The world cannot flip a switch and be entirely climate friendly overnight, President Barack Obama said Monday evening during the White House’s South by South Lawn event. Speaking with actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, the president explained that climate change must be addressed realistically. “I say all that not because I don’t recognize the urgency of the problem. It is because we’re going to have to straddle between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be, and build that bridge,” he said.
Noting the Paris Agreement on climate change, which he acknowledged does not go far enough to fix the climate change problem, the president said developing something better than its predecessor was most important. “I told our negotiators during the Paris agreement is better is good. Better is not always enough; better is not always ideal, and in the case of climate change, better is not going to save the planet. But if we get enough better, each year we’re doing something that’s making more progress, moving us forward, increasing clean energy, then that’s ultimately how we end up solving this problem.”
The successful negation of the Paris Agreement is a high point in the president’s climate legacy. The agreement goes far beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which only applied to developed nations and was not ratified by the United States. In Paris last December, diplomats successfully negotiated the terms of an international climate agreement that applies to all developed and developing nations and that the U.S. could join without the consent of the Senate.
The agreement is expected to enter into force early next month, cementing U.S. participation for at least four years.
Domestically, the Obama administration has drafted several stringent climate-related regulations, including fuel economy standards, energy efficiency standards for appliances, and the nation’s first carbon emissions standards for coal-fired power plants, the Clean Power Plan.
The Clean Power Plan is the subject of a massive legal challenge recently argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In light of his initiative, Obama acknowledged he might not be coal country’s favorite person. “Coal miners feel like they’ve been battered, and they often blame me and my tree-hugger friends for having created real economic problems in places like West Virginia, or parts of Kentucky, or parts of my home state of southern Illinois,” he said, noting that low natural gas prices have contributed a great deal to coal’s decline.
Coal miners’ concerns should not be ignored, Obama suggested. “Some people have some real concerns about what this transition is going to do to them, to their pocketbook, and we’ve got to make sure that they feel like they’re being heard in this whole process,” he said.
On a brighter note, programs like the Clean Power Plan, under which states are required to develop action plans to meet federally set emissions reduction goals, usually work, according to Obama. “The good news is that in the past, where we create an incentive for companies, it turns out that we’re more creative, we’re more innovative, we typically solve the problem cheaper, faster than we expected, and we create jobs in the process,” he said.
Regulation is not generally seen as the ideal path to lower emissions, DiCaprio said. “Most of the scientific community truly believes that the silver bullet to combat this issue is a carbon tax. Now, a carbon tax, as complex as it is to implement, I would imagine, is something that needs to come from the people. It needs to come from the will of the people, which means there needs to be more awareness about this issue,” he said.
Obama did not disagree that a carbon tax would be a good alternative to regulation, but was pessimistic about the chances of implementing one. “I’ll be honest with you. In the current environment in Congress, and certainly internationally, the likelihood of an immediate carbon tax is a ways away,” he said.
The two took a few jabs at climate deniers in Congress and perhaps also at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has in the past said climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. “The scientific consensus is in, and the argument is now over. If you do not believe in climate change, you do not believe in facts or in, or empirical truths, and therefore, in my humble opinion, should not be allowed to hold public office,” DiCaprio said.
Obama mentioned some lawmakers’ dismissal of statements from the nation’s top military leaders that climate change is a major national security issue, as the problem could lead to mass migrations, limited resources, and destructive weather events. “Even as we have members of Congress who scoff at climate change at the same time as they are saluting and wearing flag pins and extolling their patriotism, they’re not paying attention to our Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon who are saying that this is one of the most significant national security threats that we face over the next 50 years,” he said.
