Obama Shirtfronts Tony Abbott Again, Calls World Leaders Who Lag On Climate Change “Not Fit To Lead”

The upcoming Paris United Nations climate change conference in November/December is looking more and more likely to be the defining global political moment on climate change that Copenhagen was supposed to be back in 2009. Major countries like China, Brazil and France have been falling over each other to try and make Paris a success, which has led to more than a few moments of national embarrassment for Australia.

At the Brisbane G20 summit last year America and China announced an historic agreement to work together on cutting their carbon emissions, despite Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s best efforts to keep climate change off the agenda altogether. Obama’s speech to Queensland uni students at the start of the summit, where he encouraged young people to “keep raising your voices” on climate change and declared “leaders must be held accountable” if they failed to act, was widely interpreted as a rebuke of nations like Australia who’ve been dragging their feet on the issue.

But those remarks are pretty mild compared to what he just came up with in Alaska, which he’s visiting as part of a ten-day “climate tour” to talk up the need for aggressive US climate policy.

“Let’s go to Alaska!” Go behind the scenes with @POTUS as he previews his trip to the frontlines of climate change. http://t.co/WJw0WUcocl

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 1, 2015

Speaking to representatives of numerous governments at the GLACIER Conference of Arctic nations in Anchorage earlier today our time, Obama made some extremely blunt statements about how bad climate change is going to get if we don’t do something about it, and criticised the slowness of governments to act thus far.

“We’re not moving fast enough. None of the nations represented here are moving fast enough,” Obama said, sounding like your loving but constantly disappointed uncle in one of his rare moments of anger:

“This is within our power. This is a solvable problem if we start now. We’re starting to see that enough consensus is being built internationally, and within each of our own body politics, that we may have the political will — finally — to get moving.

“The time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is passed. The time to plead ignorance is surely passed. Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone. They are on their own shrinking island.

“If we were to abandon our course of action … we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.

“Any leader willing to take a gamble on a future like that — any so-called leader who doesn’t take this issue seriously or treats it like a joke — is not fit to lead.”

Entirely unrelated, here is the current leader of Australia treating climate change like a joke.

In fairness to Abbott, that video is from 2008, and he’s since said he supports the science of climate change. On the other hand, he also made us the only country on Earth to repeal a nationwide carbon emissions reduction policy and is actively torching the renewable energy sector, so screw him.

“This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet we’ve got while we still can,” Obama said in that speech. Signs are increasingly pointing to the world’s largest and most powerful nations agreeing with him. If the G20 was bad for Abbott, Paris is going to be a bloodbath.