As President Obama opened negotiations with world leaders in Paris this week on a worldwide pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address the effects of climate change, Republicans in Congress continue to challenge the administration’s climate agenda.
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The House passed two resolutions Tuesday disapproving Obama’s power-plant rules and rendering them inoperative.
Both measures, already approved by the Senate in October, now go to the White House, which has already vowed to veto them.
“Everybody else has taken climate really seriously”, Obama said during a press conference in Paris, where he’s attending a global climate change summit.
The votes are part of a concerted Republican effort to stymie Mr Obama on energy regulation and what they say is his abuse of executive authority to impose unrealistic, job-killing restrictions on industry.
The global agreement “will prevent us from further overheating the earth and causing major disruptions to people’s lives, their property and to the global economy”, Pallone said.
The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan requires states to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030, based on emissions in 2005.
A Democratic representative from drought-stricken California, Ted Lieu, retorted: “At a time when the whole world is in Paris [seeking a solution to climate change], we have the Republican majority doing exactly the opposite”. The bills would prohibit EPA from enforcing limits on electric utilities and coal plants. The maneuver is subject to a presidential veto and has rarely been successful.
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Republicans have also threatened to undermine the United States’ participation in a climate accord by withholding funding for global climate initiatives and threatening to oppose any proposal that could be sent to Congress for ratification. But even if somebody from a different party succeeded me, one of the things that you find is when you’re in this job, you think about it differently than when you’re just running for the job. “And that’s why I think people should be confident that we’ll meet our commitments on this”.
