President Barack Obama Wednesday said the US has a "responsibility" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy companies, motor vehicles and other sectors of the economy that scientists say are contributing to global climate change.
But in his first news conference since winning re-election last week, Obama said the US must reduce emissions in a way that does not make it harder for the country to recover from the years-long global economic crisis.
"If the message is somehow we're going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don't think anybody's gonna go for that," Obama said. "I won't go for that."
Obama specifically downplayed the prospect of the US imposing a so-called "carbon tax" on power plants, oil refineries and other smokestack industries, which some lawmakers and advocacy groups say could help the US combat climate change while simultaneously raising new revenue to help pay down America's massive national debt.
Obama said he doesn't expect Congress to endorse a carbon tax as part of a package of policies to address the so-called "fiscal cliff," which refers to trillions of dollars in economically harmful tax hikes and mandatory spending cuts that will take effect on December 31 unless lawmakers and the White House strike a deal to either circumvent or postpone them.
"That I'm pretty certain of," Obama said. "And, look, we're still trying to debate whether we can just make sure the middle-class families don't get a tax hike. Let's see if we can resolve that. That should be easy. [Climate change is] hard."
Obama said he intended to put forth a new policy for addressing climate change "in the coming months and years."
But he said that in the next several weeks and months, he would seek to foster "a wide-ranging conversation with scientists, engineers, and elected officials to find out what more can we do to make short-term progress in reducing carbon." That conversation would help policymakers to determine "what realistically can we do long term to make sure that this is not something we're passing on to future generations that's going to be very expensive and very painful to deal with," he said.
Environmental groups that want the US to do more to reduce energy sector GHG emissions had a mixed response to Obama's comments. Forecast the Facts, a Washington-based advocacy group, said it was pleased that Obama drew a connection between climate change and the recent spate of severe weather events, including the hurricane that hit the US Northeast earlier this month. But the group said it was disappointed with Obama's plan to postpone serious action on climate change until the US fully recovers from its economic woes.
"President Obama is right that 'natural' disasters such as Superstorm Sandy are influenced by human activities, namely the burning of fossil fuels by carbon profiteers," said Brad Johnson, the group's campaign manager. "But the president's assertion that addressing climate change should be secondary to concerns about the economy is a gross disappointment and an insult to the deep suffering of the millions of victims of climate disasters across this nation."
Johnson called the fiscal cliff debate that is currently playing out in Washington a "manufactured crisis," saying that climate change is "the most urgent threat to our national safety and economic well-being."
