14 DAY TRIAL // Given the fact that his promising to deal with climate change was probably the main drive behind his being re-elected as President of the US, it need not come as a surprise that Barack Obama now vows that his second term will be all about making head and tail of this threat.
Still, the President wished to emphasize the fact that, as important as global warming might be, that did not change the fact that improving on the country's economy would be at the core of his working agenda.
Naturally, these two issues are very much intertwined, meaning that several of the environmental shifts brought about by climate change ended up impacting on the country's economy by fostering long periods of drought, severe wildfires and powerful storms such as hurricane Sandy.
“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,” the US President said.
Furthermore, “We do know that there have been an extraordinarily large number of severe weather events here in North America, but also around the globe.”
As was to be expected, Barack Obama wishes to deal with these problems by upping fuel efficiency and by supporting the development of the country's green energy industry.
These measures are meant to reduce the country's ecological footprint, seeing how the amounts of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere on a regular basis will be considerably diminished.
For the time being, the President intends to sit down and chat with environmental scientists and several other specialists. This will supposedly help him figure out a way to plan both his short-term and his long-term plans for dealing with climate change.
“(...) 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 more can we do to make short-term progress in reducing carbons and […] 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,” the President said.
President Obama's press conference is made available to you in its entirety in the video below. The President starts talking about climate change towards the end of the conference, at about minute 42:30.
