President Obama on His Legacy, Trump's Win and the Path Forward

“Let me ask you about climate change. Trump says he's going to pull out of the Paris Agreements. Is that possible?”

U.S. President Barack Obama.

My final interview with President Obama in the White House had been scheduled for the day after the presidential election.

I had hoped to look back on what he had achieved over eight years and the issues that mattered the most to him and to the readers of Rolling Stone, hear his advice for Hillary and about the road ahead. It was to be the "exit interview," his tenth cover for Rolling Stone, our fourth interview together. Before flying down to Washington, D.C., on the morning after the staggering election results, I called and offered to postpone. This had to be one of the worst days of Obama's political life, and he hadn't had a moment to reflect on it, to be angry or to accept it.

Read Rolling Stone interview by Jans S. Wenner - “President Obama on His Legacy, Trump's Win and the Path Forward.”

Californian farmers delight in US Government $A766 million drought aid package

Joaquin Contente, dairy farmer and
 president of the Californian Farmers Union,
 implementing water conservation on his
farm at Hanford, California.

US President Obama has signed a bill delivering a $US558 million ($AU766m) relief package for drought-stricken farmers in California.

After years of wrangling over water allocations for the environment and fish, the legislation was approved by the US House and Senate, and signed by President Obama.

It will pay for desalination, water recycling and storage, as the most productive state in the US, enters possibly its sixth year of drought.

Congress has also approved $10 billion water infrastructure package, to increase pumping from reservoirs in the north to farmers in Central and southern California.

The President of the Californian Farmers Union, Joaquin Contente near Fresno in Central California said the package was a huge boost, when added to a better snowpack in the Sierras.

Groundwater resources which supply one-third of the water have been heavily depleted.

Read the ABC Rural story - “Californian farmers delight in US Government $A766 million drought aid package.”

Looking to the Earth Itself as a Climate Solution

Farmers, by using techniques that help preserve soil
carbon, could make a contribution
 to reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions. 

As President Obama scrambles to seal his climate legacy before he leaves office, his administration is taking a serious look downward—at soil.

The administration is intent on developing its plan to meet the emissions reductions goals it agreed to in last year's Paris climate accord, and that plan will likely outline how farmland, with its huge potential to sequester carbon, will play a key role.

"Attention to soil health is gaining momentum out of frustration with our inability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at an economy-wide scale," said Thomas Driscoll, director of conservation policy and education for the National Farmers Union, the country's second-largest farm industry group. "People are starting to pay attention to farming and land-use because they're having so much trouble everywhere else."

The world's cropland has the potential to store 20 billion tons of carbon on about 4 billion acres over a 25-year period. That is enough to offset as much as 15 percent of carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning each year. France recently launched an international initiative to boost the organic carbon in soil by 4 parts per thousand, which it says is enough to offset annual increases in overall carbon emissions.

Read Georgina Austin’s story on Inside Climate News - “Looking to the Earth Itself as a Climate Solution.”

Using a 'megaphone' to raise climate awareness

President Obama visits Turtle Beach
on Midway Atoll yesterday.

President Obama wants to make climate change a big part of his life and work after leaving the  next year, he said yesterday.
"I think anybody who has the megaphone that even an ex-president has needs to be working on this and raising awareness," Obama told pool reporters during a visit to Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean to highlight his conservation.

Obama speculated he might have more influence with Republicans who "have been resistant to the science" after he departs Pennsylvania Avenue.

Americans are now more polarized than ever on environmental protection, according to a newanalysis published in the journal Environment that tracked Gallup opinion poll surveys going back to 2001 and congressional voting patterns since 1970.

The authors noted that GOP lawmakers have moved more to the right, especially in terms of opposing government regulations on principle and attacking U.S. EPA.

"This is something that all of us are going to have to tackle, and maybe I get a little more of a hearing if I'm not occupying a political office," Obama said.

Obama's argument for Republicans: If the private sector and the business community are embracing a clean energy agenda, and insurers are pricing coverage for flooding, hurricanes, drought and wildfires based on climate change projections, "then there's no reason why this is something that should be a partisan issue," he said.

Over the last eight years, researchers say, public concern over climate change has fluctuated considerably because of the economic downturn.

The study's authors — Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and Oklahoma State University's Riley Dunlap and Jerrod Yarosh — note an upsurge in "organized denial" in response to the Paris climate deal and other international treaties.

On the flip side, Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change and abnormal weather conditions have increased grass-roots interest in conservation and renewable energy.

Obama reflected on his efforts over the past seven years to mobilize the nation against the unseen threats of climate change.

His historic three-day visit to Alaska in 2015, showing villages already overwhelmed by rising sea levels and changing ocean patterns, stood out as one example.

Obama this week described the Arctic as "the leading edge of climate change — our leading indicator of what the entire planet faces.

His trip yesterday to Midway Atoll, after stops in California and Lake Tahoe, similarly served to highlight the importance of addressing climate change.

The remote site is in the middle of the newly expanded Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which Obama has made the largest marine protected area in the world.

"The question gets asked, why protect such a large area?" White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters yesterday. "And one of the answers to that is the emerging climate science, that you actually need to create scale in order to create the ecosystem."

