Obama Takes on Climate Change: The Rolling Stone Interview
We go back to Hawaii every year, and I intend to, hopefully, spend a lot of time there when I’m out of office. I want to make sure my kids, when they go snorkeling, are seeing the same things that I saw when I went snorkeling when I was five years old, or eight years old. I spent a big chunk of my life in Indonesia when I was young, and I want them to be able to have some of the same experiences, walking through a forest and suddenly seeing an ancient temple. And I don’t want that gone.
And so it’s probably less of a function of being president, more a function of age [laughs] when you start thinking about what you’re leaving behind. One of the books I read during vacation was The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert. And it’s a wonderful book, and it makes very clear that big, abrupt changes can happen; they’re not outside the realm of possibility. They have happened before, they can happen again.
So all of this makes me feel that I have to tackle this every way that I can. But one of the things about being president is you’re also mindful that, despite the office, you don’t do things alone. So we’ve made big strides with the power-plant rule, but that’s not enough. We’ve doubled fuel-efficiency standards, but that’s not enough. We should triple our investment in energy R&D. I can’t do that without Congress.
So that’s why I continually go back to the notion that the American people have to feel the same urgency that I do. And it’s understandable that they don’t, because the science right now feels abstract to people. It will feel less abstract with each successive year. I suspect that the record wildfires that we’re seeing, the fact that half of the West is in extreme or severe drought right now, is making people understand this better. If you talk to people in Washington state right now, I suspect, after having tragically lost three firefighters, and seeing vast parts of their state aflame, that they understand it better. If you go down to Florida, and neighborhoods that are now flooding every time the tide rises, they’re understanding it better.
And part of what’s happening is a recognition that it is going to be cheaper to take action than not. That’s one of the hardest things in politics to convince people of: to make investments today that don’t pay off until many years from now.
But what’s now happening — and that’s part of what I’ve been trying to highlight — is that the costs are starting to accrue right now. We’re spending about a billion dollars a year on firefighting, and the fire season extends now about two and a half months longer than it did just a few decades ago. And that’s money that could be spent on schools. That’s money that could be spent on fixing roads. That’s money that people could spend in their own households.
Obama Takes on Climate Change: The Rolling Stone Interview, Page 14 of 16