Obama to visit Arctic, Vegas as part of climate change tour

The White House has been coy on the details of the tour. Obama discussed the trip briefly Monday as he announced the centerpiece of his climate agenda, the Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark Clean Power Plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants. The tour will play up his successes on clean energy and emissions reductions.

“This has been our focus these past six years. And it’s particularly going to be our focus this month,” Obama said. In Nevada, he will “talk about the extraordinary progress we’ve made in generating clean energy and the jobs that come with it, and how we can boost that even further.”

“I’ll also be the first American president to visit the Alaskan Arctic, where our fellow Americans have already seen their communities devastated by melting ice and rising oceans, the impact on marine life,” he said. “We’re going to talk about what the world needs to do together to prevent the worst impacts of climate change before it’s too late.”

For the Alaska leg of the trip, the White House seems to be keeping the congressional delegation, many of whom are Republican, in the dark.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the chairwoman of the energy committee, hasn’t been asked to come with the president, at least not yet. “I’m not sure what his agenda is,” said Robert Dillon, Murkowski’s spokesman.

She did accompany Secretary of State John Kerry earlier in the year when the U.S. took over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, a major international body of the Arctic countries.

Murkowski said that except for an invitation from the head of the Arctic Council, Retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Robert Papp, to attend a welcoming reception, the White House has not asked for her input.

“I have not been informed of, nor consulted on, the president’s planned visit to Alaska beyond … [an international] event” being held at the end of the month in Anchorage, Murkowski said.

That meeting of foreign ministers will be held Aug. 30-31. The event will be led by the U.S. and will focus on climate change. Obama will arrive in time to give closing remarks at the conference, called GLACIER — or “Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience.”

“I have offered input and hope that while in Alaska the president will engage with Alaskans and see firsthand the challenges across the state that I have been working to address,” Murkowski said.

The State Department says the event will help “drive political will for ambitious action” at a climate conference later this year in Paris, where world leaders will try to hash out a major deal on emissions reductions. Obama has made the Paris meeting the next major step in his climate change agenda after finalizing the EPA plan earlier this week.

The plan places the 48 contiguous states on the hook to reduce emissions from power plants by 32 percent by 2030, but gives Alaska a pass.

Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker praised the administration for exempting his state from the plan, saying the EPA lacks adequate data to obligate the state to reduce its emissions. The EPA says it will address the state’s emissions in the future.

Walker told Alaska Dispatch News he was consulted on the trip, which he says centers on the GLACIER event, with some other visits to indigenous villages still being discussed.

President Obama will meet with Reid in Las Vegas on Aug. 24 before going to Alaska. Nevada is a leading investor in solar and geothermal power, and has plans to retire most of its fossil plants.

Two weeks ahead of the event, the National Manufacturers Association will release a report on Aug. 11 highlighting the debilitating effects of the administration’s proposed environmental regulations on Las Vegas. The effort is part of an eleventh-hour campaign to put pressure on Washington to roll back new rules on smog-forming ozone pollution.

The group argues that the rules are the most expensive in history, leading to job losses and curtailed economic development.