President Obama: ‘I am a firm believer that climate change is real’

President Barack Obama held his first postelection press conference today, Nov. 14, 2012, in the East room at the White House. The president took eight questions from the White House press corps; one of those questions was on the subject of Global Climate Change, and the President’s plan to “tackle the issue of climate change”.

Mark Landler, part of the White House press corps and a journalist for the New York Times, asked the President the following question on Global Climate Change.

    “Mr. President. In his endorsement of you a few weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg said he was motivated by the belief that you would do more to confront the threat of climate change than your opponent. Tomorrow you’re going up to New York City, where you’re going to, I assume, see people who are still suffering the effects of Hurricane Sandy, which many people say is further evidence of how a warming globe is changing our weather. What specifically do you plan to do in a second term to tackle the issue of climate change? And do you think the political will exists in Washington to pass legislation that could include some kind of a tax on carbon?”


The president did not shy away from the question, saying, “I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior and carbon emissions.”

    “You know, as you know, Mark, we can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change. What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago. We do know that the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than was predicted even five years ago. We do know that there have been extraordinarily — there have been an extraordinarily large number of severe weather events here in North America, but also around the globe.”

    “And I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior and carbon emissions. And as a consequence, I think we’ve got an obligation to future generations to do something about it.”

President Obama then talks about what was done in his first term to help curb carbon emissions, such as the new CAFE standards on cars and trucks, as well as clean energy productions.

    “Now, in my first term, we doubled fuel efficiency standards on cars and trucks. That will have an impact. That will a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. We doubled the production of clean energy, which promises to reduce the utilization of fossil fuels for power generation. And we continue to invest in potential breakthrough technologies that could further remove carbon from our atmosphere.”

    “But we haven’t done as much as we need to. So what I’m going to be doing over the next several weeks, next several months, is having a conversation, a wide-ranging conversation with scientists, engineers and elected officials to find out what can — what more can we do to make short-term progress in reducing carbons, and then working through an education process that I think is necessary, a discussion, the conversation across the country about, you know, what realistically can we do long term to make sure that this is not something we’re passing on to future generations that’s going to be very expensive and very painful to deal with.”

President Obama said he did not know “what either Democrats or Republicans are prepared to do at this point because it is a “partisan” issue today, unlike the past when there was “bipartisan support.”

    “So you know, you can expect that you’ll hear more from me in the coming months and years about how we can shape an agenda that garners bipartisan support and helps move this — moves this agenda forward.”

The president would like to move forward on this issue, but the only way to move forward is if the Democrats and Republicans in congress work together, so, it may take awhile.

http://www.examiner.com/article/president-obama-i-am-a-firm-believer-that-climate-change-is-real