4. AIR FORCE ONE
PRESIDENT OBAMA WAS in a very good mood in Alaska. It was the fall of 2015, and he had a little more than a year left in his second term—you could tell he had the finish line in sight. The stated purpose of the trip was to draw attention to the looming climate catastrophe the world faces, but with the exception of one big policy speech in Anchorage, in which 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 advisor joked. Others credited the buoyant US economy or the fact that the president had just learned that he had secured enough Senate votes to protect the hard-fought and controversial nuclear deal with Iran. Donald Trump had announced his presidential run a few months earlier, but at this point, Trump’s campaign was a joke that no one took seriously. President Obama’s popularity was sky-high, and his legacy seemed secure.
Whatever the reason, you could see the cheerfulness in Obama’s face the moment he stepped out of his armored limo at Elmendorf Air Force base in Anchorage. The president was all smiles, shaking hands with local pols and then bounding up the stairs into Air Force One for the short flight to Kotzebue, a village on the west coast of Alaska that is threatened by sea-level rise and other climate impacts. No suit and tie, no sir—today, the third and final day of his Alaska trip, he was dressed for adventure in black outdoor pants, a gray pullover, and a black Carhartt jacket. 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 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,” he said in his remarks to an international summit on the Arctic in Anchorage on the first day of his trip. In surprisingly stark language, 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 acting fast enough,” he said four times in a twenty-four-minute speech (an aide later told me this repetition was ad-libbed).
For Obama, this trip to Alaska marked the beginning of the last big push of his presidency—to build momentum for a meaningful deal at the international climate talks in Paris later that year. (“I’m dragging the world behind me to Paris,” Obama later told a visitor to the Oval Office.) The Paris agreement was widely viewed as a last-ditch effort to get the nations of the world to commit to reducing carbon pollution to a level that might limit the worst impacts of climate change, including slowing sea-level rise in the decades to come.
Policy-wise, the president didn’t have much to offer in Alaska. He restored the original native Alaskan name to the highest mountain in North America (Denali) and accelerated the construction of a new US Coast Guard icebreaker—largely symbolic gestures that didn’t do much to help Alaskans deal with eroding shorelines and thawing permafrost (he would later propose $100 million to relocate Alaska villages in his 2017 budget proposal, but the funding was redlined out). In the end, the trip was mostly a calculated and well-crafted presidential publicity stunt. And it raised the question: If the American people see the president of the United States standing atop a melting glacier and telling them the world is in trouble, will they care?
“Part of the reason why I wanted to take this trip was to start making it a little more visceral and to highlight for people that this is not a distant problem that we can keep putting off,” the president told me. “This is something that we have to tackle right now.”
Obama could not have picked a better place to make his point than Alaska. Climate-wise, it is the dark heart of the fossil fuel beast. On one hand, temperatures in the state are rising twice as fast as in the rest of the nation, and glaciers are retreating so quickly that even the pilot of my Delta flight into Anchorage told passengers to “look out the window at the glaciers on the left side of the aircraft—they won’t be there for long!” And it wasn’t just villages like Kotzebue that were in trouble. The very week of Obama’s visit, thirty-five thousand stressed-out walruses huddled on the beach in northern Alaska because the sea ice they use as resting spots while hunting had melted away.
On the other hand, the state is almost entirely dependent on revenues from fossil fuel production, which, thanks to the low price of oil and exhausted oil and gas wells on the North Slope, was in free fall—the state was grappling with a $3.7-billion budget shortfall that year. Alaska governor Bill Walker had flown from Washington, DC, to Anchorage with the president at the beginning of his trip; according to one of the president’s aides, Walker more or less pleaded with the president to open more federal lands to oil and gas drilling to boost state revenues. “Alaska is a banana republic,” Bob Shavelson, executive director of Cook Inletkeeper, an environmental group in Alaska, told me. “The state has to pump oil or die.”
For the flight up to Kotzebue, the air force left the president’s 747 parked on the tarmac in Anchorage and switched to a smaller plane, a 757 (it was also dubbed Air Force One, which name applies to any airplane the president is flying in—the president’s staff called it “mini–Air Force One”). Several members of the president’s senior staff were along, including Susan Rice, his national security advisor.
