President Obama used a Wednesday speech at the 20th Lake Tahoe Summit to boast about his accomplishments on fighting climate change and on conservation.
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Scientists believe an array of factors such as storm-water runoff, vehicle traffic and nearby construction have fueled the loss of clarity in the alpine lake, leading to major investments over the last 20 years by Congress, private groups, local authorities and the states of California and Nevada.
He said it doesn’t take a scientist: “the overwhelming body of evidence shows that climate change is caused by human activity”. Warmer temperatures also increase the surface water temperature; a recent UC Davis report found that the lake is warming faster than ever recorded.
President Clinton attended the first Lake Tahoe summit in 1997, also at the invitation of Reid, bringing national and global attention to the fate of the lake, which is a popular resort area.
He said past efforts including the annual Tahoe Summit have proven the choice between the environment and the economy is “a false one”.
When President Bill Clinton visited Lake Tahoe in 1997, the attention he focused on the lake was widely credited with rallying support for federal restoration funding.
“For thousands of years, this place has been a spiritual one”, Obama said in his keynote address.
“No nation, not even one as powerful as the United States, is immune from a changing climate”, Obama said after landing in Hawaii, the Pacific island state where he grew up.
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.
Sen. Harry Reid invited Obama to speak at Wednesday’s event in Stateline, Nevada. This year’s summit was hosted by retiring Nevada Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California, all Democrats, in highlighting the lake as an example of progress on environmental issues.
Assistant Interior Secretary Janice Schneider, who preceded Obama in the program, said the money would come from the Southern Nevada Lands Management Act, a 1998 law that directs money from public land sales near Las Vegas to conservation and public land projects throughout Nevada.
To tackle some of the local challenges Obama referenced an additional $29.5 million in planned spending on hazardous fuels reduction, mostly in the Lake Tahoe Basin.
Since the summit began two decades ago, almost $2 billion has been spent to protect and restore the lake.
President Barack Obama is opening a two-day environmental tour aimed at showcasing conservation efforts before traveling to Asia, where climate change is high on the agenda for his final trip to the continent.
Obama will continue the theme Thursday during an unusual presidential visit to Midway Atoll, a speck of land halfway between Asia and North America.
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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. He has also vowed to cancel the Paris climate agreement that Mr. Obama has signed with dozens of other world leaders.
