Father’s Day video says Obama is ‘#1 Dad’ on climate action

Media Contacts

Environment America

Washington, D.C. – With Father’s Day around the corner, a new video from Environment America features conservation leaders, congressmen, and other dads from across the country — along with their cute children — thanking President Obama for his efforts to stem the climate crisis.
 
“Thank you for showing my kids and every kid in America what leadership looks like,” Tom Steyer, founder of NextGen Climate, said in the video.
 
Jon Carson of SolarCity, Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth, and Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) were among the dozens of other fathers who addressed the president directly in the short video.
 
With 2014 and 2015 breaking heat records, this Father’s Day may prove to be the hottest yet. Scientists say rising temperatures are contributing to more extreme storms, heat waves, and rising seas – all of which will get worse without aggressive action to curb pollution.
 
Fathers in the video said they didn’t want their kids to grow up in a more dangerous world, with drought and extreme weather the new normal.
                                                                                     
“I want to leave a better world for my kids,” said one father with two babies on his lap.
 
“It’s important to me to that these kids live in a world not racked by escalating heat,” said another surrounded by his three daughters.
 
The video comes almost three years after the president first announced his Climate Action Plan on a hot June day on the campus of Georgetown University. The president said then he wanted to be able to “look our children in the eye” with the confidence that he’d done all he could to protect their health and their future.
 
He’s since gone on to do more than any other president to slow the threat of climate change, including enacting the nation’s first-ever carbon pollution limits on power plants, and leading nearly 200 nations to adopt the Paris climate agreement to avoid dangerous global warming.
 
“Thanks to President Obama’s leadership, now more than ever, we can actually picture that it’s possible to move to a future of 100 percent renewables,” said Rob Sargent, Energy Program director for Environment America and father of two. “Ultimately, it will be up to the world’s future fathers and others to follow through on the bold progress the president has begun.”