jobs. The inflow will create a permanent pool of roughly 2.5 million graduate-level workers who will compete for jobs against the 800,000 Americans who graduate from college with skilled degrees each year.
Obama has played a central, behind-the-scenes role and announced his support for the bill on Saturday.
Democratic and business advocates of the pending immigration plan say it will stimulate the economy and boost government revenues.
Despite Washington’s spending of $7 trillion in borrowed funds since 2009, the economy has yet to recover from the government-fostered housing bubble, which burst in 2007.
A June 18 report by the Congressional Budget Office says the inflow will reduce average wages, education and employment rates for the next decade, and will increase the share of national income gained by property owners — rather than salary-earners — over the next 20 years.
The plan is expected to generate roughly $1 trillion in extra government revenues by 2033. In later decades, however, the low-skilled immigrants are expected to consume more in government medical and retirements funds than they pay in taxes.
Major environmental lobby groups support the immigration plan, even though the immigrants are expected to boost the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the United States, and to expand urban development.
In his video, Obama said a climate change plan is needed to “respond to the growing threat of climate change for the sake of our children and future generations… There’s no single step that can reverse the effects of climate change. But when it comes to the world we leave our children, we owe it to them to do what we can.”
However, there’s growing evidence that the climate change claim is incorrect. World temperatures have stopped climbing, despite a growing amount of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere.
New scientific papers and media reports have highlighted the growing gaps between the global-warming theory and reality.
