Obama: Climate Change ‘Is a Generational Problem’

“And I guess, more than anything, that’s the main message I want to send here, is climate change is a massive problem. It is a generational problem. It’s a problem that, by definition, is just about the hardest thing for any political system to absorb, because the effects are gradual, they’re diffuse; people don’t feel it immediately and so there’s not a lot of constituency pressure on politicians to do something about it right away, it kind of creeps up on you. You’ve got the problem of the commons and you’ve got to get everybody doing it — because if just one nation is helping but the other nations aren’t doing it, then it doesn’t do any good — so you have this huge coordination problem and the danger of free riders.
 
So on all these dimensions, it’s hard to come up with a tougher problem than climate change — or a more consequential problem.”