Icebergs are seen floating in Harlequin Lake near Yakutat, in southeastern Alaska October 7, 2014.Bob Strong/Reuters
Seeking an Arctic stage to stress the grave perils posed by global warming, U.S. President Barack Obama will press northern nations, including Canada, for greater curbs on carbon emissions during his first official visit to Alaska on Monday.
In advance of his trip, the President laid out a stark picture of collapsing glaciers, rapidly melting Arctic sea ice and indigenous communities inundated by rising seas.
"What's happening in Alaska isn't just a preview of what will happen to us if we don't take action," Mr. Obama warned in a pretrip video. "It's a wake-up call. The alarm bells are ringing."
Mr. Obama, with an eye on his presidential legacy, casts the struggle to limit global warning as a fight for survival.
"As long as I'm President, America will lead the world to meet this threat before it's too late," he said.
Mr. Obama, who has already struck a major bilateral pact with China to cut carbon emissions and is expected to try to press for even greater global effort in Paris later this year, wants northern nations to act.
Foreign ministers from five of the seven circumpolar nations – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, all of which are expected to back Mr. Obama's call for immediate action to cut emissions and protect the Arctic – will attend the Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience (GLACIER).
Only two countries – Canada and Russia, where resource exploitation, not curbing carbon emissions, is the top Arctic priority – won't send a minister to hear Mr. Obama's call for action.
Neither Foreign Minister Rob Nicholson nor Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, who led the Arctic Council during Canada's two-year chairmanship, will attend the two-day GLACIER conference hosted by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Anchorage, Alaska. Instead Ottawa is sending a senior bureaucrat, Daniel Jean, a deputy minister. Moscow will be similarly represented by an official, Russia's U.S. Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Mr. Obama, whose only previous visit to the 49th state was a brief stop at Elmendorf Air Force Base while Air Force One was refuelled during the President's Asian trip in 2009, said: "Alaskans are on the front lines of one of the greatest challenges we face this century: climate change."
But not all Alaskans are impressed by the three-day visit that will include stops in smaller communities as part of a rallying cry to battle global warming.
"He's coming to use Alaska as a backdrop to further his argument on climate change," Mike Dingman, a fifth-generation Alaskan wrote in a stinging column for the Alaska Dispatch News. "Every Alaskan, regardless of political leaning, should be offended that the President is coming to our state and disrupting our lives for a few days just to use us for his own political purposes."
Alaska's Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski warned Mr. Obama that "climate change must not be used as an excuse to deprive Alaskans of our best economic prospects," meaning further oil and gas development. And Republican Representative Don Young warned the President not "to pander to extreme interest groups using Alaska as a poster child for their reckless agenda."
Even some environmental activists have accused Mr. Obama of hypocrisy in his new-found interest in Alaska. "Climate leaders don't drill in the Arctic," the group Credo said in a searing parody of Mr. Obama's pretrip video.
In recent months, Mr. Obama has stepped up his dire warnings about climate change. "We can't condemn our kids and grandkids to a planet that's beyond fixing," he said. But it remains unclear how much change he can force, especially given widespread opposition in Congress, where some prominent Republicans remain unconvinced by the overwhelming evidence that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are the prime driver of global warming.
"Climate change once seemed like a problem for future generations but for most Americans, it is already a reality, deeper droughts, and longer wildfire seasons, some of our cities even flood," Mr. Obama said in advance of his Alaska trip.
Yet Mr. Obama's record of battling climate change is mixed. He's delivered soaring speeches calling man-made global warning the gravest peril facing humanity and urging sweeping action to cut carbon emissions rather than let future generations suffer.
His administration has set tough new rules that will curb coal use in power generation but has also infuriated environmentalists by giving big oil companies permission to drill offshore, including in the Arctic where Shell drill ships are currently deployed.
The President seems all but certain to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, despite Prime Minister Stephen Harper's relentless lobbying and his insistence that approval is a "no brainer."
Environmentalists turned Keystone XL into a test of Mr. Obama's credibility on climate change, saying the scheme to funnel carbon-heavy Alberta oil sands crude to U.S. ports and refineries would spur development of the world's dirtiest oil. The Obama administration has also encouraged wind and solar generation with billions worth of tax breaks and subsidies, sometimes funding companies that went bankrupt.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Leona Aglukkaq as Health Minister. In fact, she is Environment Minister.