RUN AROUND SENATE TO GET CLIMATE DEAL

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Human Events:

President Barack Obama is reportedly attempting to forge an international climate change deal without gaining U.S. Senate approval for a treaty as required by the Constitution.

 

It is virtually certain the Senate will not ratify any new international climate change agreement, especially if it includes legally binding U.S. greenhouse gas emission reductions. Therefore, the Obama administration is shaping what it hopes will be a “politically binding” agreement. The administration will attempt to tack on to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), a treaty President George H.W. Bush signed and the Senate ratified in 1992.

Obama hopes to have his addendum to the 1992 treaty ready to present for signatures at the next United Nations climate meeting in Paris in 2015.

Obama’s plan is a hybrid agreement, combining legally binding conditions of the 1992 UNFCC with voluntary commitments by countries to enact climate change policies for reducing emissions by specific amounts and sending money to poor countries. Rather than an enforcement mechanism, the agreement would, in the words of negotiators, “name and shame” countries into cutting greenhouse gas emissions.