Last night, I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, streamed over the Internet to my room in Toronto by Al-Jazeera. I was thinking of my younger sister, who lay in a delivery room in America at that moment.

She gave birth to her first baby girl at 9:51 p.m. last night, nine minutes before Obama took the podium at Mile High Stadium. I was thinking about how this man will have a disturbing amount of influence on my newborn niece’s life. That 8-pound-6-ounce baby girl doesn’t have the power to mitigate carbon emissions, find alternative sources of fuel, or repair a broken financial system. Opening her eyes for the first time, she has no idea what she’s being born into. She’s relying on Obama and his promise of genuine leadership to create a situation in which she can live a decent life. It’s the current policymakers, more so than her hardworking parents, that are going to decide how bad climate change gets and where our energy comes from and which wars, if any, we are embroiled in. Of course, the US is ostensibly a democracy, so it is impossible and unfair to put the burden on Obama’s leadership alone: it requires all US citizens to support him, influence him, challenge him, and go beyond him. (more…)