Bill McKibben on How Climate Crises and New Technologies Will Change What It Means to Be Human

Murtaza Hussain

Is the human race approaching its demise? The question itself may sound hyperbolic — or like a throwback to the rapture and apocalypse. Yet there is reason to believe that such fears are no longer so overblown. The threat of climate change is forcing millions around the world to realistically confront a future in which their lives, at a minimum, look radically worse than they are today. At the same time, emerging technologies of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are giving a small, technocratic elite the power to radically alter homo sapiens to the point where the species no longer resembles itself. Whether through ecological collapse or technological change, human beings are fast approaching a dangerous precipice.

The threats that we face today are not exaggerated. They are real, visible, and potentially imminent. They are also the subject of a recent book by Bill McKibben, entitled “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?” 

McKibben is an environmentalist and author, as well as the founder of 350.org, a campaign group working to reduce carbon emissions. His book provides a sober, empirical analysis of the reasons why the human race may be reaching its final stages.

McKibben spoke to The Intercept about the book. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you explain what you mean by the “human game”?

I was looking for a phrase to describe the totality of everything that we do as human beings. You could also term it as human civilization, or the human project. But “game” seems like a more appropriate term. Not because it’s trivial, but because, like any other game, it doesn’t really have a goal outside of itself. The only goal is to continue to play, and hopefully play well. Playing the human game well might be described as living with dignity and ensuring that others can live with dignity as well.

There are very serious threats now facing the human game. Basic questions of human survival and identity are being realistically called into question. It’s become clear that climate change is dramatically shrinking the size of the board on which the game is played. At the same time, some emerging technologies threaten the idea that human beings as a species will even be around to play in the future.

Could you briefly run down the implications of climate change for the future of human civilization, as we presently understand it?

Climate change is by far the biggest thing that humans have ever managed to do on this planet. It has altered the chemistry of the atmosphere in fundamental ways, raised the temperature of the planet over 1 degree Celsius, melted half the summer ice in the Arctic, and made the oceans 30 percent more acidic. We are seeing uncontrollable forest fires around the world, along with record levels of drought and flooding. In some places, average daily temperatures are already becoming too hot for human beings to even work during the daylight.

People are making plans to leave major cities and low-lying coastal areas, where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years. Even in rich countries like the United States, critical infrastructure is being strained. We saw this recently with the shutdown of electrical power in much of California due to wildfire risk. This is what we’ve done at merely 1 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is already becoming difficult to live in large parts of the planet. On our current trajectory, we are headed for 3 or 4 degrees of warming. At that level, we simply won’t have a civilization like we do now.

Since the major culprit in climate change remains the fossil fuel industry, what practical steps can be taken to get their activities under control? And given that they also share a planet with everyone else, what exactly is their plan for a future of climate dystopia?

We have already made efforts at divestment and halting the construction of pipelines, but the next crucial area is finance: focusing on the banks and asset managers that give them the money to do what they do. It has become very clear that the only goal of the fossil fuel industry is to protect their business model at all costs, even at the cost of the planet. Major oil companies like Exxon knew about the connection between carbon emissions and climate change in the 1980s. They knew and believed in what was coming. Instead of rationally adjusting their behavior to avoid it, they invested millions in lobbying and disinformation to ensure that the world wouldn’t do anything to make them change or stop their activities.

To the extent that any fossil fuel company thinks about the long run at all — and it’s not clear that any still do — they know that their days are numbered. Renewable energy costs are plummeting, and what the industry is fighting for now is to just keep themselves going for a few more decades. Their goal is to ensure that we’re still burning a lot of oil and gas in 10 or 20 years, rather than trying to get off the stuff as fast as possible.

The other major threat that you identify is posed by technologies like genetic engineering. Can you explain the threat that they pose to human identity and purpose?

Just as we had long taken for granted the stability of the planet, we have likewise taken for granted the stability of the human species. There are technologies now emerging that call into question very fundamental assumption about what it means to be a human being.

Take, for example, genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR. These are already now coming into effect, as we saw recently in China, where a pair of twins were reportedly born after having their genes modified in embryo. I don’t see any problem with using gene editing to help existing people with existing diseases. That is very different, however, from genetically engineering embryos with specialized modifications.

Let’s say for example that an expectant couple decides to engineer their new child to have a certain hormonal balance aimed at improving their mood. That child may reach adolescence one day and find themselves feeling very happy without any particular explanation why. Are they falling in love? Or is it just their genetic engineering specs kicking in? Human beings could soon be designed with a whole range of new specs that modifies their thoughts, feelings, and abilities. I think that such a prospect — not far-fetched at all today — will be a devastating attack on the most vital things about being human. It will call into question basic ideas of who we are and how we think about ourselves.

There is also the implication of accelerating technological change in genetic engineering technology. After modifying their first child, those same parents may come back five years later to the clinic to make changes to their second child. In the meantime, the technology has marched on, and you can now get a whole new series of upgrades and tweaks. What does that mean for the first child? It makes them the iPhone 6: obsolete. That’s a very new idea for human beings. One of the standard features of technology is obsolescence. A situation where you are rapidly making people themselves obsolete seems wrongheaded to me.

There also seems to be a question of economic inequality here, in the sense that people with more resources will be the ones with the access to these genetic enhancements.

As things stand, these technologies will take the economic inequality presently in existence and encode it in our genes. This is so obviously going to happen if we continue down this path that no one bothers to argue otherwise. Lee Silver, a professor at Princeton University who is one of the leading proponents of genetic modification, has already said that in the future we will have two unequal classes of human beings: “GenRich” and “naturals.” He and many others have already begun taking such a future as granted.

Do you think that artificial intelligence poses a similar threat to human beings?

Many of the first generation of people who studied AI came away deeply afraid of its potential implications. There is a fear that smart robots and programming codes may get out of hand and end up posing a threat to human beings. Those fears may or may not be real. At the end of the day, they worry me less than the more fundamental assault on human meaning and purpose posed by these technologies. They can easily eliminate most of the choices and activities that have given us our basic sense of identity as human beings.

What should be the priority of social movements seeking to defend “the human game” at the moment? And do we have cause for optimism?

Climate change is such an immediate and overpowering issue that it should be the focus of our attention right now, because it could make everything else moot. I’ve gotten to watch the rise of the climate movement over many years and it gives me cause for some optimism. We’ve recently seen massive climate strikes around the world. The Democratic Party in the United States is becoming energized on this issue. These are good signs. Whether they come in time or not, we don’t know. But the advent of human genetic engineering is not getting the attention it deserves at the present. The profound implications of CRISPR and other rapidly evolving technologies are things that we should give much more attention. From a strategic perspective, it would be good to get a resistance going sooner than later. As we have seen with fossil fuels, once there is a huge, powerful industry behind something, it becomes much more difficult to control.

It seems like at core there is an ideological issue underlying all of these threats that are presently facing human beings.

It’s instructive that a lot of the fantasies underlying the most extreme manifestations of genetic engineering and AI come from people in Silicon Valley who share a libertarian mindset. They are essentially hip versions of the Koch brothers. They share an ethos with the fossil fuel industry that says no one should ever question decisions made by the powerful and that no one should ever get in the way of business and technological innovation.

Meanwhile, the public is being told — and has been told for a long time — that they’re nothing but individuals and nothing but consumers. That goes against everything we know about human nature. Human beings are happy when they’re part of working communities, not when they’re out on their own as individuals trying to take over the universe. That’s what all these battles are in some sense about: building human solidarity against a hyper-individualist elite. We need to find out once again how to make decisions as a society, rather than have a small group of super-wealthy people privately making them for us.

Joseph Stiglitz: Corporate greed is accelerating climate change. But we can still head off disaster

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute. His latest book, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, will be released by W.W. Norton on April 23. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.  

