Obama says climate trends ‘terrifying’
MIDWAY ATOLL — Seventy-four years ago, a naval battle off this remote spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean changed the course of World War II. Last week, President Barack Obama flew here to swim with Hawaiian monk seals and draw attention to a quieter war — one he has waged against rising seas, freakish storms, deadly droughts and other symptoms of a planet choking on its own fumes.
Bombs may not be falling. The sound of gunfire does not concentrate the mind. What Obama has seen instead are the charts and graphs of a warming planet. “And they’re terrifying,” he said in a recent interview in Honolulu.
“What makes climate change difficult is that it is not an instantaneous catastrophic event,” he said. “It’s a slow-moving issue that, on a day-today basis, people don’t experience and don’t see.”
Climate change, Obama often says, is the greatest long-term threat facing the world, as well as a danger already manifesting itself as droughts, storms, heat waves and flooding. More than health care, more than righting a sinking economic ship, more than the historic first of an African-American president, he believes his efforts to slow the warming of the planet will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency.
During his 7 1/2 years in office, Obama said, a majority of Americans have come to believe “that climate change is real, that it’s important and we should do something about it.” He enacted rules to cut planet-heating emissions across much of the U.S. economy, from cars to coal plants. He was a central broker of the Paris climate agreement, the first accord committing nearly every country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But while climate change has played to Obama’s highest ideals — critics would call them messianic impulses — it has also exposed his weaknesses, namely an inability to forge consensus, even within his own party, on a problem that demands a bipartisan response.
He acknowledged his rallying cry to save the planet had not galvanized Americans. He has been harshly criticized for policies that objectors see as abuses of executive power and far too burdensome for the economy.
That has made Obama’s record on climate curiously contradictory, marked by historic achievements abroad and frustrating setbacks at home. The threat of global warming inspired Obama to conduct some of the most masterful diplomacy of his presidency, which has bound the United States into a web of agreements and obligations overseas. Yet his determination to act alone inflamed his opponents, helped polarize the debate on climate change and will carry a significant economic cost.
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Obama and Hillary Clinton never seem to tire of telling the story of Copenhagen: In December 2009, with the climate conference on the verge of failure, the two learned of a meeting of the leaders of Brazil, China, India and South Africa, from which they had been pointedly excluded. Elbowing their way past a Chinese security guard, they crashed the meeting, and over 90 minutes of tense negotiations with the abashed leaders, they extracted an agreement to set goals for lowering emissions.
The Europeans, who had been cut out of the talks, derided the deal as toothless, but Obama learned from the experience. A global climate accord could not simply be a compact among developed economies, he said. It had to include the major developing economies, even if they resented being held to standards that had never applied to the club of wealthy nations. And any agreement had to be led by the two largest emitters, the United States and China.
Obama set about persuading President Xi Jinping of China to join the United States in setting ambitious reduction targets for carbon emissions. Tensions already were high over China’s hacking of U.S. companies, and the United States was balking at China’s slow-motion colonization of the South China Sea. A casual, get-acquainted summit meeting between Obama and Xi at the Sunnylands estate in California in June 2013 had failed to break the ice.
But the meeting did produce one headline: an agreement to explore ways to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, known as HFCs, potent planet-warming chemicals found in refrigerants. In hindsight, it would prove significant. The final international accord on the chemicals is expected to be ratified next month in Rwanda.
“It was a place Obama and Xi found some common ground,” said John D. Podesta, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton whom Obama recruited to lead his climate efforts in his second term. (Podesta is now the chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign.)
Podesta and Todd Stern, the State Department’s climate envoy, began arduous negotiations with China. They were backed by Secretary of State John Kerry and Obama, who sent Xi a letter with a proposal in which the United States would pledge to increase its target for reducing carbon emissions by 2025 if the Chinese pledged to cap and then gradually reduce their emissions.
China had historically resisted such agreements, but the air pollution there had become so bad, Obama noted, the most-visited Twitter page in China was the daily air-quality monitor maintained by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
“One of the reasons I think that China was prepared to go further than it had been prepared to go previously,” Obama said, “is that their overriding concern tends to be political stability. Interestingly, one of their greatest political vulnerabilities is the environment. People who go to Beijing know that it can be hard to breathe.”
A little more than a year later, in Paris, the United States led negotiations among 195 countries that resulted in the most significant climate change agreement in history. And this past weekend in Hangzhou, China, Obama and Xi formally committed their two nations to the Paris accord. For Obama, it was not just redemption for Copenhagen, but a vindication of his theory of the United States’ role in the world.
“There are certain things that the United States can do by itself,” Obama said. “But if we’re going to actually solve a problem, then our most important role is as a leader, vision setter and convener.”