The White House is almost guaranteed to snub Congress as the GOP plans to drill down on the details of President Obama’s climate change agenda in the new year.
Republican senators say the White House has an open invitation to testify. But the administration has not responded on whether officials would attend hearings early in 2016 about the Paris climate negotations.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, wants to begin oversight hearings early next year. But that will take some doing, he admits, with an increasingly resistant administration that has set a new precedent for not coming before Congress to discuss climate change.
Inhofe, who spoke in a pre-recorded message to a gathering of climate skeptics last week outside of the talks in Paris, said the administration’s refusal to come before Congress is unprecedented.
“This has never happened before. The administration has refused to meet with the committee of jurisdiction,” he said. Inhofe’s committee has oversight in the Senate for environmental issues, which include climate change.
The Senate Environment and Public Works panel “should have oversight over” the Paris talks, “but the administration still has yet to appear before our committee to testify even though they have been invited,” committee spokeswoman Kristina Baum wrote in an email.
The White House would not comment.
Inhofe said he wants the administration to explain how the president’s climate plan will work to limit emissions while benefiting the public. He doesn’t believe Obama’s plan can do both and wants to understand what was accomplished by going to Paris.
Obama is trying to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent by 2025, which analysts say will be impossible to achieve without an economy-wide emissions program more robust than anything the administration has produced so far.
In addition, the president’s global commitment to the United Nations codifies emission regulations for power plants that are being fought by more than half the nation in federal appeals court because states say the EPA is overstepping its authority. The GOP argues that the rules, called the Clean Power Plan, will drive up energy costs in the U.S. while making the grid less reliable.
Obama is trying to “implement a policy on climate change that the American public neither wants, nor is able to afford.” At the same time, “These commitments the president has made in Paris aren’t going to happen.”
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said he will continue to use all avenues to “protect the American taxpayer” from the costs that the president’s plans would impose on the nation.
Case in point: the United Nations’ $100 billion Green Climate Fund that congressional Republicans oppose.
The president wants $500 million in fiscal 2016 for the fund. But the U.N. said last week that the $100 billion is a beginning, not a ceiling or limit to reach.
Environmental groups say they will be urging the administration in the coming weeks to up its commitment to the fund.
Karen Orenstein, senior international policy analyst with the group Friends of the Earth, says groups will be urging more money for the green fund. Getting money out of Congress “will be tough, but not impossible,” she says.
She says a cadre of Republican supporters have emerged who are standing behind the president’s agenda. They include senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and presidential contender Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Lawmakers are engaging on the “physical realities” of climate change, she said. “It will happen whether or not Inhofe wants it to.”
