The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report reads like a science fiction writer’s vision of Apocalypse. But President Obama still fails to lead and to deal decisively with climate change and its looming tidal wave of human suffering.

What follows is a portion of the imagined climate change speech President Obama needs to make to the nation, and the world. See the entire speech here. 

Emancipation from Fossil Fuels: A New Birth of Freedom

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, fellow citizens: I come before Congress and the People of the United States tonight because we can no longer deny the horrific threat of carbon pollution, the corrupting influence of the fossil fuel industry, or the great danger we face as a nation. 

 Just over150 years ago, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. That act made slavery’s eradication and the Union’s reunification inevitable. Tonight I am proclaiming our Emancipation from Fossil Fuels. I do so for the safety of our nation, our children, and their children. This proclamation will make the United States the leader in combating global climate change, and release big oil’s stranglehold on our nation’s energy policy and our democracy.

I take this step because the evidence that climate change is happening, that it is a threat to our economy, national security and prosperity, is unequivocal.… I do so because the predominant moral issue of the 21st century has now become climate change. Its national security threat is now greater than the threat of Nazism faced by President Franklin Roosevelt. Its economic threat is greater than that of the Great Depression, also met head-on by President Roosevelt. And it is now an even greater moral threat to our nation than that of slavery, as faced by President Lincoln. Our fossil fuel addiction endangers our cities, our livelihoods, our economy, our security, our children and grandchildren, and even civilization. It is a threat as well to this nation’s moral compass, which has always guided us to improve life for our most vulnerable citizens. We now must shoulder the responsibility for keeping the planet habitable, or suffer the consequences.…