Rice’s presence on the trip was a reminder that a rapidly melting Arctic also has rapidly escalating national security implications. As the ice vanishes, there’s a whole new ocean opening up—and one that contains 30 percent of the known natural gas reserves and 13 percent of the oil. Unlike Russia, the US is poorly equipped to operate up there, with only one heavy-duty icebreaker (the Russians have forty). And the Russians aren’t the only ones with eyes on the Arctic—at the very moment we were flying toward Kotzebue, five Chinese warships were cruising in international waters below. Coincidence or power play? And a few hundred miles to the east, the Canadian military was engaged in Operation NANOOK, an annual large-scale military exercise that, according to the Canadian government, was “about demonstrating sovereignty over northern regions.”
Before we crossed into the Arctic, we touched down in Dillingham, a small town on Bristol Bay that is the heart of the salmon fishery in Alaska. The presidential motorcade headed straight for the beach, where a couple of native Alaskan women had caught a few silver salmon in a net, which made another nice visual tableaux for the president’s social media feed and gave him a chance to talk briefly about the importance of salmon to Alaska’s economy. The funniest moment of the trip occurred when the president, who was wearing orange rubber gloves, held up a two-foot-long silver salmon that the fisherwoman had given him. The salmon, apparently a male and still very much alive, ejaculated on his shoes. Obama laughed, and the fisherwoman said something privately to him. The president laughed again and repeated her remark loudly enough for everyone to hear: “She says he’s happy to see me.”
Last stop, Kotzebue. On the way, the president asked the pilot to fly a little farther north and circle over the island of Kivalina so he could get a look at it. Like Kotzebue, Kivalina is a poster child for the havoc that climate change is wreaking on native Alaskan villages along the coast—in addition to rising seas that are eating away as much as sixty feet of shoreline each year, thawing permafrost is destabilizing the soil, causing houses to collapse into the sea. About four hundred people live on Kivalina, and they are in trouble—relocating the village to higher ground on the mainland will cost $100 million or so, which neither the state nor the federal government has been willing to pay for.
We descended in a long arc over the island, which is less than a mile off the Alaskan coast—from the air, it looked like an Arctic version of Miami Beach, a thin barrier island floating in a vast cold gray sea. Hope Hall, the White House videographer, rushed to the window with her camera to take a shot of the soon-to-be-sunken land, which was later used in one of the president’s video messages that he posted on Facebook and other social media sites.
We touched down in Kotzebue at about 5 p.m. The president was greeted on the tarmac by Reggie Joule, the mayor of the Northwest Arctic Borough; then we climbed into our assigned vehicles in the motorcade for the short drive to the high school. We rolled by flimsy weather-beaten houses with American flags hanging in the windows and broken dogsleds in the front yards. You could sense the hardship of life in a place where it gets down to 100 degrees below zero (with wind chill) in the long, dark winters and where the nearest road to civilization is 450 miles away.
The motorcade pulled up at Kotzebue High School, a large metal building draped with banners welcoming the president, with snipers pacing on the roof. A thousand people crowded into the basketball gym, draped with the blue and gold of the Kotzebue Huskies. Obama gave a relaxed speech about climate change and the wonders of the far north, clearly enjoying the fact that history would remember him as the first sitting president to visit the Arctic. He said he was envious that Warren Harding spent two weeks here during a trip in 1923, but explained that he had to get back quickly because “I can’t leave Congress alone that long.”
When it was over, a White House aide guided me into a nearly empty classroom with a large round table in the center and two blue plastic chairs. Ice crystals made from blue construction paper hung from the ceiling and a Secret Service officer kept watch by the door. I chatted with Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, who was along for the trip, and fiddled with my notes. Remarkably, the White House did not put any limits on the scope of my questions or ask to vet them in advance. Earnest told me I would have forty-five minutes alone with the president.
I heard footsteps in the hallway, and then the president walked in. He was easy, familiar, and if you didn’t know he was president of the United States, you might say there was nothing intimidating about him. We shook hands and exchanged a few words about the flight; then he sat down in one of the plastic chairs and said, “Let’s do it.” We talked for more than an hour—during which the cheerfulness that had animated his public remarks on this trip dissipated. He spoke in measured tones, but with a seriousness that suggested that he believed—not unjustifiably—that the fate of human civilization was in his hands. Only near the end, when I asked if he felt any sadness about what we are losing in the world as a result of our rapidly changing climate, did he show any emotion—he averted his eyes for a moment and looked away, as if the knowledge of what’s coming in the next few decades was almost too much to bear.
