Obama never named Republican members in Congress or GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who have questioned whether climate change is real and opposed global efforts to address the issue, but the president’s pointed critique left no doubt of his targets. Throughout the trip, Obama is hoping to elevate issues of climate change and conservation as he works to lock in his environmental legacy.
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“A single wildfire in a dangerously flammable Lake Tahoe basin could cause enough erosion to erase decades of progress when it comes to water quality”, he said.
The White House earlier in the day also unveiled a strategy to boost private and philanthropic investment in US conservation efforts, which it said have grown from $230 million a year when Obama took office in 2009 to about $1 billion a year today.
Obama is touting his decision to expand the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. “I think it’s fair to say that climate change is the largest factor impacting Lake Tahoe – more than any other factor”, Schladow said.
Obama’s remarks at the annual Lake Tahoe Summit came at the height of a presidential election in which Republican candidate Donald Trump has sharply criticized both the worldwide climate pact signed a year ago in Paris and federal policies to shift power production to renewable sources.
“For thousands of years, this place has been a spiritual one”, Obama said in his keynote address. I just won’t have Marine One. That’s the presidential helicopter that he boarded after the summit to fly back to Reno-Tahoe International Airport before he continues on to Hawaii. “Our healing of Lake Tahoe proves it’s within our power to pass on the great bounty of this country to the next generation”.
Obama said in a speech at the 20th annual Lake Tahoe Summit on Wednesday that tourist-based economies like the one at Tahoe live or die by the health of the environment.
Earlier on Wednesday, Obama stopped in to a summit about the health of Lake Tahoe, the deep alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains on the Nevada-California border whose average surface temperature reached an all-time recorded high past year.
President Obama was in Nevada today for the 20th Annual Lake Tahoe Summit.
“He has not backed off”, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who is hosting the summit, said in an interview.
“It’s the first time I’ll be listening to a sitting president talk about Lake Tahoe, and that’s exciting for all of us”, says Sue Novasel, El Dorado County Supervisor.
Since the summit began two decades ago, almost $2 billion has been spent to protect and restore the lake.
President Obama yesterday hit out once again at Republican climate sceptics, arguing that there was “no contradiction” between effective environmental policies and strong economic performance. Harry Reid convinced President Bill Clinton to attend the first summit. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California were also in attendance.
The executive order assigned the 87,563 acres formerly owned by Burt’s Bees entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby to the U.S. Department of the Interior and the National Park Service.
Scientists are anxious about the loss of clarity in the alpine lake caused by a wide variety of factors over past half-century, including housing construction, storm-water runoff, automobiles and aquatic species.
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“The president will be discussing the role that remote islands play in the climate context, but also the importance of the intersection between conservation and climate change as we face an increasingly severe threat of climate change in these parts of the world”, Brian Deese, a senior adviser to the president, told reporters on Monday. Warmer temperatures also increase the surface water temperature; a recent UC Davis report found that the lake is warming faster than ever recorded.
