American President Barack Obama crossed the Arctic Circle on Wednesday, in a first by a sitting U.S. president, telling residents in a far-flung Alaska village that their plight should be the world’s wake-up call on global warming.
Mr. Obama’s visit to Kotzebue, a town of some 3,000 people in the Alaska Arctic, was designed to snap the country to attention by illustrating the ways warmer temperatures have already threatened entire communities and ways of life in Alaska. He said, despite progress in reducing greenhouse gases, the planet is already warming and the U.S. isn’t doing enough to stop it.
“I’ve been trying to make the rest of the country more aware of a changing climate, but you’re already living it,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of more than 1,000 in the town on Alaska’s western coast.
As he closed out a three day tour of the state focused almost entirely on climate change, the president sought to show solidarity with Alaska natives and rural Alaskans, whose immense challenges are rarely in the national spotlight. His brief visit had the feeling of a campaign rally, with throngs of people cheering and applauding, when he invoked the historic nature of the first presidential visit to the Arctic.
He said while many speak of America’s pioneering, independent spirit, in Alaska it’s not just a slogan but a way of life.
“It can be harsh,” Obama said. “That means that you depend on each other,” he said.
Obama came to Alaska with no grand policy pronouncements or promises of massive federal aid. Instead, he sought to use the changes to Alaska’s breathtaking landscape to put pressure on leaders in the U.S. and abroad to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as he works to secure a global climate treaty that he hopes will form a cornerstone of his environmental legacy.
Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as anywhere else on earth, Mr. Obama said. Permafrost, the layer of frozen ice under the surface, is thawing and causing homes, pipes and roads to sink as the soil quickly erodes. Some 100,000 Alaskans live in areas vulnerable to melting permafrost, government estimates show.