He said, "I think that in the future, people will look at this and actually see it as a climate refuge because you have a protected space of sufficient scale to actually allow the natural features to become more resilient."

'We've done it before'
Obama arrived in khakis and brown desert boots at an old hangar terminal, where he was greeted by almost all the 40 people who live on the 2.4-mile-long island.

He later made remarks, pointing to the monument's "spectacular" ecosystem and the need to "examine the effects of climate change" in the Pacific.

On the deck of Clipper House — a white wooden structure within the monument that overlooks lush green vegetation, white sand and cyan waters — Obama said it was part of his job to present "visual aid" so the public can understand what is happening in remote regions of the world.

"When we come here, being able to highlight the incredible beauty of a place like this but also recognizing that if oceans continue to get warmer, that a lot of the marine species here could be affected and ultimately that's going to have an impact on human populations, so it's tough," Obama said.

The president also offered advice to his successor on making progress and keeping the climate change from becoming so partisan.

With Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton looking to build on momentum generated by Obama's climate initiatives and Republican nominee Donald Trump vowing to pull out of international agreements on climate, the study's authors concluded that the 2016 presidential election presents a historic choice.

This November, voters confront the "most consequential climate-related decision" most voters will have ever taken, they wrote.

Obama said his successor should tell the story of previous efforts to regulate pollution, including dealing with Ohio's Cuyahoga River, smog in Los Angeles and acid rain in the Northeast.

"The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act transformed parts of the United States, urban and rural, that a lot of people had written off," he said.

"... Or more spectacularly a hole in the ozone way above our heads that's now actually healing itself in part because of steps that we took back in the '70s and '80s. So we have to have confidence in our ability to solve these problems," Obama said.

"We've done it before; there's no reason why we can't do it this time," he added.

 

 

Donald Trump a climate change advocate - what!

Donald Trump once advocated for action
for action against climate change.

As negotiators headed to Copenhagen in December 2009 to forge a global climate pact, concerned U.S. business leaders and liberal luminaries took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for aggressive climate action.

In an open letter to President Obama and the U.S. Congress, they declared: “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

One of the signatories of that letter: Donald Trump.

Also signed by Trump’s three adult children, the letter called for passage of U.S. climate legislation, investment in the clean energy economy, and leadership to inspire the rest of the world to join the fight against climate change

Read the Grist story - “Donald Trump once backed urgent climate action. Wait, what?”

U.S military preparing for security risks of climate change

In case you missed it, Keith Johnson with Foreign Policy recently published an article that strikes at the heart of where the United States is in assessing and preparing for the security risks of climate change.

While much of the discussion on this topic is about carefully parsing lines of causality, and waiting for certainty before raising concerns about these connections, a quote from Marc Levy in the article makes the case that this is a luxury:

“I think we’re woefully far behind…Sometimes people get accused of being overly alarmist…I think the warnings being given about the security threats from climate change are overly timid.”

Rhetorically, however, the current Administration has not been timid on this question. In a recent interview with the Atlantic, President Obama noted. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.”

This rhetoric has been shored up in recent months with one of the most significant responses to climate change from the Department of Defense (DoD Directive 4715.21: Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience), which is the latest and most robust output on climate change in a long line of assessments, strategy and planning documents from the Pentagon which stretches back to 2003, during the first half of the George W. Bush Administration. As noted by Johnson:

Read the Centre for Climate and Security story - “How the U.S. Military’s Not Waiting to Find Out if Climate Change is an Existential Risk.”

India holds 'balance of power' in Paris climate negotiations

A

head of the upcoming “Paris 2015” UN climate change conference, ITV News travelled to India, a country which will hold the balance of power at the negotiations.

But why is India so crucial to efforts to improve the health of our planet, so much so that President Obama has alluded that it could be the deal maker or breaker in Paris?

Scientists and politicians generally agree that we must curb global emissions to avoid dangerous climate change by the end of the century.

Read the ITV News story - “Climate in Crisis: Why is India so important in the fight against global warming?”

Discussion at University of Melbourne in June about climate change and national security

T

wo of the world’s leading experts will launch of the Centre for Policy Development’s (CPD) report examining climate change and Australia’s national security

In May this year, President Obama acknowledged something that is fast becoming conventional wisdom in the United States and around the globe: that climate change is a threat to national security.

CPD’s report is an important contribution to the national policy debate about how we prepare Australia for the coming security impacts of climate change, and how our defence force must adapt to continue to secure our peace and stability.

The UK Government's former Climate and Energy Security EnvoyRear Admiral Neil Morisetti, and the former chief of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Admiral Chris Barrie.

Former chief of the Australian
Defence Force (ADF), Admiral
 Chris Barrie.

Rear Admiral Morisetti - he
will launch the report.

Rear Admiral Morisetti will launch the report with a keynote address.

Admiral Morisetti is the UK Government's former Climate and Energy Security Envoy and an expert on climate security and its effects on international relations and the military. 

This will be followed by a panel discussion with Admiral Morisetti and Admiral Barrie.

The launch will be held on Monday, June 22 at 6:00pm in Theatre 1 on the ground floor at 111 Barry St, Carlton, University of Melbourne.