America's economy has not been working for a large portion of the country. Workers at the bottom of the income scale earn wages, adjusted for inflation, that are not much higher than what they were 60 years ago, while the income of a typical full‐time male worker hasn't budged much from 40 years ago. In addition, life expectancy is in decline. But the economy is not only failing American citizens. It's failing the planet, and that means it's failing future generations. 

There are many reasons for our plight, including corporate power and greed centered on immediate profits and little regard for the impacts business decisions have on low-income Americans and the environment. Corporations have translated their economic power into political power, lobbying for policies that give them free rein to despoil the environment; and the swamp President Donald Trump promised to drain has been overflowing. At the same time, Trump has publicly asserted that climate change is a hoax, and yet his administration has repeatedly been forced to admit it is a reality — in response to climate lawsuits such as Juliana v. United States, for which I'm an expert witness.

 

Climate change is real, and it includes not only an increase in the average temperature, but also more extreme weather events including droughts, floods and hurricanes that have led to a large number of deaths. The United States has borne enormous costs as a result of the warming planet — in 2017, more than 1.5% of GDP. By the end of this century, some sectors of the US economy, including agriculture and energy, could lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year because of climate change, according to the latest report issued by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. 

 

So there is a real urgency to respond to our economic malaise and our climate crisis. The good news on this Earth Day is that these are problems of our own making, and that means a change toward pro-Earth policies can make a big difference. Even better, the major investments we need to respond to the crisis would be a spur to the economy. This is one of the central messages of the Green New Deal. 

 

The transition to the "green economy," in which we rely on renewable energy, won't happen on its own, however. It will require a mobilization of resources — the kind we saw during the New Deal and the Second World War. 

 

Government will have to take the lead, and it will require public investments — including in infrastructure and research — and regulations. Environmental regulations such as the Clean Air Act can and have worked, and typically are very cost‐effective. Without these measures, our air would be even more unbreathable than the air in New Delhi or Beijing today. 

 

Dealing effectively with climate change is well within our reach; in fact, I recently co‐chaired an international commission that showed that the global goals of limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius were clearly achievable. It would make so much more sense to spend money retrofitting our economy to reduce the risk of disastrous climate change rather than spending money to deal with the enormous economic and human costs of coping with its consequences. 

 

Some of the required resources would come simply from eliminating the huge subsidies we provide for fossil fuels, or from taxing corporations that inflict damage on our environment. This would encourage corporations to work hard to prevent it. But there are broader changes that would help grow the economy, providing some of the needed resources: curbing the excesses of corporate power more generally would lead to a more efficient economy and to more equality. So, too, would curbing the abuses of corporate governance, like CEOs paying themselves so much at the expense both of workers and investment. Policies that reduce discrimination in the labor market and provide more flexibility in hours are examples of supply‐side measures that work. And over the long run, education policies that help all citizens live up to their potential would also help the economy grow.

 

The mobilization during World War II had some long‐term salutary effects on our economy and society: It brought women into the labor force and it helped transform us from an agrarian to an urban society. The mobilization required to fight climate change has a similar potential. As we restructure our economy and society away from a high‐carbon economy and toward a more sustainable one, we should seize this opportunity to create the society that benefits all of us, as well as the planet.

Trump’s radical departure from postwar foreign policy

By Fareed Zakaria

We now have a Trump Doctrine, and it is, at least in its conception and initial execution, the most radical departure from a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy since 1945. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and national security adviser H.R. McMaster say that President Trump has “a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” The senior officials add: “Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.” That embrace has now led the United States to withdraw from the Paris accord on climate change, signed by 194 other parties.

The “elemental” aspect of international relations has existed for millennia. The history of the human race is one of competition and conflict. U.S. foreign policy has amply reflected this feature. The United States has the world’s largest military and intelligence apparatus, troops and bases in dozens of countries around the world, and ongoing military interventions on several continents. This is not the picture of a nation unaware of political and military competition.

But in 1945, the world did change. In the wake of two of the deadliest wars in human history, with tens of millions killed and much of Europe and Asia physically devastated, the United States tried to build a new international system. It created institutions, rules and norms that would encourage countries to solve their differences peaceably — through negotiations rather than war. It forged a system in which trade and commerce would expand the world economy so that a rising tide could lift all boats. It set up mechanisms to manage global problems that no one country could solve. And it emphasized basic human rights so that there were stronger moral and legal prohibitions against dehumanizing policies such as those that led to the Holocaust.

It didn’t work perfectly. The Soviet Union and its allies rejected many of these ideas from the start. Many developing nations adopted only some parts of the system. But Western Europe, Canada and the United States did, in fact, become an amazing zone of peace and economic, political and military cooperation. Certainly there was competition among nations, but it was managed peacefully and always with the aim of greater growth, more freedom and improved human rights.

The “West” that emerged is, in historical terms, a miracle. Europe, which had torn itself apart for hundreds of years because of the “elemental nature” of international competition, was now competing only to create better jobs and more growth, not to annex countries and subjugate populations.

President Trump has decided to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Here's what you need to know (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post) .

This zone of peace grew over the years, first encompassing Japan and South Korea, and later a few countries in Latin America. It was always in competition and conflict with the Soviet bloc, in traditional geopolitical ways. Then in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and large parts of the world gravitated toward this open international order.

At the heart of the system was the United States, which had tried to create such an enterprise after World War I but failed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, learning from those mistakes, advanced a new set of ideas as World War II was drawing to a close. This time, it worked.

Since then, every president of either party has recognized that the United States has created something unique that is a break from centuries of “elemental” international conflict. In the past two-and-a-half decades, it has tried to help incorporate hundreds of millions of people, from Mexico to Ukraine, who want to be part of this liberal — meaning free — international order.


From the start of his political career, Trump has seemed unaware of this history and ignorant of these accomplishments. He has consistently been dismissive of the United States’ closest political, economic and moral allies. He speaks admiringly of strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte but critically of almost every democratic leader of Europe.

The consequences of Trump’s stance and his actions are difficult to foresee. They might result in the slow erosion of the liberal international order. They might mean the rise of a new, not-so-liberal order, championed by China and India, both of them mercantilist and nationalist countries.

But they could also result, in the long run, in the strengthening of this order, perhaps by the reemergence of Europe. Trump has brought the continent’s countries together in a way that even Putin could not. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Europe must look out for itself and, as if to underscore that fact, the same week welcomed the prime minister of India and the premier of China. French President Emmanuel Macron upheld Western interests and values face to face with Putin, in just the way an American president would have done in the past.

Trump might not cause the end of the Western world, but he could end the United States’ role at its center.

Obama’s harsh words for Trump after Paris withdrawal

By Peter Holley




The Paris climate agreement was a step forward. President Trump's decision to withdraw from the landmark agreement was several giant steps in the opposite direction. 

That's the underlying message of former president Barack Obama's statement on his successor's controversial move.

Brief and to the point, Obama never mentions Trump by name. Instead, he pointedly refers to the “absence of American leadership,” a jabbing phrase that for many Trump critics extends beyond the climate agreement.

Statement from President Barack Obama on the Paris climate agreement:

A year and a half ago, the world came together in Paris around the first-ever global agreement to set the world on a low-carbon course and protect the world we leave to our children.

It was steady, principled American leadership on the world stage that made that achievement possible.

[Transcript: President Trump’s remarks on leaving the Paris climate deal, annotated] 
 

It was bold American ambition that encouraged dozens of other nations to set their sights higher as well. And what made that leadership and ambition possible was America’s private innovation and public investment in growing industries like wind and solar — industries that created some of the fastest new streams of good-paying jobs in recent years, and contributed to the longest streak of job creation in our history.

