Alaskans concerned Obama visit a ploy to highlight green legacy

President Obama on Monday will begin a three-day trip to Alaska to hike on a glacier and call attention to climate change, amid concern from Alaskans and the oil and gas industry that the president merely wants to use the resource-rich state as backdrop to burnish his legacy as an environmentalist.

The president will highlight Alaska’s retreating glaciers to lend urgency to his campaign to reduce carbon emissions, which are blamed for rising temperatures, as he tries to build momentum for a global deal to cut greenhouse gases at a United Nations conference in Paris in December.

Some in the energy industry say that as Mr. Obama approaches his final year in office, he has stopped even paying lip service to fossil fuel production in the U.S.

“There has been a very clear shift in the administration’s position,” said Louis Finkel, vice president of government relations at the American Petroleum Institute. “In the first four years, you heard a lot of rhetoric about an ‘all of the above’ energy policy. The administration’s lost sight of that. The administration clearly is looking at everything they do through a Paris lens.” (by Dave Boyer - The Washington Times - Sunday)

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