President Obama spoke about conservation and climate change. The lake’s temperature has risen faster over the last four years than any time on record.
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The two California senators have joined with their counterparts in Nevada in an effort to reauthorize the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act, which is still pending in Congress, and provide hundreds of millions of dollars more to protect the lake from pollutants and restore the health of the surrounding forests.
“This is the best opportunity we have had in years to make a real difference for the more than 650,000 people who live around the Salton Sea, as well as the millions of birds and other wildlife that depend on the sea for their survival”, said Audubon president and chief executive David Yarnold. “Conservation is more than just putting up a plaque and calling something a park”, he said.
At a Nevada summit on the health of Lake Tahoe, whose average surface temperature reached an all-time recorded high a year ago, Obama will talk about drought, wildfires and gains the United States has made in renewable energy.
“In 2015, Lake Tahoe experienced its warmest average surface water temperature ever recorded and the west struggled with what may be the worst drought in more than 1,500 years”.
“We’ve been working on climate change on every front”, he said. Then the president heads to China for the Group of 20 major economies summit and a meeting with China’s president.
Standing beneath the forest-green peaks of the Sierra Nevada, President Barack Obama drew a connection Wednesday between conservation efforts and stopping global warming, describing the two environmental challenges as inseparably linked.
Before returning to Washington, Obama also was to become the first sitting president to visit Laos.
Reid opened the 20th annual Lake Tahoe Summit Wednesday at an outdoor arena on the lake’s south shore where President Barack Obama will deliver the keynote address later in the afternoon. “There is no contradiction between being smart on the environment and having a strong economy, and we’ve got to keep it going”.
“Beauty transcends politics”, Brown said.
Rep. Tom McClintock, a Republican from Elk Grove whose district includes the California side of the lake and who has called for less-expansive Tahoe funding, and is focused primarily on fire prevention, said he was not invited.
Numerous grants and programs announced by the White House to coincide with the president’s speech are to boost clean energy or improve conservation in the region surrounding the California lake or nearby states such as Nevada and Utah, which were awarded a $29 million grant to study geothermal energy. Annual snowfall levels in the nearby mountains have been on a steady decline, reducing the cool snowmelt that streams into the lake and replenishes its oxygen supply, said Geoffrey Schladow, director of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.
“We tend to think of climate change as if it’s something that is just happening out there that we don’t have control over”, Obama said.
After the Tahoe stop, the president will head to the lush terrain in Honolulu, where he plans a speech to a gathering of leaders of island nations in the Pacific Ocean.
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To that end, Obama planned an unusual presidential visit Thursday to Midway Atoll, a speck of land halfway between Asia and North America where Obama recently expanded a marine monument.
