ANCHORAGE, Alaska: US President Barack Obama is painting a doomsday scenario for the Arctic and beyond if climate change isn’t dealt with fast: entire nations submerged underwater, cities abandoned and refugees fleeing in droves as conflict breaks out across the globe. It’s a harrowing image of a future that Obama insists is inevitable unless the world follows his and America’s lead by making sweeping cuts to greenhouse gases. Lest his sense of urgency get lost, Obama was to drive the message home on Tuesday by hiking a melting glacier in Alaska. Obama is counting on Alaska’s exquisite but deteriorating landscape to elicit a sense of urgency that his previous calls to action on climate change have not. He opened his three-day trip to the nation’s largest state on Monday with a speech to an Arctic climate summit, calling global warming an escalating crisis already disturbing Alaskans’ way of life. “We will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair,” Obama said. Alluding ironically to the threat of rising seas, he castigated leaders who deny climate change as “increasingly alone — on their own shrinking island.” Meanwhile, amid concerns that the US has ceded influence to Russia in strategic Arctic waters, the White House announced Tuesday that it would ask Congress to speed up construction of new icebreakers to protect US interests and natural resources. The US currently has two working icebreakers, compared to Russia’s 40. On his first day in Alaska, Obama offered no new policy prescriptions or federal efforts to slow global warming, but said the US is doing its part by working to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases by up to 28 per cent over the next decade. Obama set that target as the US commitment to a major global climate treaty to be finalised in December, and has urged fellow leaders to make similarly ambitious pledges as works to secure a cornerstone of his environmental legacy. Yet by turning to Alaska’s majestic mountains and stirring coastlines to make his point on climate, Obama also brought fresh attention to deep and persistent divisions in the US over how to balance the nation’s energy and environmental needs. Heavily dependent on energy revenues, Alaska is suffering economically due to the recent plunge in oil prices, a blow made all the more poignant by the fact that the cost of energy here is exceedingly high. Alaska leaders of all political stripes have implored Obama to open up more of the state to drilling to help alleviate a $3.5 billion budget deficit that has triggered steep cuts to state services — a critical lifeline for poor and rural Alaskans. “For a population as small as we are, it’s pretty significant,” Alaska Governor Bill Walker told reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew with Obama to Anchorage. Yet even Obama, who has elevated global warming as a rallying point in his second term, has a complicated record on energy that has muddied his clarion call on climate. The president has struggled to explain how his dire warnings square with steps he’s taken to expand energy production, even at the risk of higher emissions.
