House Republicans are introducing legislation that would push President Joe Biden to extract a more aggressive emissions reduction pledge from China before reengaging in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Their new bill, the Paris Transparency and Accountability Act, would force the Biden administration to report to Congress before it submits to the United Nations a new U.S. target to reduce emissions under the Paris Agreement.
The two-part legislation is led by the top Republicans on major committees: Garret Graves of the Select Committee on Climate Crisis, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Michael McCaul of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
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It would also call for the United States to negotiate a new global climate agreement to replace Paris with an agreement that assures that other major emitters, especially China, reduce emissions comparable to the U.S. The new pact would have to be sent to the Senate for ratification, a course the Obama administration did not take with the Paris Agreement.
“We need to renegotiate the Paris Agreement so it is fair to the American worker and ensures global emissions will actually go down,” Graves told the Washington Examiner exclusively ahead of the bill’s release Friday. “We can and should do better, and that is what our bill is all about: reducing global emissions, making America stronger, and ensuring the Biden administration is transparent with the American people and Congress.”
The bills stand no chance of advancing through the Democratic Congress, but they are the latest example of congressional Republicans opposing the Paris Agreement, even as the party’s leadership has tried to shift its positioning on climate change.
Republicans, for the most part, are in the same place as they were more than four years ago when President Donald Trump rejected the agreement, decrying the U.S. involvement as undermining the country’s sovereignty and giving a free pass for China and India to pollute.
Their approach has put them at odds with businesses, including oil companies, with which they are usually aligned.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute issued statements supporting Biden’s decision to reenter the Paris Agreement, a shift of position for both as they seek to find areas of compromise with Biden as he pursues an aggressive climate agenda.
The new Republican bill has the backing of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and is part of a broader House GOP climate agenda that the party is promoting to counter the Biden administration’s summit event on Earth Day with world leaders of top-emitting countries. At the summit that will be held on Thursday and Friday, the Biden administration is expected to unveil a new target under the Paris climate agreement to cut U.S. emissions by around 50% by 2030, a move meant to build momentum for other countries to make similarly aggressive commitments.
That target would be consistent with helping halve global emissions by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 in order to hold global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the major goal of the Paris Agreement.
The House Republican bill would force Biden to provide a plan to Congress for the U.S. to meet its new emissions target, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution, including the types of new regulations or legislation it would take to achieve it. Biden would also have to say how reaching the target would contribute to reducing emissions globally and how he would address potential “increased” energy costs and “job displacement.” Congress could vote to disapprove of the target.
“The U.S. is currently an outlier amongst representative democracies. Everyone else has a role for their legislatures in shaping the NDC,” said George David Banks, a former aide to Republicans on the House Climate Committee who was also Trump’s international climate adviser.
But the major focus of the Republican legislation is to force the U.S. to apply pressure on China, a course that the Biden administration has been pursuing.
Biden invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Earth Day summit as the administration seeks to get China, the world’s top emitter, to increase its ambition.
Climate envoy John Kerry visited China this week to lock down new commitments from the country’s leaders. State Department officials told the Wall Street Journal that the goal of the trip is to get China to reduce emissions more quickly compared to its current target of having emissions peak before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser for the Progressive Policy Institute, said that China must agree to begin reducing emissions “well before” 2030 in order to have any success in cutting global emissions. But China’s five-year plan released in March provided no evidence it plans to reduce fossil fuel consumption soon to get it on a path to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. Last year, China generated 53% of the world’s total coal power, making it the only G-20 nation to increase its coal-fired generation significantly in 2020, according to a report last month from Ember, a London-based research group.
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“We applaud John Kerry for going to China,” a House GOP aide told the Washington Examiner. “If China comes back and says, we are going to reduce emissions by 2030 in the same way the U.S. is doing, great. It’s really about China stepping up.”
