Sometimes you don't know what you got -- til it's gone. ... Sometimes, you do ...

Even President Obama has said as much himself — that we’re not moving fast enough on Climate Change.

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Obama in Alaska warns ‘we’re not moving fast enough’ on climate change

by Tony Dokoupil, MSNBC.com — 09/01/15; Updated 09/01/15

President Barack Obama late Monday issued a blunt, borderline apocalyptic call for global action on climate change, rallying world leaders to reach an agreement this year or “condemn our children to a world they will no longer have the capacity to repair.”

“Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now,” the President said in Anchorage, Alaska, addressing an international conference on the Arctic. “I have come here today, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second-largest emitter, to say that the United States recognizes our role in creating the problem, and we embrace our responsibility to help solve it.”

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“If we do nothing to keep glaciers from melting, and forests from burning we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their repair,” the president said, summing images of “entire industries of people who can’t practice livelihoods, desperate refugees, political disruptions that could trigger conflicts around the world.”

“Any leader willing to take a gamble on a future like that,” he continued, “any so-called leader who doesn’t take this issue seriously or treats it like a joke is not fit to lead. On this issue, of all issues, there’s such a thing as being too late.”

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NOW — that president Obama is putting the finishing touches on his Executive Legacy as president, it seems he may have a bit of buyer’s-remorse — regarding his decision to ‘wait for Republicans to get on board with Climate Change legislation’

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Obama: I should have acted sooner on climate change

by Jordan Fabian, theHill.com — 09/24/15

President Obama says he should have "moved faster to a nonlegislative strategy" to address climate change after Congress killed cap-and-trade legislation in 2009.

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The collapse of the cap-and-trade bill, which would have taxed companies for carbon pollution as an incentive to cut emissions, was one of the biggest legislative failures of Obama’s presidency.

The 2009 cap-and-trade bill passed the House but was never brought to the floor in the Senate, were it ran into opposition from Republicans and some centrist Democrats, who argued it would hurt energy producers.

Environmental groups criticized Obama during his first term for not acting quickly enough on climate change. But Obama defended his push to court Republicans to back the cap-and-trade bill, saying their votes were necessary to pass the legislation.

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Over six years waiting for Republicans to support cap-and-trade? It should have been clear that after the first year or two — THAT was never going to happen.

Yet, status quo priorities always seem to trump, urgent scientific and environmental and economic goals. If were lucky, one day when those postponed priorities fail to pan out, the priority-pickers ‘wake up’ — and come to sad realization, that they may not actually be leaving their children ‘that Better World’ they had planned — despite the most hopeful of good intentions.

Once again president Obama, seems to be trying to make up for lost time, with respect to that last-on-the-list priority, sometimes colloquially referred as “doing something about Climate Change”.

[President Obama speaking, at the GLACIER Conference -- Anchorage, AK: ]

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This year [2015], in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can.

So let me sum up. We know that human activity is changing the climate. That is beyond dispute. Everything else is politics if people are denying the facts of climate change. We can have a legitimate debate about how we are going to address this problem; we cannot deny the science. We also know the devastating consequences if the current trend lines continue. That is not deniable. And we are going to have to do some adaptation, and we are going to have to help communities be resilient, because of these trend lines we are not going to be able to stop on a dime. We’re not going to be able to stop tomorrow.

But if those trend lines continue the way they are, there’s not going to be a nation on this Earth that’s not impacted negatively. People will suffer. Economies will suffer. Entire nations will find themselves under severe, severe problems. More drought; more floods; rising sea levels; greater migration; more refugees; more scarcity; more conflict.

That’s one path we can take. The other path is to embrace the human ingenuity that can do something about it. This is within our power. This is a solvable problem if we start now.

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Now if only we had that kind of resolve, “to solve Climate Change”, at the beginning of the Obama Administration — instead of at the end of it — then maybe the Obama Legacy could have actually shaken off that “Status quo” moniker.

Maybe our “one planet” would actually be on the path to becoming that ‘Better Place’ for those young folks who will follow us — instead of only the weak initiation, of such a place.