President Barack Obama accused some elected officials who didn’t support action on climate change of being “shills” for the fossil fuels industry.
“I guarantee you the Republican party will have to change its approach to climate change because the public is going to insist upon it,” Obama said in an interview with Vice that was posted in full Monday. “The challenge on something like climate change is there comes a point of no return.
He stressed that Republicans are to blame for inaction.
“On climate change, 90 percent of agree with me and 90 percent of Republicans oppose any action,” Obama said.
He added, “In some cases, you have elected officials who are shills for the oil companies or the fossil fuel industry and there is a lot of money involved.”
Obama said that his goal was to convince American that climate change was a severe and urgent problem, talking about his legacy.
“If I can change how the country thinks about this as a serious, immediate threat, not some distant, vague thing, if I can encourage and gain commitment from the Chinese to put forward a serious commitment to start curbing their greenhouse gasses and that then allows us to leverage the entire world for the conference that is taking place this year in Paris, and if I’m able to double fuel efficiency standards, and I’m able to make appliances more efficient, double the production of clean energy, if I’m able to do all those things now, when I’m done, we will still have a heck of a problem, but we will have made enough progress that the next president and the next generation can start building on,” Obama said.
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