President Obama says he will keep fighting to prevent climate change after he leaves the office next year.
“I think that this is something that I will continue to be concerned about,” Obama told the New York Times during his visit to the Midway Atoll Thursday.
“I think anybody who has the megaphone that even an ex-president has needs to be working on this and raising awareness. One of the things that I probably can do best is, in addition to shining a spotlight, helping citizens who are concerned about this to mobilize and shape political strategies so that on a bipartisan basis, we can be more effective in dealing with these challenges,” he said, according to a transcript provided by the paper.
“My hope is maybe as ex-president, I can have a little more influence on some of my Republican friends who, I think up until now, have been resistant to the science,” he said. Obama said he would point out that the private sector has started to embrace the idea of clean energy, while insurance companies have started to price in the costs of climate change, factors that could help make it more of a bipartisan issue.
“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,” he said.
As for making environmentalism a non-partisan issue again, Obama said he will stress the economic benefits.
“Part of what I constantly want to emphasize is we’ve seen our ability to preserve the environment while still growing the economy,” he said. “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, whether it’s the Cuyahoga [River in Ohio] or [Los Angeles] smog or acid rain in the Northeast, 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. We’ve done it before; there’s no reason why we can’t do it this time,” Obama said.
