Obama Resorts to “Political Magic” to Carry Out His Stealthy Global Climate Change Strategy

In Paris next year, the nations of the world are
supposed to hammer out an global regime to control energy
production as a way to prevent possible catastrophic climate
change. Having covered United Nations climate negotiations for more
than two decades, I can confidently predict that there is no way
that countries will adopt a comprehensive treaty that somehow
legally binds them to make specific cuts in their greenhouse gas
emissions. As evidence, consider that when the Kyoto Protocol
emissions limits chafed, many countries, e.g., Canada and Japan,
simply ignored them and dropped out of the treaty.

Now the New York Times is reporting that President
Barack Obama is working on
a “politcally binding” international agreement to limit the
emissions of greenhouse gases produced largely by burning
fossil fuels. Such an agreement would be an end run around the
pesky constitutional requirement that treaties must be ratified by
two-thirds vote of the Senate. As the Times explains:

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….

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.

President Obama seems to be
following a script laid out in May, 2014 by former
Undersecretary for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth, who was the
Clinton Administration’s lead negotiator for the Kyoto Protocol,
and former South Dakota Senator Thomas Daschle who astutely
asserted that “the international community should stop chasing the
chimera of a binding treaty to limit CO2 emissions.”
They further noted that more than two decades of U.N. climate
negotiations have failed because “nations could not agree on who is
to blame, on how to allocate emissions, or on projections for the
future.”

Wirth and Daschle are advocating that the climate negotiators
adopt a system of “pledge and review” at the 2015 Paris conference
of the parties to the UNFCCC. In such a scheme nations would make
specific pledges to cut their carbon emissions, to adopt clean
energy technologies, and to wring more GDP out of each ton of
carbon emitted. The parties would review their progress toward
reducing greenhouse gas emissions every three years and make
further pledges as necessary to achieve the goal of keeping the
increase in average global temperature under 2°C. Since there would
be no legally binding targets, there would be no treaty that would
require politically difficult ratification. If insufficient
progress is being made by 2020 they argue that countries should
consider adopting globally coordinated price on carbon.

Wirth and Daschle have joined the emerging consensus that
schemes to prevent climate change by rationing carbon – e.g.,
imposing a cap-and-trade scheme or taxation – are doomed to
failure. Why failure? Because of the “iron law of climate policy”
argues University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke,
Jr.  Pielke’s iron law declares that “when policies focused on
economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions,
it is economic growth that will win out every time.” People and
their governments are very reluctant to give up the immediate
benefits of economic growth – more goods and services, jobs, better
education and improved health – that access to modern fuels make
possible in order to avert the distant harms of climate change.

In any case, President Obama evidently believes that addressing
the climate “crisis” is far more important than observing
constitiutional niceties like senatorial “advice
and consent” to treaties.