‘Science Is Science’: Obama Embraces Price on Carbon, Leaving Fossil Fuels in the Ground

President Obama made some candid remarks on climate change in a new interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.  The interview airs Monday in the final episode of Showtime’s acclaimed climate series, Years of Living Dangerously and is excerpted in Friedman’s latest column.

Friedman began by asking if the president accepts the latest findings of scientists and governments regarding climate change and the globe’s consumption of fossil fuels.

If you take the UN’s climate study it basically says that if we go beyond 2 degree centigrade in global average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, we’re going to cross into some really dangerous, unstable territory; Arctic melting, massive sea level rise, disruptive storms. The International Energy Agency says in order to stay under that two degree rise we’re really going to have to keep most of the oil and gas and coal — 70 percent is a rough number they use — in the ground. Do you agree with that?

Given that the United States was one of the countless countries that signed off on the UN Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment report, Obama’s answer should not be a total surprise.  “Science is science,” he said.  “And there is no doubt that if we burned all the fossil fuel that’s in the ground right now that the planet’s going to get too hot and the consequences could be dire.”

I can’t recall Obama being as candid about the realities of climate change and what must be done to address it as he is in this interview.  He goes on to say:

We’re not going to be able to burn it all.  Over the course of the next several decades, we’re going to have to build a ramp from how we currently use energy to where we need to use energy.  And we’re not going to suddenly turn off a switch and suddenly we’re no longer using fossil fuels, but we have to use this time wisely, so that you have a tapering off of fossil fuels replaced by clean energy sources that are not releasing carbon … But I very much believe in keeping that 2 [degree] Celsius target as a goal.

When Friedman asked the president to name one thing he would like to get done to advance the issue of climate action, he was clear about what that one move would be.

The way we’ve solved previous pollution problems like acid rain was we said, “we’re gonna charge you if you’re releasing this stuff into the atmosphere. We’re gonna let you figure it out, but we’re gonna to tell you that you can’t keep dumping it out in the atmosphere and making everybody else pay for it.” So if there is one thing I would like to see, it’d be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions.

‘Science Is Science’:  Obama Embraces Price on Carbon, Leaving Fossil Fuels in the Ground