President Obama keeps announcing new commitments on climate change, and the Republican Party appears to be struggling to keep up.
Case in point: The White House announced on Tuesday that the administration wrote a $500 million check to fund the U.S.’s portion of a multi-billion dollar Green Climate Fund under December’s climate change agreement.
The Paris climate deal, to be signed in New York next month, includes the fund as a way to help developing countries cope with the catastrophic effects of climate change. The fund is slated to reach $100 billion a year by 2020. The U.S.’s obligation is $3 billion.
On Capitol Hill that same morning, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a leading critic of the fund, was holding a hearing when the news reached him. He was shocked that the president wrote the check.
“The most recent fiscal year appropriations bill provided no funding for the U.N. Green Climate Fund, specifically prohibited the transfer of funds to create new programs,” Barrasso said, scolding Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom. Barrasso is chairman of a Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee focused on environment and energy policy
“Now media’s reporting this morning that the administration deposited $500 million into the U.N. Green Climate Fund,” he said. “It appears to be latest example of the administration going around Congress because the American people don’t really support what the president is doing with this initiative. So if the media reports are true, this is a blatant misuse of taxpayer dollars.
“It is clear that this committee must take a closer look at the State Department’s entire budget and resource allocation if millions, $500 million of surplus funds intended for specific programs are suddenly available to be spent on other priorities,” he said.
And Obama’s deals kept coming.
Two days later, the president met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to roll out a landmark agreement that would harmonize greenhouse gas emission standards between the two countries focused on reducing methane from the oil and natural gas sector, and cutting emissions from big-rig trucks and aircraft.
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans introduced a bill opposing an environmental rule change from July that would essentially make race cars illegal under the Clean Air Act.
Presidential contender Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., had flagged the Environmental Protection Agency’s overreach with the race car rule ahead of the South Carolina primary. The House had introduced similar legislation earlier in the week, while little was said on the president’s deal with Canada.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was still trying to catch up with what the EPA has been doing to encourage states to work on its greenhouse gas rules for power plants after the Supreme Court stayed the regulations Feb. 9.
Citing statements EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy made last month, Inhofe told her in a March 10 letter that he thought it entirely “inappropriate” for the agency to be encouraging states to move forward after the court had halted the climate plan.
McCarthy has made a number of public remarks saying the administration will continue to move ahead and will work with states that want to work on complying with the regulations. The regulations, called the Clean Power Plan, place states on the hook to reduce greenhouse gas emissions a third by 2030. Thirty states are suing the EPA over the rule and managed to secure a stay with the high court.
“Since February 9, when the Supreme Court halted EPA’s implementation of the [Clean Power Plan], the agency’s public response to the decision has ranged between muddled reticence and outright defiance, leaving impacted stakeholders and resource-strapped states confused and in limbo,” he wrote in a Thursday letter to the agency.
“These reports are very troubling,” Inhofe wrote. “The purpose of the stay is to maintain the status quo, pausing implementation of the rule in its entirety until completion of the judicial review.”
Meanwhile on the other side, environmental groups continue to gripe that the GOP presidential candidates are not serious enough about climate change.
“All we heard was more obfuscation and delay tactics from Republicans who seem more concerned with their fossil fuel backers than they are with the fate of dozens of communities in Florida and across the country,” a statement from billionaire activist Tom Steyer’s group NextGen Climate said Friday after Thursday night’s GOP debate in Florida.
Rubio “failed miserably,” the group said, when a fellow Republican who acknowledges manmade climate change asked what he would do as president to address climate change.
Miami Republican Mayor Tomás Regalado asked Rubio if he would “acknowledge the reality of the scientific consensus about climate change and, as president, will you pledge to do something about it?”
Rubio responded by saying “the climate is changing and one of the reasons why the climate is changing is the climate has always been changing.”
“There’s never been a time when the climate has not changed,” he added. “I think the fundamental question for a policymaker is, is the climate changing because of something we are doing and if so, is there a law you can pass to fix it?” He dismissed EPA’s climate rules and said Miami’s problems with flooding was due to its low-lying geography and not global warming.
“But as far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather, there’s no such thing,” he said.
