President Obama on Wednesday challenged Republicans to stop denying climate change and take steps to tackle severe weather and floods that are impacting many states.
“Climate change can no longer be denied. It can’t be edited out. It can’t be omitted from the conversation. And action can no longer be delayed,” the president said, speaking from Everglades National Park in Florida, a battleground state in the coming 2016 presidential elections.
Throughout the Earth Day speech, Obama made references to a policy Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott has endorsed, disallowing those in public office from uttering the words “climate change.” But the president never uttered the governor’s name.
“Refusing to say the words ‘climate change’ doesn’t mean that climate change is not happening,” Obama said. “You don’t stick your head in the sand [when a storm is coming]. You prepare for the storm.” He said many of the nation’s major corporations, utilities and universities understand that the effects of climate change are undeniable and have implemented plans to face it.
The president said the concerns about global warming and climate change should cut across partisan lines, saying it is a bipartisan issue. “This is not an impossible problem we can’t solve,” he said. “We can solve it,” he implored. “It’s a bipartisan issue.”
Pointing to the park behind him, the president said climate change is “threatening this treasure,” and “if we don’t act there may not be an Everglades” in the future.
He noted that his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush, acknowledged climate change is occurring. President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and Theodore Roosevelt spurred the conservation movement.
The president underscored that climate “adaptation” strategies are where to start, as opposed to mitigation, which seeks to reduce the manmade carbon dioxide emissions that many scientists say are causing the Earth’s climate to warm.
He appeared to offer a climate change adaptation strategy to bridge the partisan discord over the issue, and said Americans should begin taking action now where they see the impact of increased flooding, drought and sea-level rise, especially in Florida, he said.
America is the leader in clean energy development, but that is only part of the solution. “We are going to have to do some adaptation” first, the president said.
“The steps we have taken are making a difference. We are using more clean energy than ever before. America is number one in wind power, and last year we generated 20 times more electricity from sunlight than we did in all of 2008. We have committed to doubling the pace at which we cut carbon pollution,” he said.
“But we also have to prepare for the effects of climate change [where] it’s already too late to avoid it,” the president said. If “we’re hitting the brakes on a car, the car is not going to come to a complete halt, right away. So some of these changes are already happening…[and] we are going to have to make some adaptations.”
He said the government is working with cities and states to build more resilient infrastructure “to restore natural defenses” against the effects of climate change.
“Climate change resilience” is a term the administration uses to comprise a variety of strategies to harden the nation’s infrastructure against the effects of global warming without trying to stop it. Those effects include more severe weather, flooding and droughts.
He noted that extreme weather is causing more salt water to enter the fresh water aquifer that supports the Everglades, where most Floridians get their drinking water. He also pressed Congress to approve his budget proposed for fiscal 2016 that includes increased spending to help maintain the Everglades.
On Tuesday, the White House established a working group with 17 of the nation’s largest utility companies to improve the resilience of the nation’s electricity infrastructure, which is being affected by the increased frequency of severe storms.
