President Barack Obama addresses world leaders at COP15, urging them to consider a global climate pact which takes into account the needs of both developed and developing nations.
President Barack Obama
President Obama is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office, as well as the first president born in Hawaii. Obama previously served as the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.
Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. During the campaign, several events brought him to national attention, such as his victory in the March 2004 Democratic primary election for the United States Senator from Illinois as well as his prime-time televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in November 2004.
Obama began his run for the presidency in February 2007. After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Obama is the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.
President Barack Obama makes clear that the United States will continue its path towards a clean energy economy despite the outcome of the COP15 conference, but calls on global cooperation to reach an accord that holds all nations accountable.
Obama's plan calls for: mitigation, transparency and financing. "It's a clear formula," he says, "one that embraces the principle of common but differentiated responses and respective capabilities."