One of the first things I asked him about was drilling for oil in the Arctic, which was much in the news during our visit. If he took climate change so seriously, how could he allow this? The president quickly made the point that opening the Arctic for drilling was not his doing. “One of the things about being president is you’re never starting from scratch,” he said, not mentioning that it was George W. Bush who had cleared the way for drilling off the coast. He argued that no matter how urgent the science is on climate change, you have to take the politics slowly, especially in a fossil-fuel-dependent state like Alaska. “If I howl at the moon without being able to build a political consensus behind me, nothing’s going to get done.” He talked about the importance of pushing clean energy, which can lower energy costs and create jobs, “so that we’re reducing what is perceived as a contradiction between economic development and saving the planet.”
“Okay, I understand that,” I argued, looking the president in the eye, while simultaneously aware in another part of my brain that I was looking the president of the United States in the eye. “But the problem is that building consensus on climate change is different than other issues because you have physics to account for too, right? The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building.”
“I understand,” the president replied coolly. He pushed his sleeves up, revealing his thin wrists. “But if we’re going to get our arms around this problem, which I think we can, then we are going to have to take into account the fact that the average American right now, even if they’ve gotten past climate denial, is still much more concerned about gas prices, getting back and forth from work, than they are about the climate changing. And if we are not strategic about how we talk about the issue and work with all the various stakeholders on this issue, then what will happen is that this will be demagogued and we will find ourselves in a place where we actually have slower progress rather than faster progress.
“So the science doesn’t change,” he continued. “The urgency doesn’t change. But part of my job is to figure out what’s my fastest way to get from point A to point B—what’s the best way for us to get to a point where we’ve got a clean-energy economy. And somebody who is not involved in politics may say, well, the shortest line between two points is just a straight line; let’s just go straight to it. Well, unfortunately, in a democracy, I may have to zig and zag occasionally, and take into account very real concerns and interests.”
I thought, “Obama the pragmatist.” But given that he was now head of the world’s biggest economy and leader of the free world, how did he handle the responsibility of avoiding a potential climate catastrophe within his daughters’ lifetimes?
I thought he might balk at the phrase “climate catastrophe.” But he did not.
“I think about it a lot,” he said, pausing and looking down at his hands. “I think about Malia and Sasha a lot. I think about their children a lot.”
Then, switching back to a more presidential-sounding voice, he went on: “One of the great things about being president is you travel a lot and you get to see the world’s wonders from a vantage point that very few people get a chance to see. When we were out on the waters yesterday, going around those fjords, and the sea otter was swimming on its back and feeding off its belly, and a porpoise jumps out of the water, and a whale sprays—I thought to myself, ‘I want to make sure my grandchildren see this.’”
President Obama on the beach in Dillingham, Alaska. (Photo courtesy of The White House/Pete Souza)
“We go back to Hawaii every year, and I intend to, hopefully, spend a lot of time there when I’m out of office. I want to make sure my kids, when they go snorkeling, are seeing the same things that I saw when I went snorkeling when I was five years old, or eight years old. I spent a big chunk of my life in Indonesia when I was young, and I want them to be able to have some of the same experiences, walking through a forest and suddenly seeing an ancient temple. And I don’t want that gone.”
The president mentioned that during his vacation, he had read The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, which is about the impact climate change is having on the natural world. “It makes very clear that big, abrupt changes can happen; they’re not outside the realm of possibility,” he said. “They have happened before; they can happen again.”
He made a little tent with the fingers of both hands, then continued. “So all of this makes me feel that I have to tackle this every way that I can. But one of the things about being president is you’re also mindful that, despite the office, you don’t do things alone. I continually go back to the notion that the American people have to feel the same urgency that I do. And it’s understandable that they don’t, because the science right now feels abstract to people. It will feel less abstract with each successive year. I suspect that the record wildfires that we’re seeing, the fact that half of the West is in extreme or severe drought right now, is making people understand this better. If you talk to people in Washington State right now, I suspect, after having tragically lost three firefighters, and seeing vast parts of their state aflame, that they understand it better. If you go down to Florida, and neighborhoods that are now flooding just every time the tide rises, they’re understanding it better.”
After the formal interview, the president left to meet with some local officials. When he was finished with that, he and I were scheduled to take a walk along Kotzebue Sound so that we could be filmed together for a short documentary Rolling Stone was producing about the visit. We rode in the motorcade a few blocks to the water’s edge. The water of Kotzebue Sound was gray and flat, and even though it was only early September, you could already feel winter approaching. A few hundred feet off, the president stepped away to talk to locals about vanishing sea ice and flooding.
I thought back to a few days earlier, when I’d seen the president walk up to the face of a mountain glacier. It was not a big glacier, but even a small glacier made the president look diminutive. On this trip I’d witnessed all the trappings of presidential power—the jets, the helicopters, the Secret Service agents, the obsequiousness of local politicians. But compared to the larger forces at work in the natural world, it was nothing.
