Obama meets with Alaska natives on climate change tour

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The first official action President Barack Obama took on arriving in downtown Anchorage on Monday for a whirlwind, three-day climate change tour of the biggest state in America was to sit down with a group of Alaska native leaders.

After all, he told reporters after his conversation with a dozen tribal leaders, “They don’t just represent a large portion of Alaska’s population. These are communities that have been around for 10,000 years or so, so it’s worth paying attention to them. They know a little bit from all that history.”

By the end of his tenure in the White House, Obama said, “I will have visited more tribal communities than any other previous sitting president, and I feel pretty good about that, in case anybody’s keeping track.”

Obama was in Alaska’s biggest city for the international GLACIER conference on global leadership in the Arctic. He said part of his attention to the destructive effects of climate change is dealing with difficult problems like coastal erosion in tiny Arctic villages such as Kivalina.

“We will be paying a lot of attention to how we can work together to tap into the wisdom and knowledge of tribal communities in managing and conserving land in the face of what is a profound challenge,” he said.

Obama also noted that his administration had heeded Alaskans’ pleas to change the name of North America’s tallest peak from Mount McKinley to its original name, Denali.

By the time Air Force One landed at Alaska’s Elmendorf Air Force Base, the National Park Service had already begun printing new maps of Denali National Park, wiping all traces of the 25th president from the cartographic record.

Just a day earlier, the Obama administration had renamed the mountain – goodbye, Mount McKinley, hello, Denali. And as the president flew from Washington, D.C., to the Last Frontier, press secretary Josh Earnest clutched one of the new maps and defended the decision.

“It’s not an arbitrary change,” Earnest told reporters, referring to the dethroning of former President William McKinley, a native of Ohio. “In fact, this is an effort to align the policies of the federal government with what Alaskan natives have referred to that way for thousands of years. And so this seems to be a common-sense way for us to acknowledge that name.

“The Department of Interior, I understand, has said they will work with leaders in Ohio, especially, who are especially interested in this to find an appropriate way to acknowledge President McKinley’s contribution to our country,” he continued. “That’s an appropriate thing to do and that’s what the Department of Interior is looking at.”

Obama hopes to make climate change the cornerstone of his remaining time in office, but his plans to use his three-day Alaska trip to highlight the phenomenon come with a tense backdrop.

As senior adviser Brian Deese told reporters before the trip: “The president has been pretty clear about his long-term vision for our nation’s energy sector. He believes that America needs to lead, and the world needs to lead, in transitioning to an energy system based on carbon-zero renewable energy.”

Still, environmentalists are wary of the man who just allowed Royal Dutch Shell to develop limited offshore oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea. An online petition by the group Credo Action sends the angry message: “Climate leaders don’t drill the Arctic.”

A coalition of groups including Alaska Rising Tide rallied Monday just blocks from the convention center where Obama will address the international GLACIER conference on climate change. The groups are demanding an end to offshore Arctic drilling and a rapid transition to renewable energy sources.

Protesters in polar bear costumes lolled on a long, grassy park as others waved signs proclaiming, “People for the Ethical Treatment of Alaska” and “Our Future Must Be Renewable.” Kelly Heithold, an Anchorage life coach, said she joined the demonstration for her grandchildren’s sake.

“I am here because overall I am just concerned about our climate and the Earth,” she said, squinting in the bright sunshine. “I am concerned about my grandkids and what their life will look like if we don’t make changes. I am concerned about the Arctic, but I am concerned about the Earth.”

Animal welfare organizations have launched an ad campaign “to ensure that an increasingly ice-free Arctic will not become a thoroughfare for trade in commercial whale products.”

And then there are those who argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to allow for the extraction of this cash-strapped state’s abundant natural resources, among them, oil, natural gas and minerals key to manufacturing.

Gov. Bill Walker, who flew in with Obama on Air Force One, is among that group.

In a news conference last week about the president’s visit, Walker told reporters that “one of the major messages to the president is the fact that we have an excellent pipeline in Alaska, except it’s three-quarters empty. And so I’ll talk to him about what we need to do to put more oil in the pipeline, more access we need to have to our resources.”

Talking to reporters on the plane trip west, Walker said he thanked the president for allowing Shell to drill in the Chukchi Sea and said he is confident that the oil giant will proceed safely.

And he said his state is “excited to have a president come up and it’s actually a destination, it’s not just a low-on-fuel stop.”

Obama will be the first sitting president to venture north of the Arctic Circle when he visits Kotzebue on Wednesday. But he’s not the first to visit this, the biggest state in America.

Walker said the two men talked about the predecessors’ visits during their in-flight one-on-one time.

Jimmy Carter went fly-fishing. Warren Harding visited Juneau and the Alaska governor’s home not long before his death. (“I didn’t bring that one up,” Walker quipped.)

When Ronald Reagan stayed at the Fairbanks home of then-Sen. Frank Murkowski, the hot water ran out.

“They were out there with flashlights,” Walker said, “trying to figure out how to get the hot water going again.”

Walker said it was “great” that the president can “get out and touch Alaska, be part of it.”