A showdown is brewing between the Obama administration and Republicans over climate change.
U.S. negotiators are heading into international negotiations this week to try to reach a rough draft of a deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions that wouldn’t require Senate approval. Republicans, who will take control of the upper chamber in January, want to quash that plan.
Nations will begin hammering out a draft Dec. 1 in Lima, Peru, that will guide talks in Paris next year. The goal is to establish a system for governing reductions of the greenhouse gases blamed for exacerbating climate change, including a legal framework.
The Obama administration says it can strike a pact that wouldn’t need Senate ratification, largely by using existing United Nations frameworks to set up a binding structure to make sure global emissions targets are being reached.
The State Department’s top negotiator, Todd Stern, has touted a plan floated by New Zealand that would hold nations accountable for emissions cuts. But the size of the cuts wouldn’t be binding. That, Stern and other advocates believe, could allow President Obama to bypass a Republican-led Senate, which is unlikely to approve any climate change deal.
Senate Republicans don’t believe that’s the case.
“I don’t know the answer to that. But [Obama] doesn’t know, either,” Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., incoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
Inhofe, who has called climate change a “hoax,” was angered by the nonbinding accord Obama signed last month with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He called it a “charade.”
China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, said in the deal that its emissions would peak in 2030 and then begin declining. But China had already expected its emissions to peak by then. The United States, meanwhile, must double its current pace of emissions cuts after 2020 to meet a goal of reducing them at least 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Inhofe, who intends to bring Obama’s pledges before his committee, said that if there is a way to block the commitments, he plans to do it.
The Obama administration probably has not figured out how to make the agreement legally binding without Senate approval, observers say.
“It’s one of the issues that they really haven’t grappled with that much,” said Alden Meyer, policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists and a longtime observer of the U.N. climate process. “But they’re going to have to start getting to that at Lima.”
Veterans of the U.N. negotiating process say the Obama administration is looking for a pact that has less scope than a legal treaty, which would require Senate approval. That’s where the approach differs from the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Kyoto was a legally binding agreement requiring specific emissions cuts by developed nations, which needed an OK from the Senate. It didn’t get it.
Instead, the administration might be analyzing elements of the Copenhagen and Cancun accords of 2009 and 2010, noted Lou Leonard, who heads the World Wildlife Fund’s climate program. Many nations in Copenhagen pledged to meet nonbinding targets, with Obama committing the United States to a 17 percent reduction by 2020 that now appears doable. In Cancun, nations set up a registry to track, record and review emissions-cutting efforts.
However, finding a way to go around the Senate won’t be easy, Leonard said.
“But as a recovering lawyer, I know that these questions are really complex and it is hard to say hypothetically when you cross that line” of needing to put a deal before the Senate, Leonard said in an email.
