Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/11/2015
PARIS – The United States, as the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, plays a key role in the ongoing negotiations toward a global climate agreement in Paris. The administration has made clear its view on the proceedings at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, pushing for an ambitious agreement. The U.S. Congress, however, remains split on the issue, a rift that has only grown during the two weeks of talks.
A group of Democratic senators, the only congressional delegation to make the trip to Paris, reassured attendees of their commitment to supporting whatever agreement comes out of the negotiating process. “What you see here are the people who are going to protect what the president is putting on the table in Paris as a promise from the American people to the world,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said at a COP21 briefing Saturday.
The Democratic delegation was led by Sen. Ben Cardin (Md.) and also featured Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Tom Udall (N.M.), Chris Coons (Del.), Al Franken (Minn.), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), and Cory Booker (N.J.). “We are here because of the urgency of the issue of climate change. We are here because of the U.S. leadership on this issue. We are proud of President Obama and the Obama administration in getting the individual country commitments coming into Paris,” Cardin said.
Republican lawmakers have sought to send a message to the negotiators that the Obama administration’s climate change efforts do not have the support of Congress. In the last several weeks a number of hearings have been held to address the feasibility of an agreement from the Paris talks, whether the U.S. can meet its national commitment to the agreement, and, just this week, if climate change is real at all. Two Congressional Review Act resolutions passed the Republican-controlled Congress just before the negotiations heated up in an attempt to overturn the linchpin of the U.S. commitment to the agreement – its recently finalized carbon emissions standards for new and existing coal-fired power plants. The CRA have now gone to the president’s desk for a near-certain veto.
The GOP push against climate action is the result of a corrupt political system, Whitehouse said. “I think it is plain to anybody who’s paying attention that the fossil fuel industry is doing its best to manipulate American politics,” he said.
On the other side of the aisle, and the Atlantic, two notable Senate Republicans took aim at the negotiations and their underlying purpose. Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, held a hearing this week in which he attempted to demonstrate his belief that climate change is myth. He did so largely by referencing satellite data suggesting there has been no global warming for 18 years, a claim he has touted for several months and which earned him a “Mostly False” grade by PolitiFact in March. The satellite data is questioned due in part because it starts its measurement in 1998, a year in which the world experienced a very large El Nino event that gives the data an unreasonably high baseline.
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, speaking Wednesday on the Senate flood, described the climate negotiations as a “party,” stating that “nothing is happening over there now. They are having a good time. I am sure there are lots to drink and lots to eat, but that party will be over.”
Inhofe said the administration’s belief that a climate deal from the Paris talks will not need Senate approval if it does not include binding targets is dishonest, and that such an agreement would accomplish nothing in any case. “Everyone knows that [the president] can’t unilaterally do these things, even though he tries. In 1992, when the Senate approved President H.W. Bush’s agreement to have the United States participate in the conference of parties – that is the one that is going on right now, the 21st one – the process, any emissions, targets , or requirements were going to have to be approved by the Senate,” he said.
The Democratic coalition addressed these assertions at the Saturday briefing, stating that nothing in the U.S. commitment to the talks, which would reduce national carbon emissions 26-28 percent below 1990 levels by 2025, would have to pass Congress. “There is nothing the president is committing to that is not already legally binding inside of our country under the law,” Markey said.
