President Obama and Climate Change | Before the Flood

Good to see you. Thank you so much. You doing all right? Absolutely all right. Come on, the Paris Agreement ended up being a historic agreement not because it gets us to where we need to be eventually, but for the first time locking in all countries into verifiable steps and targets that they're going to take. It creates the architecture that allows us to finally start dealing with this problem in a serious way.

So, you were happy with what? I was happy that we put the architecture in place. The targets that have been set in Paris are nowhere near enough for what the scientists tell us we have to do eventually to solve this problem. But if we can use the next 20 years to apply existing technologies to reduce carbon emissions and then start slowly turning up the dials as new technologies come online, so that we have more and more ambitious targets each year, then we're not going to completely reverse the warming that now is inevitable, but we can stop it before it becomes catastrophic.

It's no secret that you've been under great opposition to try to implement some of your climate change initiatives, and we got some folks on the other side. Yeah, so somebody that comes into office that does not believe in the science of climate change, right? Do they have the capacity and the power to dismantle everything that you've already worked for? Even if somebody came in campaigning on denying climate science?

Reality has a way of, you know, hitting you in the nose if you're not paying attention. I think that the public is starting to realize the science, in part because it’s indisputable. I admire optimism, yeah, but you start to look at the science, look at what's going on in the Antarctic, and scientists saying that there are sections of ice that guarantee 4 to 6 meters of ocean level rise, which will be catastrophic for the future.

You are the leader of the Free World. You have access to information that most people do not. What makes you terrified for the future? A huge portion of the world's population lives near oceans. If they start moving, then you start seeing scarce resources, the subject to competition between populations. This is the reason why the Pentagon has said this is a national security issue. This isn't just an environmental issue; this is a national security issue.

You know, in addition to just the sadness that I would feel if my kids can never see a glacier the way I saw when I went up to Alaska, you know, that's the romantic side of me. That's the side that takes a walk with my daughters, and I want to be able to them to see, or my grandkids; I want them to see the same things I saw as I was growing up. Even if you were unsentimental about that, in very hard-headed terms, you've got to worry about the national security implications of this and the capacity for the existing world order, as we understand it, to survive the kinds of strains that the scientists are predicting without action. This is why we have to take action now.