Obama to Presidential Hopefuls: You’re Going to Need to Deal with Climate Change

President Obama sent a hopeful message to the U.N. climate talks Tuesday before he left Paris.

Speaking to the press, Obama said that coming to an agreement in Paris won’t be easy — “getting 200 nations to agree on anything is hard” — but that he was confident in the process.  And, Obama said, it wasn’t just Paris he was confident about.

“Climate change is a massive problem.  It’s a generational program.  It’s a problem that by definition is just about the most difficult thing for a political system to absorb,” he said.  “And yet despite all that the main message I’ve got is, I actually think were gonna solve this thing.”

Obama cited the progress the world had already made on climate change as reason for his optimism, including the fact that nearly 200 countries had shown up in Paris with fairly ambitious agreements and the fact that the price of generating solar energy had dropped so dramatically in the last five years.
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Obama addressed these detractors Tuesday, speaking specifically to presidential hopefuls.

“The fact of the matter is there’s a reason why you have the largest gathering of world leaders probably in human history here in Paris.  Everybody else is taking climate change really seriously.  They think it’s a really big problem,” he said.  “I think the president of the United States is going to need to think this is really important.”
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“This one trend, climate change, affects all trends,” he said.  “If we let the world keep warming as fast as it is, and sea levels rising as fast as they are, and weather patterns shifting in more unexpected ways, before long were going to have to devote more and more economic resources not to growing opportunities for our people, but to adapting to the various consequences of a changing planet.”

And, Obama said, one way of tackling climate change would be to put a price on carbon.

“I’ve long believed that the most elegant way to drive innovation and to reduce carbon emissions is to put a price on it,” he said.

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