Simply put, the private sector already chose a low-carbon future. And for the nations that committed themselves to that future, the Paris Agreement opened the floodgates for businesses, scientists, and engineers to unleash high-tech, low-carbon investment and innovation on an unprecedented scale.

[Trump announces U.S. will exit Paris climate deal] 
 

The nations that remain in the Paris Agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created. I believe the United States of America should be at the front of the pack.

But even in the absence of American leadership; even as this Administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got.

President Obama Holds a Press Conference (Video?Transcript)

THE PRESIDENT:  Good afternoon.  This is the most wonderful press conference of the year.  I've got a list of who’s been naughty and nice to call on.  (Laughter.)  But let me first make a couple of quick points, and then I’ll take your questions.

Typically, I use this yearend press conference to review how far we’ve come over the course of the year.  Today, understandably, I'm going to talk a little bit about how far we’ve come over the past eight years.

As I was preparing to take office, the unemployment rate was on its way to 10 percent.  Today, it’s at 4.6 percent -- the lowest in nearly a decade.  We’ve seen the longest streak of job growth on record, and wages have grown faster over the past few years than at any time in the past 40.

When I came into office, 44 million people were uninsured.  Today, we’ve covered more than 20 million of them.  For the first time in our history, more than 90 percent of Americans are insured.  In fact, yesterday was the biggest day ever for HealthCare.gov.  More than 670,000 Americans signed up to get covered, and more are signing up by the day.

We’ve cut our dependence on foreign oil by more than half, doubled production of renewable energy, enacted the most sweeping reforms since FDR to protect consumers and prevent a crisis on Wall Street from punishing Main Street ever again.  None of these actions stifled growth, as critics predicted.  Instead, the stock market has nearly tripled.  Since I signed Obamacare into law, our businesses have added more than 15 million new jobs.  And the economy is undoubtedly more durable than it was in the days when we relied on oil from unstable nations and banks took risky bets with your money.

Add it all up, and last year, the poverty rate fell at the fastest rate in almost 50 years, while the median household income grew at the fastest rate on record.  In fact, income gains were actually larger for households at the bottom and the middle than for those at the top.  And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by nearly two-thirds and protecting vital investments that grow the middle class.

In foreign policy, when I came into office, we were in the midst of two wars.  Now, nearly 180,000 troops are down to 15,000.  Bin Laden, rather than being at large, has been taken off the battlefield, along with thousands of other terrorists.  Over the past eight years, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed an attack on our homeland that was directed from overseas.

Through diplomacy, we’ve ensured that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon -- without going to war with Iran.  We opened up a new chapter with the people of Cuba.  And we brought nearly 200 nations together around a climate agreement that could very well save this planet for our kids.  And almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago.

In other words, by so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started.  That's a situation that I’m proud to leave for my successor.  And it’s thanks to the American people -- to the hard work that you’ve put in, the sacrifices you’ve made for your families and your communities, the businesses that you started or invested in, the way you looked out for one another.  And I could not be prouder to be your President.

Of course, to tout this progress doesn’t mean that we’re not mindful of how much more there is to do.  In this season in particular, we’re reminded that there are people who are still hungry, people who are still homeless; people who still have trouble paying the bills or finding work after being laid off.

 There are communities that are still mourning those who have been stolen from us by senseless gun violence, and parents who still are wondering how to protect their kids.  And after I leave office, I intend to continue to work with organizations and citizens doing good across the country on these and other pressing issues to build on the progress that we’ve made.

Around the world, as well, there are hotspots where disputes have been intractable, conflicts have flared up, and people -- innocent people are suffering as a result.  And nowhere is this more terribly true than in the city of Aleppo.  For years, we’ve worked to stop the civil war in Syria and alleviate human suffering.  It has been one of the hardest issues that I've faced as President.

The world, as we speak, is united in horror at the savage assault by the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies on the city of Aleppo.  We have seen a deliberate strategy of surrounding, besieging, and starving innocent civilians.  We've seen relentless targeting of humanitarian workers and medical personnel; entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble and dust.  There are continuing reports of civilians being executed.  These are all horrific violations of international law.

 Responsibility for this brutality lies in one place alone -- with the Assad regime and its allies Russia and Iran.  And this blood and these atrocities are on their hands.

We all know what needs to happen.  There needs to be an impartial international observer force in Aleppo that can help coordinate an orderly evacuation through safe corridors.  There has to be full access for humanitarian aid, even as the United States continues to be the world’s largest donor of humanitarian aid to the Syrian people.  And, beyond that, there needs to be a broader ceasefire that can serve as the basis for a political rather than a military solution.

That’s what the United States is going to continue to push for, both with our partners and through multilateral institutions like the U.N.

Regretfully, but unsurprisingly, Russia has repeatedly blocked the Security Council from taking action on these issues.  So we’re going to keep pressing the Security Council to help improve the delivery of humanitarian aid to those who are in such desperate need, and to ensure accountability, including continuing to monitor any potential use of chemical weapons in Syria.  And we’re going to work in the U.N. General Assembly as well, both on accountability and to advance a political settlement.  Because it should be clear that although you may achieve tactical victories, over the long term the Assad regime cannot slaughter its way to legitimacy.

That’s why we'll continue to press for a transition to a more representative government.  And that’s why the world must not avert our eyes to the terrible events that are unfolding.  The Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies are trying to obfuscate the truth.  The world should not be fooled.

 And the world will not forget.

So even in a season where the incredible blessings that we know as Americans are all around us, even as we enjoy family and friends and are reminded of how lucky we are, we should also be reminded that to be an American involves bearing burdens and meeting obligations to others.  American values and American ideals are what will lead the way to a safer and more prosperous 2017, both here and abroad.

And by the way, few embody those values and ideals like our brave men and women in uniform and their families.  So I just want to close by wishing all of them a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

With that, I will take some questions.  And I'm going to start with Josh Lederman, of AP.

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  There’s a perception that you're letting President Putin get away with interfering in the U.S. election, and that a response that nobody knows about or a lookback review just won’t cut it.  Are you prepared to call out President Putin by name for ordering this hacking?

 And do you agree with what Hillary Clinton now says, that the hacking was actually partly responsible for her loss?  And is your administration’s open quarreling with Trump and his team on this issue tarnishing the smooth transition of power that you have promised?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, first of all, with respect to the transition, I think they would be the first to acknowledge that we have done everything we can to make sure that they are successful as I promised.  And that will continue.  And it’s just been a few days since I last talked to the President-elect about a whole range of transition issues.  That cooperation is going to continue.

There hasn’t been a lot of squabbling.  What we’ve simply said is the facts, which are that, based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC, and that, as a consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that and make sure that we are preventing that kind of interference through cyberattacks in the future.

That should be a bipartisan issue; that shouldn’t be a partisan issue.  And my hope is that the President-elect is going to similarly be concerned with making sure that we don’t have potential foreign influence in our election process.  I don’t think any American wants that.  And that shouldn’t be a source of an argument.

I think that part of the challenge is that it gets caught up in the carryover from election season.  And I think it is very important for us to distinguish between the politics of the election and the need for us, as a country, both from a national security perspective but also in terms of the integrity of our election system and our democracy, to make sure that we don’t create a political football here.

Now, with respect to how this thing unfolded last year, let’s just go through the facts pretty quickly.  At the beginning of the summer, we’re alerted to the possibility that the DNC has been hacked, and I immediately order law enforcement as well as our intelligence teams to find out everything about it, investigate it thoroughly, to brief the potential victims of this hacking, to brief on a bipartisan basis the leaders of both the House and the Senate and the relevant intelligence committees.  And once we had clarity and certainty around what, in fact, had happened, we publicly announced that, in fact, Russia had hacked into the DNC.

