Obama Takes on Climate Change: The Rolling Stone Interview
So where does that leave us now? We set a 17 percent target [for emissions reduction]; we are on track to meet that. We have doubled our production of clean energy — wind-energy production up threefold, solar up twentyfold. We’ve been able to grow the economy from the depths of the recession while emitting less carbon than we did. Our auto and truck regulations are on track. And the prospect of a real clean-energy economy is there on the horizon. It’s achievable. And as I’ve said, we’ve been able to do that while creating millions of jobs and dropping the unemployment rate down. And none of the disasters that were predicted from our regulatory steps have taken place.
With the clean-power-plant rule, we are now doubling down. And I think it’s fair to say that with the steps we’ve taken through the clean-power-plant rule to reduce carbon emissions from the single largest source by over 30 percent, we’ve been able to establish a very aggressive target of 26 to 28 percent carbon reduction. Probably as importantly, we’ve been able to lead by example in a way that allowed me to leverage China and President Xi to make their own commitments for the first time, to have a conversation with somebody like Prime Minister Modi of India or President Rousseff of Brazil, so that they put forward plans.
And I believe that when we get to Paris at the end of this year, we’re now in a position for the first time to have all countries recognize their responsibilities to tackle the problem, and to have a meaningful set of targets as well as the financing required to help poor countries adapt. And if we’re able to do that by the end of this year — and I’m cautiously optimistic — then we will at least have put together the framework, the architecture to move in concert over the next decade in a serious way.
But having said all that, the science keeps on telling us we’re just not acting fast enough. My attitude, though, is that if we get the structure right, then we can turn the dials as there’s additional public education, not just in the United States but across the world, and people feel a greater urgency about it and there’s more political will to act.
Here in Alaska, you talked in almost apocalyptic terms about the future we face if we don’t cut carbon pollution quickly. But at the same time, you recently approved a new round of drilling in the Arctic here. How do you justify that decision?
This has been an ongoing conversation that I’ve had with the environmental community. One of the things about being president is you’re never starting from scratch, you’ve got all these legacies that you wrestle with. And obviously, the fossil-fuel economy is deeply entrenched in the structure of everybody’s lives around the world. And so from the start, I’ve always talked about a transition that is not going to happen overnight.
And regardless of how urgent I think the science is, if I howl at the moon without being able to build a political consensus behind me, it’s not going to get done. And in fact, we end up potentially marginalizing supporters or people who recognize there’s a need to act but also have some real interests at stake.
Alaska, I think, is a fascinating example of that. We’ve been having conversations with Alaska Natives who are seeing their way of life impacted adversely because of climate change, but also have a real interest in generating jobs and economic development in depressed areas. And so they’ll talk to me about climate change and in the same breath say, “By the way, we really are looking to use our natural resources in a way that can spur on economic development.” And that’s just a microcosm of what’s true across America and what’s true around the world.
So my strategy has been to use every lever that we have available to move the clean-energy agenda forward faster, which then reduces the costs of transition for everybody — in fact, in many cases, saves people money and saves businesses money — so that we’re reducing what is perceived as a contradiction between economic development and saving the planet.
And when it comes to our own fossil-fuel production, what I’ve said is there’re some things we’re just not going to do, not only because it’s bad for the climate, but it’s also bad for the environment or too risky — Bristol Bay, where we went to earlier today, being a prime example where we just took out the possibility of oil and gas drilling around the Aleutians in ways that would threaten Bristol Bay. Same thing up north.
But to say that, knowing there’s still going to be some energy production taking place, let’s find those areas that are going to be least likely to disturb precious ecosystems, and let’s raise the standards — meaning making them more costly — but not shut them off completely, and that allows me then to have a conversation not with folks who are climate deniers, and not with folks who are adamant about their right to drill, explore and extract anywhere, anytime, but with those folks who are of two minds about the issue.
And I think that process is something that we have to take into account even when something is really important. Even when something threatens us all, we have to bring everybody along. We had the same discussion around something like fracking. The science tells us that if done properly, fracking risks can be minimized. And natural gas is a fossil fuel, but the reason we’re not seeing coal-fired plants being built in the United States is not just because of the clean-power-plant rule — because we just put that in place. The reason is it wasn’t economical because natural gas was so cheap. And we have to make those choices.
Nuclear energy — we approved a nuclear plant down South. And there are some environmentalists who don’t like that either. But while acknowledging the risks that we saw in Fukushima, we also have to acknowledge that if we’re going to solve climate change, energy is going to have to come from somewhere for a lot of these countries.