Obama’s new climate change call: Yes we can – Andrew Restuccia and Edward-Isaac Dovere

“When you start seeing massive lobbying efforts backed by fossil fuel interests or conservative think tanks or the Koch brothers pushing for new laws to roll back renewable energy standards or prevent new clean energy businesses from succeeding, that’s not the American way. That’s not progress. That’s not innovation,” he said. “That’s rent-seeking. That’s trying to protect old ways of doing business.”

 

Monday’s speech kicked off a two-week global warming messaging sprint by Obama that will take him from the Las Vegas event to New Orleans on Thursday for a Hurricane Katrina commemoration tour to a glacier in north Alaska next week.

 

Throughout, he’ll be using the devastating prospects of extreme weather and other climate changes in an effort to galvanize support for the executive actions he’s already taken — such as the first-ever greenhouse gas rules for power plants released earlier this month — as he lays out the groundwork for the major international climate change agreement he’s hoping will emerge from the global climate summit in Paris in December.

 

If successful, that international agreement could stand as one of the defining accomplishments of Obama’s presidency. It would also be an important reset for Obama after his failure to secure a significant international climate deal at the 2009 conference in Copenhagen during his first term, despite rushing there in person at the last minute to plead for progress.

 

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