Obama defends Shell Arctic drilling

Ahead of a three-day trip to Alaska that begins Monday, President Obama is thrusting climate change into the spotlight, warning of the dangers global warming presents for the United States.

“It’s inconsistent on the one hand for President Obama to lead the world toward comprehensive action on climate change, while on the other allowing companies to pursue hard, expensive oil in unsafe and remote places”, said Michael LeVine, Pacific senior counsel for Oceana, an environmental group.

Alaska is on the “bucket lists” for a lot of people, but for President Obama it’s on his famous list of things that rhyme with bucket.

Kotzebue and many of its neighbors – Inuit villages that are being overtaken by the sea because of soil erosion, brought on by melting permafrost and stronger storms that come with higher temperatures – are potent real-time examples of what Mr. Obama has called a climate wake-up call.

“This is all real, ” Obama said. “That is occurring to our fellow People proper now”. Yet Obama has taken steps that show he’s cautiously navigating the competing environmental and energy interests at play. Several weeks ago, his government granted Royal Dutch Shell a final license to drill into oil bearing stone off the northwest shore for the very first time in over two decades in Alaska. One activist organization, CREDO, said the president’s visit is a symbol of “the self-defeating hypocrisy of his policies on energy and climate”. “This is a point where we differ”.

For many Alaskans, though, the issue comes down to dollars and cents.

“You have to balance it with the fundamentals of your economy and of basic needs”. “That’s a transition that is not going to happen overnight”, Deese said.

“I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports”, said Obama, “and we should demand the highest safety standards in the industry – our own”.

It will produce a photo-opportunity similar to David Cameron’s 2006 husky expedition when the then Tory opposition leader sought to underline his party’s green credentials and determination to deal with global warming.

During that trip in 2009, the president told the crowd at JBER “Until today I had been to all 49 states, so this is officially my 50th state”.

Obama is investing time on an incomplete global climate treaty that as he works to procure his environmental heritage before his presidency ends states desire to finalize in December.

His visit continues Wednesday in Dillingham, in southwest Alaska, where Obama will meet with fishermen locked in an ongoing conflict with miners over plans to build a massive gold and copper mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest salmon fishery.

On Tuesday, he will hike on a receding glacier near the town of Seward.