CNN news 2015-03-24 加文本

cnn news 2015-03-24

CARL AZUZ, HOST: Fridays are awesome.

I`m Carl Azuz with your commercial-free news source for the classroom.

First up this March 20th, President Obama announced a new executive order yesterday. It requires U.S. government agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The president says he wants a 40 percent reduction over the next 10 years in the types of emissions that many scientists say contribute to climate change.

Government buildings will have to reduce energy use. Government agencies will have to replace their vehicles with lower emissions ones, like hybrids.

But this is an order not approved by Congress, and it`s limited to government property only, which makes up a relatively small source of greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans say decisions like this hurt American jobs. And like other executive orders, the next president could reverse this decision.

President Obama also made news yesterday for suggesting that voting should be mandatory in the US. At a town hall event in Cleveland, Ohio, he was asked how to offset the influence of money in politics. The president said if everybody voted, it would be, quote, "transformative."

Twenty-six countries require their citizens to vote. In some places, like Australia and Belgium, people can get fined if they don`t. And if they don`t pay that fine in Belgium, they can be jailed.

The U.S. has a relatively low voter turnout rate among wealthier democracies.

In the 2012 presidential election, just over 57 percent of all eligible voters voted. In the 2014 midterm elections, it was just under 37 percent. The midterms usually have lower turnout.

Critics say the freedom to vote also comes the freedom not to vote. And they say that passing a law and then enforcing it would be hard to do.