And at that time, we did not attribute motives or any interpretations of why they had done so.  We didn’t discuss what the effects of it might be.  We simply let people know -- the public know, just as we had let members of Congress know -- that this had happened.

And as a consequence, all of you wrote a lot of stories about both what had happened, and then you interpreted why that might have happened and what effect it was going to have on the election outcomes.  We did not.  And the reason we did not was because in this hyper-partisan atmosphere, at a time when my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process was not in any way damaged, at a time when anything that was said by me or anybody in the White House would immediately be seen through a partisan lens, I wanted to make sure that everybody understood we were playing this thing straight -- that we weren’t trying to advantage one side or another, but what we were trying to do was let people know that this had taken place, and so if you started seeing effects on the election, if you were trying to measure why this was happening and how you should consume the information that was being leaked, that you might want to take this into account.

And that's exactly how we should have handled it.  Imagine if we had done the opposite.  It would have become immediately just one more political scrum.  And part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place -- at a time, by the way, when the President-elect himself was raising questions about the integrity of the election.

And, finally, I think it's worth pointing out that the information was already out.  It was in the hands of WikiLeaks, so that was going to come out no matter what.  What I was concerned about, in particular, was making sure that that wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself.

And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, and there were going to be some serious consequences if he didn’t.  And, in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process.  But the leaks through WikiLeaks had already occurred.

So when I look back in terms of how we handled it, I think we handled it the way it should have been handled.  We allowed law enforcement and the intelligence community to do its job without political influence.  We briefed all relevant parties involved in terms of what was taking place.  When we had a consensus around what had happened, we announced it -- not through the White House, not through me, but rather through the intelligence communities that had actually carried out these investigations.  And then we allowed you and the American public to make an assessment as to how to weigh that going into the election.

And the truth is, is that there was nobody here who didn’t have some sense of what kind of effect it might have.  I'm finding it a little curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton because you guys wrote about it every day.  Every single leak.  About every little juicy tidbit of political gossip -- including John Podesta's risotto recipe.  This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage.

So I do think it's worth us reflecting how it is that a presidential election of such importance, of such moment, with so many big issues at stake and such a contrast between the candidates, came to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks.  What is it about our political system that made us vulnerable to these kinds of potential manipulations -- which, as I've said publicly before, were not particularly sophisticated.

This was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.  They hacked into some Democratic Party emails that contained pretty routine stuff, some of it embarrassing or uncomfortable, because I suspect that if any of us got our emails hacked into, there might be some things that we wouldn’t want suddenly appearing on the front page of a newspaper or a telecast, even if there wasn’t anything particularly illegal or controversial about it.  And then it just took off.

And that concerns me.  And it should concern all of us.  But the truth of the matter is, is that everybody had the information.  It was out there.  And we handled it the way we should have.

Now, moving forward, I think there are a couple of issues that this raises.  Number one is just the constant challenge that we are going to have with cybersecurity throughout our economy and throughout our society.  We are a digitalized culture, and there is hacking going on every single day.  There’s not a company, there’s not a major organization, there’s not a financial institution, there’s not a branch of our government where somebody is not going to be phishing for something or trying to penetrate, or put in a virus or malware.  And this is why for the last eight years, I’ve been obsessed with how do we continually upgrade our cybersecurity systems.

And this particular concern around Russian hacking is part of a broader set of concerns about how do we deal with cyber issues being used in ways that can affect our infrastructure, affect the stability of our financial systems, and affect the integrity of our institutions, like our election process.

I just received a couple weeks back -- it wasn’t widely reported on -- a report from our cybersecurity commission that outlines a whole range of strategies to do a better job on this.  But it’s difficult, because it’s not all housed -- the target of cyberattacks is not one entity but it’s widely dispersed, and a lot of it is private, like the DNC.  It’s not a branch of government.  We can’t tell people what to do.  What we can do is inform them, get best practices.

What we can also do is to, on a bilateral basis, warn other countries against these kinds of attacks.  And we’ve done that in the past.  So just as I told Russia to stop it, and indicated there will be consequences when they do it, the Chinese have, in the past, engaged in cyberattacks directed at our companies to steal trade secrets and proprietary technology.  And I had to have the same conversation with Prime Minister -- or with President Xi, and what we’ve seen is some evidence that they have reduced -- but not completely eliminated -- these activities, partly because they can use cutouts.

One of the problems with the Internet and cyber issues is that there’s not always a return address, and by the time you catch up to it, attributing what happened to a particular government can be difficult, not always provable in court even though our intelligence communities can make an assessment.
What we’ve also tried to do is to start creating some international norms about this to prevent some sort of cyber arms race, because we obviously have offensive capabilities as well as defensive capabilities.  And my approach is not a situation in which everybody is worse off because folks are constantly attacking each other back and forth, but putting some guardrails around the behavior of nation-states, including our adversaries, just so that they understand that whatever they do to us we can potentially do to them.

We do have some special challenges, because oftentimes our economy is more digitalized, it is more vulnerable, partly because we’re a wealthier nation and we’re more wired than some of these other countries.  And we have a more open society, and engage in less control and censorship over what happens over the Internet, which is also part of what makes us special.

Last point -- and the reason I’m going on here is because I know that you guys have a lot of questions about this, and I haven't addressed all of you directly about it.  With respect to response, my principal goal leading up to the election was making sure that the election itself went off without a hitch, that it was not tarnished, and that it did not feed any sense in the public that somehow tampering had taken place with the actual process of voting.  And we accomplished that.

That does not mean that we are not going to respond.  It simply meant that we had a set of priorities leading up to the election that were of the utmost importance.  Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us, because we can do stuff to you.

But it is also important for us to do that in a thoughtful, methodical way.  Some of it we do publicly.  Some of it we will do in a way that they know, but not everybody will.  And I know that there have been folks out there who suggest somehow that if we went out there and made big announcements, and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that somehow that would potentially spook the Russians.  But keep in mind that we already have enormous numbers of sanctions against the Russians.  The relationship between us and Russia has deteriorated, sadly, significantly over the last several years.  And so how we approach an appropriate response that increases costs for them for behavior like this in the future, but does not create problems for us, is something that’s worth taking the time to think through and figure out.  And that’s exactly what we’ve done.

So at a point in time where we’ve taken certain actions that we can divulge publically, we will do so.  There are times where the message will go -- will be directly received by the Russians and not publicized.  And I should point out, by the way, part of why the Russians have been effective on this is because they don't go around announcing what they're doing.  It's not like Putin is going around the world publically saying, look what we did, wasn't that clever?  He denies it.  So the idea that somehow public shaming is going to be effective I think doesn't read the thought process in Russia very well.

Okay?

Q    Did Clinton lose because of the hacking?

THE PRESIDENT:  I'm going to let all the political pundits in this town have a long discussion about what happened in the election.  It was a fascinating election, so I'm sure there are going to be a lot of books written about it.

I've said what I think is important for the Democratic Party going forward rather than try to parse every aspect of the election.  And I've said before, I couldn't be prouder of Secretary Clinton, her outstanding service.  I thinks she's worked tirelessly on behalf of the American people, and I don't think she was treated fairly during the election.  I think the coverage of her and the issues was troubling.

But having said that, what I've been most focused on -- appropriate for the fact that I'm not going to be a politician in about, what is it, 32 days?  31?

Q    Thirty-four.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thirty four?  (Laughter.)  But what I've said is, is that I can maybe give some counsel and advice to the Democratic Party.  And I think that that the thing we have to spend the most time on -- because it's the thing we have the most control over -- is how do we make sure that we are showing up in places where I think Democratic policies are needed, where they are helping, where they are making a difference, but where people feel as if they're not being heard and where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, politically-correct, out-of-touch folks.  We have to be in those communities.  And I've seen that when we are in those communities, it makes a difference.

