by Coral Davenport, The New York Times, August 26, 2014
WASHINGTON
— The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping
international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their
planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from
Congress.
In
preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit
meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats
from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s
largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But
under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding
treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.
To
sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are
devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name
and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to
face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor
countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only
realistic path.
“If
you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the
U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this
time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton
administration who works closely with the Obama White House on
international climate change policy.
Lawmakers
in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the
currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the
near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican
lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused
global warming.
“There’s
a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a
willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said
Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United
Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require
ratification by the Senate.”
American
negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to
blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new
voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the
treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of
ratification.
Countries
would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies —
but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to
channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change.
Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress
toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations
that did not meet their cuts.
“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council,
an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible
without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.
The
strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already
experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more
severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more
devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say
is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the
coming century.
At
the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates
will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make
progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is
planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.
In
seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change
agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he
bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a
far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb
their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final
until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit
filed on behalf of a dozen states.
But
unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to
curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be
possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and
China, agree to enact similar cuts.
The
Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to
infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing
his executive authority by pushing through major policies without
congressional approval.
“Unfortunately,
this would be just another of many examples of the Obama
administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to
disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected
representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch
McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, said in a
statement.
A
deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any
other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In
African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are
the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear
that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United
Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars
to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.
Poor
countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard
against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food
aid during pervasive droughts.
“Without
an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to
address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate
negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing
this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility.
What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If
they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”
Observers
of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more
than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the
world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully
such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least
level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
About
a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70% of the world’s
carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.
At
a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to
forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut
carbon emissions through 2020.
The
Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to
avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort
at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the
world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s
richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused
to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon
polluter was not bound by the agreement.
Seventeen
years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats
currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach
agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties.
In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a
United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the
treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a
Republican president, George W. Bush.
This
fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly
to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of
the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a
coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change
protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest
source of carbon pollution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html
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