WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is trying to negotiate a legacy-making climate change pact this coming week in Paris with one hand tied behind his back. Congress can’t even agree whether global warming is real.
Scientists point to the global agreement, years in the making, as the last, best hope for averting the worst effects of global warming. Obama has spent months prodding other countries to make ambitious carbon-cutting pledges to the agreement, which he hopes will become the framework for countries to tackle the climate issue long beyond the end of his presidency in early 2017.
But Republicans have tried to undermine the president by sowing uncertainty about whether the U.S. will make good on its promises. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP leaders have warned other countries not to trust any deal Obama may strike; other GOP allies are working to nullify Obama’s emissions-cutting steps at home.
“America is extremely divided, and there doesn’t seem to be any prospect that’s going to change at least in the next year or two,” Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.), who is attending the talks, said in an interview. “America’s leadership is not as great as it should be given the recalcitrance and the continuing obstructionism of the opposition party.”
About 150 heads of state are set to join Obama for talks on Monday and Tuesday as the deal nears the finish line. The goal is to secure worldwide cuts to emissions of heat-trapping gases to limit the rise of global temperatures to about another 2 degrees from now.
With little room for error, leaders have tried to avoid the pitfalls that undercut global climate negotiations in the past—specifically, those in Kyoto, Japan, in the early 1990s and in Denmark during Obama’s first term.
The deal in Kyoto—which the U.S. never ratified—spared developing countries such as China and India from mandatory emissions cuts, causing resentment in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. The Paris agreement would be the first to involve all countries.
In Copenhagen in 2009, leaders managed only to produce a broad-strokes agreement that fell far short of intended goals.
The concept behind a Paris pact is that the 170 or so nations already have filed their plans. They would then promise to fulfill their commitments in a separate arrangement to avoid the need for ratification by the Republican-run Senate. That dual-level agreement could be considered part of a 1992 treaty already approved by the Senate, said Nigel Purvis, an environmental negotiator in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
But it’s not just about whether or not to ratify.