That's how I became President.  I became a U.S. senator not just because I had a strong base in Chicago, but because I was driving around downstate Illinois and going to fish frys and sitting in VFW halls and talking to farmers.  And I didn't win every one of their votes, but they got a sense of what I was talking about, what I cared about, that I was for working people, that I was for the middle class, that the reason I was interested in strengthening unions, and raising the minimum wage, and rebuilding our infrastructure, and making sure that parents had decent childcare and family leave was because my own family's history wasn't that different from theirs, even if I looked a little bit different.  Same thing in Iowa.

And so the question is, how do we rebuild that party as a whole so that there's not a county in any state -- I don't care how red -- that we don't have a presence and we're not making the argument.  Because I think we have the better argument.  But that requires a lot of work.  It's been something that I've been able to do successfully in my own campaigns.  It is not something I've been able to transfer to candidates in midterms and sort of build a sustaining organization around.  That's something that I would have liked to have done more of, but it's kind of hard to do when you're also dealing with a whole bunch of issues here in the White House.

And that doesn't mean, though, that it can't be done.  And I think there are going to be a lot of talented folks out there, a lot of progressives who share my values who are going to be leading the charge in the years to come.

Michelle Kosinski of CNN.

Q    Thank you.  So this week we heard Hillary Clinton talk about how she thinks that the FBI Director's most recent announcement made a difference in the outcome of the election.  And we also just heard in an op-ed her campaign chairman talk about something being deeply broken within the FBI.  He talked about thinking that the investigation early on was lackadaisical in his words.  So what do you think about those comments?  Do you think there's any truth to them?  Do you think there's a danger there that they're calling into question the integrity of institutions in a similar way that Donald Trump's team has done?

And the second part to that is that Donald Trump's team repeatedly -- I guess, giving the indication that the investigation of the Russian hack, as well as the retaliation, might not be such a priority once he's in office, so what do you think the risk is there?  And are you going to talk to him directly about some of those comments he made?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, on the latter point, as I said before, the transition from election season to governance season is not always smooth.  It's bumpy.  There are still feelings that are raw out there.  There are people who are still thinking about how things unfolded.  And I get all that.  But when Donald Trump takes the Oath of Office and is sworn as the 45th President of the United States, then he's got a different set of responsibilities and considerations.

And I've said this before:  I think there is a sobering process when you walk into the Oval Office.  And I haven’t shared previously private conversations I've had with the President-elect.  I will say that they have been cordial and, in some cases, have involved me making some pretty specific suggestions about how to ensure that regardless of our obvious deep disagreements about policy, maybe I can transmit some thoughts about maintaining the effectiveness, integrity, cohesion of the office, of various democratic institutions.  And he has listened.  I can't say that he will end up implementing, but the conversations themselves have been cordial as opposed to defensive in any way.  And I will always make myself available to him, just as previous Presidents have made themselves available to me as issues come up.

With respect to the FBI, I will tell you, I've had a chance to know a lot of FBI agents, I know Director Comey, and they take their job seriously, they work really hard, they help keep us safe and save a lot of lives.  And it is always a challenge for law enforcement when there's an intersection between the work that they are doing and the political system.  It's one of the difficulties of democracy, generally.  We have a system where we want our law enforcement investigators and our prosecutors to be free from politics, to be independent, to play it straight, but sometimes that involves investigations that touch on politics.  And particularly in this hyper-partisan environment that we've been in, everything is suspect, everything you do one way or the other.

One thing that I have done is to be pretty scrupulous about not wading into investigation decisions or prosecution decisions, or decisions not to prosecute.  I have tried to be really strict in my own behavior about preserving the independence of law enforcement, free from my own judgments and political assessments, in some cases.  And I don’t know why it would stop now.

Mike Dorning of Bloomberg.

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  On Aleppo, your views that what happens there is the responsibility of the Russian government, the Iranian government, the Assad regime are pretty well aired.  But do you, as President of the United States, leader of the free world, feel any personal moral responsibility now at the end of your presidency for the carnage that we’re all watching in Aleppo, which I’m sure disturbs you -- which you said disturbs you?

And, secondly, also on Aleppo, you’ve again made clear your practical disagreements with the idea of safe zones.  And President-elect Trump has, throughout his campaign, and he said again last night that he wants to create safe zones in Syria.  Do you feel like, in this transition, you need to help him toward implementing that?  Or was that not something that you should be doing?

THE PRESIDENT:  Mike, I always feel responsible.  I felt responsible when kids were being shot by snipers.  I felt responsible when millions of people had been displaced.  I feel responsible for murder and slaughter that’s taken place in South Sudan that’s not being reported on partly because there’s not as much social media being generated from there.

There are places around the world where horrible things are happening, and because of my office, because I’m President of the United States, I feel responsible.  I ask myself every single day, is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn’t deserve to suffer.

So that’s a starting point.  There’s not a moment during the course of this presidency where I haven’t felt some responsibility.  That’s true, by the way, for our own country.  When I came into office and people were losing their jobs and losing their homes and losing their pensions, I felt responsible, and I would go home at night and I would ask myself, was there something better that I could do or smarter that I could be that would make a difference in their lives, that would relieve their suffering and relieve their hardship.

So with respect to Syria, what I have consistently done is taken the best course that I can to try to end the civil war while having also to take into account the long-term national security interests of the United States.

And throughout this process, based on hours of meetings, if you tallied it up, days or weeks of meetings where we went through every option in painful detail, with maps, and we had our military, and we had our aid agencies, and we had our diplomatic teams, and sometimes we’d bring in outsiders who were critics of ours -- whenever we went through it, the challenge was that, short of putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground, uninvited, without any international law mandate, without sufficient support from Congress, at a time when we still had troops in Afghanistan and we still had troops in Iraq, and we had just gone through over a decade of war and spent trillions of dollars, and when the opposition on the ground was not cohesive enough to necessarily govern a country, and you had a military superpower in Russia prepared to do whatever it took to keeps its client-state involved, and you had a regional military power in Iran that saw their own vital strategic interests at stake and were willing to send in as many of their people or proxies to support the regime -- that in that circumstance, unless we were all in and willing to take over Syria, we were going to have problems, and that everything else was tempting because we wanted to do something and it sounded like the right thing to do, but it was going to be impossible to do this on the cheap.

And in that circumstance, I have to make a decision as President of the United States as to what is best -- I’m sorry, what’s going on?  Somebody’s not feeling good?  All right.  Why don’t we have -- we’ve got -- we can get our doctors back there to help out.  Does somebody want to go to my doctor’s office and just have them -- all right -- where was I?

Q    Doing it on the cheap.

THE PRESIDENT:  So we couldn’t do it on the cheap.  Now, it may be --

Can somebody help out please and get Doc Jackson in here?  Is somebody grabbing our doctor?

Q    Thank you, Mr. President, for stopping.

THE PRESIDENT:  Of course.  In the meantime, just give her a little room.  The doctor will be here in a second.  You guys know where the doctor’s office is?  Just go through the Palm doors.  It’s right next to the Map Room.  There he is.  All right, there’s Doc Jackson.  He’s all right.  Okay.  The doctor is in the house.

Q    You were saying you couldn’t do it on the cheap.

THE PRESIDENT:  And I don’t mean that -- I mean that with all sincerity.  I understand the impulse to want to do something.  But ultimately, what I’ve had to do is to think about what can we sustain, what is realistic.  And my first priority has to be what’s the right thing to do for America.
And it has been our view that the best thing to do has been to provide some support to the moderate opposition so that they could sustain themselves, and that we wouldn’t see anti-Assad regime sentiments just pouring into al Nusra and al Qaeda or ISIL; that we engaged our international partners in order to put pressure on all the parties involved, and to try to resolve this through diplomatic and political means.

