Everglades used for Earth Day warning
President Barack Obama walks the Anhinga Trail on Wednesday at Everglades National Park, Florida. Obama visited the Everglades on Earth Day to talk about how global warming threatens the U. S. economy. He said, “Climate change can no longer be denied.”
MIAMI — President Barack Obama on Wednesday paid his first visit to the Everglades, delivering an Earth Day speech that tied the threat rising seas pose for the imperiled River of Grass to wider climate change risks across the nation.
But his choice of South Florida as a venue also was clearly calculated to make political points.
Voters will elect Obama’s successor in 18 months, and the Republican field so far is teeming with would- be candidates, including two from Florida, who question whether climate change is man- made, despite significant scientific scholarship concluding that it is largely a result of carbon emissions.
In a speech delivered at Everglades National Park, the president also got a subtle dig in at Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who has come under fire for ordering state staffers to avoid the term “climate change.”
“Climate change can no longer be denied ... cannot be edited out of the conversation,” Obama said.
The governor, who declined an invitation to join Obama on his Glades tour, has denied such a mandate exists.
Before his speech, the president and park rangers walked the Anhinga Trail, the park’s most popular tourist stop, passing baby alligators, sleek cormorants and a pair of black vultures, which occasionally eat the rubber off visitors’ vehicles.
Obama said he could think of “no better place” to spend Earth Day and extolled the virtues of the Everglades, remarking that it provides habitat for both alligators and crocodiles.
“I’m told this is a good thing,” he joked.
In addition to making an economic, public health and national security case for confronting the risks of climate change and rising seas, the president was in South Florida to tout his administration’s record on tackling environmental problems, including imposing a historic cap on carbon pollution and spending $ 2.2 billion on Everglades restoration projects, the administration said.
Obama was expected to reveal new conservation efforts in four areas of the country, including Southwest Florida. And in a move some say is long overdue, the National Park Service will designate as a national historic landmark Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ cottage in Coconut Grove, which several years ago sparked a contentious fight between preservationists and neighbors. The pioneering preservationist is largely credited with sparking Everglades restoration.
Obama’s decision to focus on climate change in South Florida also could have campaign implications by pressuring Republicans into a more robust debate of a touchy subject for the GOP.
Among the climatechange skeptics are U. S. Sen. Marco Rubio and, to a lesser extent, former Gov. Jeb Bush, both of Miami.
While Obama is not expected to single out any presidential contender, a trip to Bush’s and Rubio’s backyard will hardly go unnoticed in the early days of the 2016 campaign.
“This is not an effort necessarily to go to anybody’s home state,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Tuesday before the speech. “This is an effort to raise this debate.”
Scott on Tuesday called on the federal government to speed up funding to Everglades restoration, which the White House admits has been slow from the outset, before Obama took office. The state has invested $ 1.9 billion in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project, nearly a billion more than the feds.