Climate: Will Obama Really Be the Best Ally at COP21?

Will Barack Obama turn out to be the best ally at the Paris conference on climate change? If you were to see him in Alaska, pleading for urgency in the fight against climate change, three months before COP21 – the United Nations conference on climate change – you would have good reason to think so. In Anchorage, speaking before a meeting of countries bordering on the Arctic, Mr. Obama called on the international community in strong terms. “The climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it,” he said Monday, Aug. 31, without denying the particular responsibility of the United States, the world’s second biggest polluter.

The American president described in dramatic terms the consequences of a temperature increase if nothing is done to halt it: “Abandoned cities. Fields no longer growing … Desperate refugees seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own. Political disruptions that could trigger multiple conflicts around the globe.”

’Hypocrisy’

To attract his compatriots’ attention, Mr. Obama made multiple media appearances in Alaska. Not only did he take part in an episode of the survivalist reality TV series, “Running Wild with Bear Grylls,” which will be shown on NBC in the fall, but on Wednesday, he will also be the first sitting president to travel north of the Arctic Circle. He will meet Inuits whose villages are threatened by rising sea levels. On Tuesday, he went to Exit Glacier, 125 miles from Anchorage, which is melting at a constantly increasing rate. Spectacular photos were posted on the White House’s social networks.

However, environmental activists give him a mixed review. Certainly, Mr. Obama has imposed stricter limits on power plants (a mandatory 32 percent decrease in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030). But two weeks before he left for Alaska, he gave Royal Dutch Shell the definitive green light to carry out exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea. Ecologists label it “hypocrisy.”

Before celebrating this helping hand from America, you must remember – like the Europeans do from the bitter experience at the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 – that Barack Obama is, first and foremost, a pragmatist.