President Obama does not want to repeat what happened to the Clinton administration, and we are not talking about health care. Rather, we are talking about climate change and whether or not action or inaction by the US Senate might derail a global climate change treaty should one be reached in Copenhagen, Denmark in early December, 2009.Kim Chapman’s story in Bloomberg online about the upcoming international climate change meeting in Copenhagen examines the intricacies of the climate change meeting and what role the US negotiators and the US Senate will play in the meeting.
Carol Browner is a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and currently serves as the senior White House advisor on energy and the environment. Browner is confident that the United States will play a major role in Copenhagen, despite the fact that the US Congress has not passed climate change legislation this year—something the administration had wanted before heading to Copenhagen.
As Chapman reports, the meeting will involve 200 countries that are coming to Denmark with hopes of reaching an “agreement on terms for a new accord to reduce greenhouse gases.” The administration does not want to repeat the outcome from 1998 when President Bill Clinton’s UN envoy signed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, only to have the Senate “pass a resolution declaring they would reject any treaty that didn’t require developing nations such as China to cut emissions along with industrialized countries.”
Per US law, the Senate must ratify treaties. Yet, without a climate change bill having passed the full Senate the administration cannot be sure that if they sign a treaty, the Senate will accept it. Additionally, as Chapman reports, without guidance from the Senate in the form of legislation “President Barack Obama may be forced to send envoys to Copenhagen empty-handed, hurting the chance of countries reaching a deal.”
Still, Browner remains resolute, “This administration from day one has been about taking action and we are still working very, very hard to get a bill out of the Senate,” Browner states in Chapman’s article. However, without a bill some environmental advocacy groups have doubts that a treaty will emerge from Copenhagen.
Further, “U.S. negotiators have said they are wary about signing off on a deal in Copenhagen and having it rejected by the Senate. ‘We don’t want to repeat the Kyoto experience of having a number where there’s nothing behind it,’ Obama’s climate envoy, Todd Stern, said Oct. 18 in London.”
While the United Nations wants the Copenhagen meeting to be the deadline for putting together a new international treaty, Michael Levi, “senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations” believes the negotiations will have to continue into 2010 without a new climate change law as the US won’t be able to take a leading role in the negotiations, which Levi believes is essential to a deal being reached.
The meeting is going to happen whether or not Congress passes a bill for the President to sign before December. So, Browner says negotiators will talk about the progress on the bill as well as deliver “a message about Obama’s commitment to tackling climate change and overhauling the way Americans use energy.”
Whether or not this will be enough for a deal to be reached, and whether the Senate will approve any treaty remains to be seen.
To read Chapman’s article click here.
Posted: 10/28/09
