We need a green leader

Not green as in "inexperienced" but green as someone concerned about Mother Earth. Someone concerned about food supplies. Someone concerned about our environmental health. clearly we have few elected leaders that fall into that category.
The Ungreening of Obama

Barack Obama was green when he entered the Oval Office. He was a relative newcomer to politics. He was also the most successful fundraiser in presidential history, hauling in more green than the two Democratic and Republican candidates in 2004 combined. And he was, more or less, an environmentalist.
Back in 2004, Amanda Little dug around in Obama's past and declared in Grist magazine that he was a "bona fide, card-carrying, bleeding-heart greenie" going back to his days as an undergrad "trying to convince minority students at City College in Harlem to recycle," and then as a community organizer in Chicago fighting for lead abatement in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood. As the junior senator from Illinois, Obama got high marks from the League of Conservation Voters for his introduction or co-sponsorship of 100 environment-friendly bills from mercury reduction to raising fuel economy standards on cars.
Running for president, Obama promised to paint the town green. He proclaimed his "intergenerational" perspective, his recognition that "we are borrowing this planet from our children and our grandchildren." After years of supporting the coal industry back in Illinois, he turned around to identify climate change as "one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation" and supported cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. He put sustainable energy policy at the center of his economic renewal, pledging to derive one-quarter of all U.S. energy from renewables by 2025 and to improve the efficiency of federal buildings and all new construction. There would also be tighter regulations on emissions and a much greater commitment to conservation. These promises also had a price tag: $150 billion alone for renewable energy investments.
Obama did indeed keep some of these promises. Dealing with the enormous economic crisis gifted to him by his predecessor, Obama emphasized green jobs in his stimulus package, with $78 billion in clean energy investment and $500 million specifically for job training around energy efficiency. He boosted funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, put more money into the national park system, and worked to improve water quality standards. In July, the administration brokered a major deal with auto manufacturers and environmentalists to raise the fuel economy standard, saving consumers money at the pump and reducing carbon emissions. On some of the big issues, like climate change legislation, the president came up against considerable congressional opposition. Given the flaws of the cap-and-trade mechanism at the core of this legislative initiative, which would have established a dubious market in carbon credits, it was a bittersweet failure.
This record would suggest a president who desperately wants to be Mr. Green but faces the dual political challenge of climate change skeptics and pollution industry lobbyists. You might fault him for his backbone but surely not his heart. Here was a politician who'd seen the (green) light.
But recent moves by Obama suggest a different interpretation of his environmental record....
The real problem is not with Obama but with politics in general. The environment doesn't obey four-year cycles. Global warming could care less about democracy. And, in turn, snail darters and polar bears don't vote. Politicians who seek reelection want jobs now, not potential jobs, not future jobs, not if-everything-works-out-according-to-this-alternate-calculation jobs. Obama did invest in the new green economy, and that investment hasn't yet produced the 500,000 new jobs a year that he promised. And, because of the rush to produce results, the administration got sucked into a scandal involving the solar manufacturer Solyndra, which involved pumping money into a dying firm.
Ideally, our elected representatives would acknowledge that environmental issues should rise above politics, that the fate of the world should not be held hostage to lobbyists and election cycles. We have to take the long view. Of course we need jobs, and we need them sooner, not later. But the only job we create when we imperil the environment is the job of gravedigger. And when the grave you're digging is your own, there's certainly no future in that profession.