Obama Takes on Climate Change: The Rolling Stone Interview

"I don't want to get paralyzed by the magnitude of this thing. I'm a big believer that imagination can solve problems," says the president

By Jeff Goodell

n Alaska, President Obama was in a very good mood. He visited the state in late summer to draw attention to the looming climate catastrophe the world faces, but with the exception of one big policy speech when he sounded as apocalyptic as any hemp-growing activist, he spent most of his three days up north beaming. "He's happy to be out of his cage," one aide joked. Others credited the buoyant U.S. economy or the fact that the president had just learned that he had secured enough votes to protect the hard-fought nuclear deal with Iran from being derailed by Senate Republicans.

Whatever the reason, you could see the cheerfulness in his face the moment he stepped out of his armored presidential limo at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, where the air was hazy with smoke from the wildfires that had burned millions of acres in Alaska. The president was all smiles, shaking hands with local pols and then bounding up the stairs into Air Force One. No suit and tie, no sir — today, on what was the third and final day of his trip, he was dressed for adventure in black outdoor pants, a gray pullover and a black Carhartt jacket.

He was heading north to Kotzebue, a village about 30 miles above the Arctic Circle, which is suffering from a climate-disaster trifecta of melting permafrost, rising seas and bigger storm surges. As White House press releases and video blogs pointed out, this was a historic trip — not only would Obama be the first sitting president to ever visit the Arctic, but he would also be the first president to use a selfie stick to take videos of himself talking about the end of human civilization.

The president's upbeat mood was an odd and unexpected counterpoint to the seriousness and urgency of the message he was trying to deliver. "Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now," Obama said in his remarks to an international conference on the Arctic in Anchorage on the first day of his trip. In perhaps the starkest language he has ever used in public, Obama warned that unless more was done to reduce carbon pollution, "we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair: submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields no longer growing." His impatience was obvious: "We're not moving fast enough," he repeated four times in a 24-minute speech (an aide later told me this repetition was ad-libbed).

Obama's trip to Alaska marked the beginning of what may be the last big push of his presidency — to build momentum for a meaningful deal at the international climate talks in Paris later this year. "The president is entirely focused on this goal," one of his aides told me in Alaska. For Obama, who has secured his legacy on his two top priorities, health care and the economy, as well as on important issues like gay marriage and immigration, a breakthrough in Paris would be a sweet final victory before his presidency drowns in the noise of the 2016 election. "If you think about who has been in the forefront of pushing global climate action forward, nobody is in Obama's league," says John Podesta, a former special adviser to Obama who is now chairing Hil-lary Clinton's presidential campaign. (One recent visitor to the Oval Office recalled Obama saying, "I'm dragging the world behind me to Paris.&quot



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