Obama to speak 'frankly' on 11-day climate change tour

Gregory Korte | USA TODAY

Corrections and clarifications: President Obama will visit Dillingham, Alaska next week. This story previously misspelled the name of the city.

WASHINGTON — President Obama will log more than 14,000 miles on Air Force One over the next 11 days in a climate change tour that will take him from the desert West to the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle.

In Las Vegas, New Orleans and in the small Alaska fishing village of Kotzebue, Obama will deliver a three-pronged message: The United States needs to increase the use of alternative energy sources, make coastal communities more resilient and urge a global response to climate change.

The three major climate-themed events are part of a conscious effort by Obama to speak "frequently and frankly" about the issue over his second term, said Brian Deese, a senior Obama adviser who handles environmental and energy issues for the White House. They come three weeks after the White House launched a plan for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 32% over 25 years.

• In Las Vegas Monday night, Obama was expected to tout new executive actions to make alternative energy sources more affordable in a speech to the National Clean Energy Summit. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced it would issue $1 billion in loan guarantees for "distributed energy" projects — technologies that allow consumers to generate their own electricity or obtain it from a nearby source.

The idea, officials said, was not just to invest in new technologies, but to make it easier for those technologies to get a foothold in the market. For example, the Federal Housing Administration announced a policy Monday that will allow the buyer of an energy-efficient home to assume the cost of those improvements through assessments using a federal mortgage.

• In New Orleans on Thursday, Obama will mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. And while climate change won't be the sole focus of the trip, Obama is expected to talk about the need to rebuild from disasters in ways that make communities more resistant to the effects of rising seas, more frequent storms, deeper droughts and increased wildfires.

"We’ve all tremendously increased our focus on how we build our modern infrastructure to be more resilient to all kids of risks, including that of extreme weather," said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

• In a three-day trip to Alaska next week, Obama will crisscross the state, visiting the villages of Seward, Dillingham and Kotzebue to meet with local communities — including Alaska Natives — about the effect that melting glaciers and softening permafrost are having. His visit to Kotzebue, a largely Inupiat native village 33 miles above the Arctic Circle on the edge of the Chukchi Sea, will mark the northernmost trek of any sitting president in the United States.

"I'm going because Alaskans are on the front lines of one of the greatest challenges we face this century: Climate change," Obama said in a video released by the White House. "It's our wake up call. The alarm bells are ringing, and as long as I'm president, America will lead the world to meet this threat before it's too late."

He'll also address the State Department's Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic, also known as the Glacier Conference, which is bringing together leaders from Arctic nations to grapple with climate issues.

But the Arctic trip also highlights some of the tensions in Obama's energy policy. Environmental groups have been sharply critical of the Interior Department's granting of permits to Royal Dutch Shell to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean, with the final permit coming just last week.

"President Obama has simultaneously been a great leader on the environment, and taken misguided steps backward that will lead to lasting harm if they continue to go forward," said Franz Matzner, director of the Beyond Oil Initiative of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"This sequence of events over the next couple of weeks really sheds a spotlight on an approach that's difficult to reconcile," Matzner said. "On the one hand, reducing pollution from our nation's power plants and putting in place strong efficiency standards on our vehicles that will reduce our carbon emissions, and on the other, promoting the extraction and burning of more fossil fuels that will put more carbon pollution in the atmosphere."

But Deese brushed off that criticism Monday, saying Shell was operating under a lease granted under the George W. Bush administration, and the Obama administration had delayed and narrowed the permit, allowing a single well with "unprecedented, high levels of safety standards for Shell or any other company to meet."

Moniz said the Obama administration was also trying to lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil, which the nation imports at the rate of 7 million barrels a day. "Even as we have been producing more oil and reducing our imports, that has in no way distracted us from reducing our oil dependence," he said.

Obama's domestic climate tour is a prelude to international talks in three months. In late November, the United Nations Climate Change Conference will kick off in Paris, where world leaders will negotiate long-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change is also likely to be a major topic when Pope Francis visits the White House in September, four months after releasing an environmental encyclical that called climate change "a global problem with grave implications" and "one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day."