I cannot claim that we’ve been successful.  And so that’s something that, as is true with a lot of issues and problems around the world, I have to go to bed with every night.  But I continue to believe that it was the right approach, given what realistically we could get done absent a decision, as I said, to go in a much more significant way.  And that, I think, would not have been sustainable or good for the American people because we had a whole host of other obligations that we also had to meet, wars we had already started and that were not yet finished.  

With respect to the issue of safe zones, it is a continued problem.  A continued challenge with safe zones is if you’re setting up those zones on Syrian territory, then that requires some force that is willing to maintain that territory in the absence of consent from the Syrian government and, now, the Russians or the Iranians.  So it may be that with Aleppo’s tragic situation unfolding, that in the short term, if we can get more of the tens of thousands who are still trapped there out, that so long as the world’s eyes are on them and they are feeling pressure, the regime and Russia concludes that they are willing to find some arrangement, perhaps in coordination with Turkey, whereby those people can be safe.  Even that will probably be temporary, but at least it solves a short-term issue that’s going to arise.

Unfortunately, we’re not even there yet, because right now we have Russians and Assad claiming that basically all the innocent civilians who were trapped in Aleppo are out when international organizations, humanitarian organizations who know better and who are on the ground have said unequivocally that there are still tens of thousands who are trapped and prepared to leave under pretty much any conditions.  And so right now, our biggest priority is to continue to put pressure wherever we can to try to get them out.

Q    Notwithstanding --

THE PRESIDENT:  I can’t have too much --

Q    On the second question, your intentions are well aired, but do you feel responsibility notwithstanding a move in that direction or help President-elect Trump move in that direction?

THE PRESIDENT:  I will help President Trump -- President-elect Trump with any advice, counsel, information that we can provide so that he, once he’s sworn in, can make a decision.  Between now and then, these are decisions that I have to make based on the consultations I have with our military and the people who have been working this every single day.

Peter Alexander.

Q    Mr. President, thank you very much.  Can you, given all the intelligence that we have now heard, assure the public that this was, once and for all, a free and fair election?  And specifically on Russia, do you feel any obligation now, as they’ve been insisting that this isn’t the case, to show the proof, as it were -- they say put your money where your mouth is and declassify some of the intelligence, some of the evidence that exists?  And more broadly, as it relates to Donald Trump on this very topic, are you concerned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, especially given some of the recent Cabinet picks, including his selection for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who toasted Putin with champagne over oil deals together?  Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT:  I may be getting older, because these multipart questions, I start losing track.  (Laughter.)

I can assure the public that there was not the kind of tampering with the voting process that was of concern and will continue to be of concern going forward; that the votes that were cast were counted, they were counted appropriately.  We have not seen evidence of machines being tampered with.  So that assurance I can provide.

That doesn’t mean that we find every single potential probe of every single voting machine all across the country, but we paid a lot of attention to it.  We worked with state officials, et cetera, and we feel confident that that didn’t occur and that the votes were cast and they were counted.

So that’s on that point.  What was the second one?

Q    The second one was about declassification.

THE PRESIDENT:  Declassification.  Look, we will provide evidence that we can safely provide that does not compromise sources and methods.  But I’ll be honest with you, when you’re talking about cybersecurity, a lot of it is classified.  And we’re not going to provide it because the way we catch folks is by knowing certain things about them that they may not want us to know, and if we’re going to monitor this stuff effectively going forward, we don’t want them to know that we know.

So this is one of those situations where unless the American people genuinely think that the professionals in the CIA, the FBI, our entire intelligence infrastructure -- many of whom, by the way, served in previous administrations and who are Republicans -- are less trustworthy than the Russians, then people should pay attention to what our intelligence agencies have to say.

This is part of what I meant when I said that we’ve got to think about what’s happening to our political culture here.  The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us.  They are a smaller country.  They are a weaker country.  Their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.  They don’t innovate.

But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are.  They can impact us if we abandon our values.  Mr. Putin can weaken us, just like he’s trying to weaken Europe, if we start buying into notions that it’s okay to intimidate the press, or lock up dissidents, or discriminate against people because of their faith or what they look like.

And what I worry about more than anything is the degree to which, because of the fierceness of the partisan battle, you start to see certain folks in the Republican Party and Republican voters suddenly finding a government and individuals who stand contrary to everything that we stand for as being okay because that’s how much we dislike Democrats.

I mean, think about it.  Some of the people who historically have been very critical of me for engaging with the Russians and having conversations with them also endorsed the President-elect, even as he was saying that we should stop sanctioning Russia and being tough on them, and work together with them against our common enemies.  He was very complimentary of Mr. Putin personally.

That wasn’t news.  The President-elect during the campaign said so.  And some folks who had made a career out of being anti-Russian didn’t say anything about it.  And then after the election, suddenly they’re asking, well, why didn’t you tell us that maybe the Russians were trying to help our candidate?  Well, come on.  There was a survey, some of you saw, where -- now, this is just one poll, but a pretty credible source -- 37 percent of Republican voters approve of Putin.  Over a third of Republican voters approve of Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB.  Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave.

And how did that happen?  It happened in part because, for too long, everything that happens in this town, everything that’s said is seen through the lens of "does this help or hurt us relative to Democrats, or relative to President Obama?"  And unless that changes, we’re going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence, because we’ve lost track of what it is that we’re about and what we stand for.

With respect to the President-elect’s appointments, it is his prerogative, as I’ve always said, for him to appoint who he thinks can best carry out his foreign policy or his domestic policy.  It is up to the Senate to advise and consent.  There will be plenty of time for members of the Senate to go through the record of all his appointees and determine whether or not they’re appropriate for the job.
Martha Raddatz.

Q    Mr. President, I want to talk about Vladimir Putin again.  Just to be clear, do you believe Vladimir Putin himself authorized the hack?  And do you believe he authorized that to help Donald Trump?  And on the intelligence, one of the things Donald Trump cites is Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction, and that they were never found.  Can you say, unequivocally, that this was not China, that this was not a 400-pound guy sitting on his bed, as Donald Trump says?  And do these types of tweets and kinds of statements from Donald Trump embolden the Russians?

THE PRESIDENT:  When the report comes out, before I leave office, that will have drawn together all the threads.  And so I don’t want to step on their work ahead of time.

What I can tell you is that the intelligence that I have seen gives me great confidence in their assessment that the Russians carried out this hack.

Q    Which hack?

THE PRESIDENT:  The hack of the DNC and the hack of John Podesta.

Now, the -- but again, I think this is exactly why I want the report out, so that everybody can review it.  And this has been briefed, and the evidence in closed session has been provided on a bipartisan basis -- not just to me, it’s been provided to the leaders of the House and the Senate, and the chairman and ranking members of the relevant committees.  And I think that what you’ve already seen is, at least some of the folks who have seen the evidence don’t dispute, I think, the basic assessment that the Russians carried this out.

Q    But specifically, can you not say that --

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, Martha, I think what I want to make sure of is that I give the intelligence community the chance to gather all the information.  But I’d make a larger point, which is, not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin.  This is a pretty hierarchical operation.  Last I checked, there’s not a lot of debate and democratic deliberation, particularly when it comes to policies directed at the United States.

We have said, and I will confirm, that this happened at the highest levels of the Russian government.  And I will let you make that determination as to whether there are high-level Russian officials who go off rogue and decide to tamper with the U.S. election process without Vladimir Putin knowing about it.