After about ten minutes, one of the president’s aides waved me over to join them, and the president and I took a walk along the newly armored shore of Kotzebue, where tons of riprap and concrete protected the town from the rising waters of the sound. Secret Service agents trailed behind, just out of earshot. It was a little chilly—the president had his hands in his coat pockets.
“I’ve talked to a lot of scientists about climate change,” I said, not wanting to waste any time. “A lot of them wrestle with how honest to be about what they see coming—how blunt, how optimistic. You obviously have a great responsibility on this—how do you gauge how much truth America can take? Because you know what’s coming…”
“Well, here’s the thing,” he told me, looking out over the sound as we walked. “When I was a community organizer, one of our basic principles was: if you have a big problem, you have to break it down into pieces that people can absorb. So if you talk to people about world hunger—their general attitude is, well, ‘I can’t solve world hunger.’ If you talk to people about ‘Let’s solve this particular problem that alleviates hunger for these kids,’ then you can get some action. So my job up here, the whole point of this trip, is to sound the alarm. But I want to make sure that I’m not presenting this in a way that leads people to think that we’re doomed and there is nothing we can do about it.”
The way he said this, I wasn’t entirely convinced he believed we weren’t doomed. But I let it pass.
“Look, we’re not going to save every frog and we’re not going to save every coral reef,” he said. “But I can save some coral reefs, and I can save some frogs. And there’s gonna be adaptations that have to be made and there are gonna be displacements, but I can mitigate the worst and hope that the planet ends up being more resilient than it may feel to be right now. But the most important thing is at least to express urgency and not hold back from the fact that we need to be a lot more aggressive than we are right now.”
I pressed on. “But you know the science—doesn’t it scare the hell out of you sometimes?”
“Yeah,” he said, simply and flatly.
I brought up the fact that many scientists believed that we could see six feet or more of sea-level rise by the end of the century, which was twice the IPCC estimates.
“Six feet?” the president said, as if hearing the words suddenly made the idea all too real to him.
“Yeah,” I said. “As you know, there is some uncertainty in these studies, but the error bars are all in the direction of more sea-level rise than we anticipate, not less.…”
“Look, part of my job is to read stuff that terrifies me all the time.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, the way he said it. “That’s true, I suppose.”
“I’ve got a chronic concern about pandemics, for example. And the odds are that sometime in our lifetime there’s gonna be something like the Spanish flu that wipes out a lot of people… if we’re not taking care. I do what I can do and as much as I can do and what I don’t want to do is get paralyzed by the magnitude of the thing and what I don’t want is for people to get paralyzed thinking that somehow this is out of our control. And I’m a big believer that the human imagination can solve problems. We don’t usually solve them as fast as we need to. It’s sort of like two cheers for democracy. It’s that kind of thing. We try everything else, I think Churchill said, eventually, and when we’ve exhausted every other alternative we finally do the right thing. Hopefully the same will be true here.”
With that, we came to the end of our walk, and one of the president’s aides guided him over to meet with 2011 Iditarod champion John Baker, who gave him a sled dog puppy to hold and a baseball cap to take home. While I watched, I talked with Brian Deese, special advisor to the president on issues like climate change. He was a smart and unpretentious guy, secure enough in his standing with the president that he could wear ragged hiking shoes with a sole falling off and think it was kinda funny.
I told Deese that during our talk, the president had mentioned the risks Florida faces from sea-level rise. I wondered how people like Deese, who was one of the prime architects of the president’s successful auto industry bailout in 2009, thought about the looming financial disaster that sea-level rise would bring to coastal cities. “What are you going to do when Miami goes under?” I asked him. “What does it mean to lose a great American city? How is the federal government going to deal with that? If Miami needs money, so will a lot of other places along the coast.”
“Miami has lots of resources,” Deese told me. “They can figure this out. They might have to raise taxes to pay for it, but I think you’ll see a lot of innovation down there in the coming years. I’m more concerned with places like Kivalina, where people have nowhere to go and very few resources for themselves.”
A moment later, Deese left to join the president, who was heading back to his armored SUV. At about 8:30 p.m., we motorcaded back to the airport and the president bounded up the steps to Air Force One. A small group of Alaskans waved at him from behind a chain link fence and shouted goodbyes. He had been in the Arctic for about four hours—but that was four hours more than any other president had committed. As I took my seat on Air Force One, I noticed that the president was already seated in his leather chair at the conference table on the plane, still wearing his Iditarod hat. He said to his staff, “Let’s get to work.”