Obama's new climate change call: Yes we can

Now “yes we can” is about fighting climate change too. President Barack Obama wielded his campaign slogan to hail the green energy revolution here on Monday — and to bash the critics who he said were desperately clinging to the past as a renewable energy future approaches. Monday’s speech kicked off a two-week global warming messaging sprint by Obama that will take him from the Las Vegas event to New Orleans on Thursday for a Hurricane Katrina commemoration tour to a glacier in north Alaska next week. Throughout, he’ll be using the devastating prospects of extreme weather and other climate changes in an effort to galvanize support for the executive actions he’s already taken — such as the first-ever greenhouse gas rules for power plants released earlier this month — as he lays out the groundwork for the major international climate change agreement he’s hoping will emerge from the global climate summit in Paris in December. If successful, that international agreement could stand as one of the defining accomplishments of Obama’s presidency. It would also be an important reset for Obama after his failure to secure a significant international climate deal at the 2009 conference in Copenhagen during his first term, despite rushing there in person at the last minute to plead for progress...more