Q    So I wouldn’t be wrong in saying the President thinks Vladimir Putin authorized the hack?
THE PRESIDENT:  Martha, I’ve given you what I’m going to give you.

What was your second question?

Q    Do the tweets and do the statements by Donald Trump embolden Russia?

THE PRESIDENT:  As I said before, I think that the President-elect is still in transition mode from campaign to governance.  I think he hasn’t gotten his whole team together yet.  He still has campaign spokespersons sort of filling in and appearing on cable shows.  And there’s just a whole different attitude and vibe when you’re not in power as when you’re in power.

So rather than me sort of characterize the appropriateness or inappropriateness of what he’s doing at the moment, I think what we have to see is how will the President-elect operate, and how will his team operate, when they’ve been fully briefed on all these issues, they have their hands on all the levers of government, and they’ve got to start making decisions.

One way I do believe that the President-elect can approach this that would be unifying is to say that we welcome a bipartisan, independent process that gives the American people an assurance not only that votes are counted properly, that the elections are fair and free, but that we have learned lessons about how Internet propaganda from foreign countries can be released into the political bloodstream and that we’ve got strategies to deal with it for the future.

The more this can be nonpartisan, the better served the American people are going to be, which is why I made the point earlier -- and I’m going to keep on repeating this point:  Our vulnerability to Russia or any other foreign power is directly related to how divided, partisan, dysfunctional our political process is.  That’s the thing that makes us vulnerable.

If fake news that’s being released by some foreign government is almost identical to reports that are being issued through partisan news venues, then it’s not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect, because it doesn’t seem that far-fetched compared to some of the other stuff that folks are hearing from domestic propagandists.

To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent actors -- if that’s the storyline that’s being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they’re going to believe it.

So if we want to really reduce foreign influence on our elections, then we better think about how to make sure that our political process, our political dialogue is stronger than it’s been.
Mark Landler.

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  I wonder whether I can move you from Russia to China for a moment.

THE PRESIDENT:  Absolutely.

Q    Your successor spoke by phone with the President of Taiwan the other day and declared subsequently that he wasn’t sure why the United States needed to be bound by the one-China policy.  He suggested it could be used as a bargaining chip perhaps to get better terms on a trade deal or more cooperation on North Korea.  There’s already evidence that tensions between the two sides have increased a bit, and just today, the Chinese have evidently seized an underwater drone in the South China Sea.  Do you agree, as some do, that our China policy could use a fresh set of eyes?  And what’s the big deal about having a short phone call with the President of Taiwan?  Or do you worry that these types of unorthodox approaches are setting us on a collision course with perhaps our biggest geopolitical adversary?

THE PRESIDENT:  That’s a great question.  I’m somewhere in between.  I think all of our foreign policy should be subject to fresh eyes.  I think one of the -- I’ve said this before -- I am very proud of the work I’ve done.  I think I’m a better President now than when I started.  But if you’re here for eight years, in the bubble, you start seeing things a certain way and you benefit from -- the democracy benefits, America benefits from some new perspectives.

And I think it should be not just the prerogative but the obligation of a new President to examine everything that’s been done and see what makes sense and what doesn’t.  That’s what I did when I came in, and I’m assuming any new President is going to undertake those same exercises.

And given the importance of the relationship between the United States and China, given how much is at stake in terms of the world economy, national security, our presence in the Asia Pacific, China’s increasing role in international affairs -- there’s probably no bilateral relationship that carries more significance and where there’s also the potential if that relationship breaks down or goes into a full-conflict mode, that everybody is worse off.  So I think it’s fine for him to take a look at it.

What I’ve advised the President-elect is that across the board on foreign policy, you want to make sure that you’re doing it in a systematic, deliberate, intentional way.  And since there’s only one President at a time, my advice to him has been that before he starts having a lot of interactions with foreign governments other than the usual courtesy calls, that he should want to have his full team in place, that he should want his team to be fully briefed on what’s gone on in the past and where the potential pitfalls may be, where the opportunities are, what we’ve learned from eight years of experience, so that as he’s then maybe taking foreign policy in a new direction, he’s got all the information to make good decisions and, by the way, that all of government is moving at the same time and singing from the same hymnal.

And with respect to China -- and let’s just take the example of Taiwan -- there has been a longstanding agreement, essentially, between China, the United States, and, to some degree, the Taiwanese, which is to not change the status quo.  Taiwan operates differently than mainland China does.  China views Taiwan as part of China, but recognizes that it has to approach Taiwan as an entity that has its own ways of doing things.  The Taiwanese have agreed that as long as they’re able to continue to function with some degree of autonomy, that they won’t charge forward and declare independence.

And that status quo, although not completely satisfactory to any of the parties involved, has kept the peace and allowed the Taiwanese to be a pretty successful economy and a people who have a high degree of self-determination.  But understand, for China, the issue of Taiwan is as important as anything on their docket.  The idea of one China is at the heart of their conception as a nation.
And so if you are going to upend this understanding, you have to have thought through what the consequences are, because the Chinese will not treat that the way they’ll treat some other issues.

 They won’t even treat it the way they treat issues around the South China Sea, where we’ve had a lot of tensions.  This goes to the core of how they see themselves.  And their reaction on this issue could end up being very significant.

That doesn’t mean that you have to adhere to everything that’s been done in the past.  It does mean that you’ve got to think it through and have planned for potential reactions that they may engage in.
All right.  Isaac Dovere of Politico.

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  Two questions on where this all leaves us.

THE PRESIDENT:  What leaves us?  Where my presidency leaves us?
 
Q    The election --

THE PRESIDENT:  It leaves us in a really good spot -- (laughter) -- if we make some good decisions going forward.

Q    Well, what do you say to the electors who are going to meet on Monday and are thinking of changing their votes?  Do you think that they should be given an intelligence briefing about the Russian activity?  Or should they bear in mind everything you’ve said and is out already?  Should they -- should votes be bound by the state votes as they’ve gone?  And long term, do you think that there is a need for Electoral College reform that would tie it to the popular vote?

THE PRESIDENT:  It sounded like two, but that was all one.  (Laughter.)

Q    It was all one.  (Laughter.)  You know the way this goes around here.

THE PRESIDENT:  I love how these -- I got two questions, each one has four parts.  (Laughter.)
Q    On the Democratic Party, your Labor Secretary is running to be the Chair of the Democratic National Committee.  Is the vision that you’ve seen him putting forward what you think the party needs to be focused on?  And what do you say to some of the complaints that say the future of the Democratic Party shouldn’t be a continuation of some of your political approach?  Part of that is complaints that decisions that you’ve made as President, as the leader of the party, have structurally weakened the DNC and the Democratic Party, and they think that that has led to -- or has helped lead to some losses in elections around the country.  Do you regret any of those decisions?

THE PRESIDENT:  Okay.

Q    Those are my two.  (Laughter.)  

THE PRESIDENT:  Good.  I’ll take the second one first and say that Tom Perez has been, I believe, one of the best secretaries of labor in our history.  He is tireless.  He is wicked smart.  He has been able to work across the spectrum of labor, business, activists.  He’s produced.  I mean, if you look at his body of work on behalf of working people, what he’s pushed for in terms of making sure that workers get a fair deal, decent wages, better benefits, that their safety is protected on the job -- he has been extraordinary.

Now, others who have declared are also my friends and are fine people, as well.  And the great thing is, I don’t have a vote in this, so we’ll let the process unfold.  I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.  I described to you earlier what I think needs to happen, which is that the Democratic Party, whether that’s entirely through the DNC or through a rebuilding of state parties or some other arrangement, has to work at the grassroots level, has to be present in all 50 states, has to have a presence in counties, has to think about message and how are we speaking directly to voters.

I will say this -- and I’m not going to engage in too much punditry -- but that I could not be prouder of the coalition that I put together in each of my campaigns because it was inclusive, and it drew in people who normally weren’t interested in politics and didn’t participate.  But I’d like to think -- I think I can show that in those elections, I always cast a broad net.  I always said, first and foremost we’re Americans, that we have a common creed, that there’s more that we share than divides us, and I want to talk to everybody and get a chance to get everybody’s vote.

I still believe what I said in 2004, which is this red state/blue thing is a construct.  Now, it is a construct that has gotten more and more powerful for a whole lot of reasons, from gerrymandering to big money, to the way that media has splintered.  And so people are just watching what reinforces their existing biases as opposed to have to listen to different points of view.  So there are all kinds of reasons for it.

But outside of the realm of electoral politics, I still see people the way I saw them when I made that speech -- full of contradictions, and there are some regional differences, but basically folks care about their families, they care about having meaningful work, they care about making sure their kids have more opportunity than they did.  They want to be safe, they want to feel like things are fair.  And whoever leads the DNC and any candidate with the Democratic brand going forward, I want them to feel as if they can reach out and find that common ground -- speak to all of America.  And that requires some organization.

And you’re right that -- and I said this in my earlier remarks -- that what I was able to do during my campaigns, I wasn’t able to do during midterms.  It’s not that we didn’t put in time and effort into it.  I spent time and effort into it, but the coalition I put together didn’t always turn out to be transferable.  And the challenge is that -- you know, some of that just has to do with the fact that when you’re in the party in power and people are going through hard times like they were in 2010, they’re going to punish, to some degree, the President’s party regardless of what organizational work is done.

Some of it has to do with just some deep-standing traditional challenges for Democrats, like during off-year election, the electorate is older and we do better with a younger electorate.  But we know those things are true, and I didn’t crack the code on that.  And if other people have ideas about how to do that even better, I’m all for it.

So with respect to the electors, I’m not going to wade into that issue because, again, it’s the American people’s job, and now the electors' job to decide my successor.  It is not my job to decide my successor.  And I have provided people with a lot of information about what happened during the course of the election.  But more importantly, the candidates themselves, I think, talked about their beliefs and their vision for America.  The President-elect, I think, has been very explicit about what he cares about and what he believes in.  So it’s not in my hands now; it’s up to them.
Q    What about long-term about the Electoral College?

THE PRESIDENT:  Long-term with a respect to the Electoral College -- the Electoral College is a vestige, it’s a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states, and it used to be that the Senate was not elected directly, it was through state legislatures.  And it’s the same type of thinking that gives Wyoming two senators with about half a million people, and California with 33 million get the same two.

So there are some structures in our political system, as envisioned by the Founders, that sometimes are going to disadvantage Democrats.  But the truth of the matter is, is that, if we have a strong message, if we’re speaking to what the American people care about, typically the popular vote and the Electoral College vote will align.

And I guess part of my overall message here as I leave for the holidays is that if we look for one explanation or one silver bullet or one easy fix for our politics, then we’re probably going to be disappointed.  There are just a lot of factors in what’s happened not just over the last few months, but over the last decade that has made both politics and governance more challenging.  And I think everybody has raised legitimate questions and legitimate concerns.

I do hope that we all just take some time, take a breath -- this is certainly what I’m going to advise Democrats -- to just reflect a little bit more about how can we get to a place where people are focused on working together based on at least some common set of facts.  How can we have a conversation about policy that doesn’t demonize each other.  How can we channel what I think is the basic decency and goodness of the American people so it reflects itself in our politics, as opposed to it being so polarized and so nasty that, in some cases, you have voters and elected officials who have more confidence and faith in a foreign adversary than they have in their neighbors.

And those go to some bigger issues.  How is it that we have some voters or some elected officials who think that Michelle Obama’s healthy eating initiative and school nutrition program is a great threat to democracy than our government going after the press if they’re issuing a story they don’t like?  I mean, that’s an issue that I think we’ve got to wrestle with -- and we will.

People have asked me how do you feel after the election and so forth, and I say, well, look, this is a clarifying moment.  It’s a useful reminder that voting counts, politics counts.  What the President-elect is going to be doing is going to be very different than what I was doing, and I think people will be able to compare and contrast and make judgments about what worked for the American people.

And I hope that, building off the progress we’ve made, that what the President-elect is proposing works.  What I can say with confidence is that what we’ve done works.  That I can prove.  I can show you where we were in 2008 and I can show you where we are now, and you can’t argue that we’re not better off.  We are.  And for that, I thank the American people and, more importantly, I thank -- well, not more importantly -- as importantly -- I was going to say Josh Earnest for doing such a great job.  (Laughter.)  For that, I thank the American people.  I thank the men and women in uniform who serve.  I haven’t gotten to the point yet where I’ve been overly sentimental.

I will tell you, when I was doing my last Christmas party photoline -- many of you have participated in these; they’re pretty long -- right at the end of the line, the President’s Marine Corps Band comes in, those who had been performing, and I take a picture when them, and it was the last time that I was going to take a picture with my Marine Corps Band after an event, and I got a little choked up.  Now, I was in front of Marines, so I had to, like, tamp it down.

But it was just one small example of all the people who have contributed to our success.  I’m responsible for where we’ve screwed up.  The successes are widely shared with all the amazing people who have been part of this administration.

Thank you, everybody.  Mele Kalikimaka.

President Barack Obama Weekly Address August 13, 2016 (Video/Transcript)

President Barack Obama 

 Weekly Address
The White House
August 13, 2016 

Hi, everybody.  One of the most urgent challenges of our time is climate change.  We know that 2015 surpassed 2014 as the warmest year on record – and 2016 is on pace to be even hotter.

When I took office, I said this was something we couldn’t kick down the road any longer – that our children’s future depended on our action.  So we got to work, and over the past seven-and-a-half years, we’ve made ambitious investments in clean energy, and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions.  We’ve multiplied wind power threefold.  We’ve multiplied solar power more than thirtyfold.  In parts of America, these clean power sources are finally cheaper than dirtier, conventional power.  And carbon pollution from our energy sector is at its lowest level in 25 years, even as we’re continuing to grow our economy.

We’ve invested in energy efficiency, and we’re slashing carbon emissions from appliances, homes, and businesses – saving families money on their energy bills.  We’re reforming how we manage federal coal resources, which supply roughly 40% of America’s coal.  We’ve set the first-ever national standards limiting the amount of carbon pollution power plants can release into the sky.

We also set standards to increase the distance our cars and light trucks can go on a gallon of gas every year through 2025.  And they’re working.  At a time when we’ve seen auto sales surge, manufacturers are innovating and bringing new technology to market faster than expected.  Over 100 cars, SUVs, and pick-up trucks on the market today already meet our vehicles standards ahead of schedule.  And we’ve seen a boom in the plug-in electric vehicle market – with more models, lower battery costs, and more than 16,000 charging stations.

But we’re not done yet. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll release a second round of fuel efficiency standards for heavy-duty vehicles. We’ll take steps to meet the goal we set with Canada and Mexico to achieve 50 percent clean power across North America by 2025.  And we’ll continue to protect our lands and waters so that our kids and grandkids can enjoy our most beautiful spaces for generations.

There’s still much more to do.  But there’s no doubt that America has become a global leader in the fight against climate change.  Last year, that leadership helped us bring nearly 200 nations together in Paris around the most ambitious agreement in history to save the one planet we’ve got.  That’s not something to tear up – it’s something to build upon.  And if we keep pushing, and leading the world in the right direction, there’s no doubt that, together, we can leave a better, cleaner, safer future for our children.

Thanks, everybody.  Have a great weekend.