Republicans Make Presence Felt at Climate Talks by Ignoring Them
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Version 0 of 1. LE BOURGET, France — More than 40,000 people are attending the climate talks, including scientists, activists, people living on the front lines of global warming and the negotiators for the 195 nations represented. One group is noticeably missing, however: Republicans. Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, no prominent Republican has participated in the events in this Paris suburb. No Republican attended a meeting of 400 mayors in Paris last Friday, convened by Michael R. Bloomberg, the United Nations special envoy for cities and climate change and former mayor of New York, who was elected as a Republican but is now an independent. (Several Republican mayors, including Kevin L. Faulconer of San Diego, have signed on to Mr. Bloomberg’s effort to lower their cities’ greenhouse gas emissions, Mr. Bloomberg’s aides pointed out.) Of the candidates seeking the party’s nomination for president, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Donald J. Trump reject the scientific consensus that human activities are warming the planet, while Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio have acknowledged that the planet is warming but oppose President Obama’s view that the government can and should do something about it. Anxiety that the Republican-controlled Congress or the next president might undo Mr. Obama’s ambitious goals for weaning Americans off fossil fuels was so high that 10 Democratic senators flew here last week to reassure other countries. “The Republicans do not have the votes to overturn the president’s clean-power rules,” Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts said last Friday, at Mr. Bloomberg’s event at the Paris City Hall. Republicans have derided the talks as a waste of time. On Monday, the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank that does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change and has ties to Republican lawmakers, held its own conference, at a hotel in Paris. The next day, Mr. Cruz led a subcommittee hearing in Washington on whether political bias had influenced climate science. Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who leads the Environment and Public Works Committee, crashed the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009. He is not coming this time, but in a speech from the Senate floor on Wednesday, he denounced the talks as “a big party” aimed at persuading people “that the world is coming to an end.” He said Congress would continue to try to block Mr. Obama’s emissions rules. In that way, the Republicans are very much present in Paris. Delegates and supporters of a deal are aware that Mr. Obama cannot portray one as a “treaty,” because a treaty would never be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate. In discussions before the talks, many Europeans expressed dismay over United States politics, coupled with an urgency to reach an agreement before Mr. Obama leaves office. The Republicans’ unyielding approach has even sympathizers shaking their heads. “Paris could provide a chance for the Republican Party to get on the right side of history,” said Andy Karsner, who was an assistant secretary of energy under President George W. Bush. At the International New York Times Energy for Tomorrow Conference in Paris on Wednesday, Mr. Karsner, now an adviser to Google X, Google’s research and development arm, urged climate-change skeptics to leave the realm of the ideological and view the promotion of renewable energy in economic terms. That is the view espoused by Mr. Schwarzenegger, who in a Facebook post on Monday said that even if climate science was bunk, Americans should support a shift to clean energy because of the deaths caused by air pollution; because fossil fuels are not inexhaustible; and because renewable power sources are a better bet economically. “As long as you can give Republicans the choice of saying, ‘Well, I don’t really think that 20 years from now there will be a sea level rising,’ or ‘I don’t think that is human-caused,’ and stuff like that, you give them an opening, and they will use it,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. He added that it was far more effective to frame the argument in terms of the immediate effects on health and the economy. Secretary of State John Kerry took a similar tack in a speech here on Wednesday. “For a moment — and a moment only — let’s give the climate deniers the benefit of the doubt,” he said. Even if the overwhelming scientific consensus is wrong, he asked rhetorically, “what is the worst that could happen” by shifting away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy? “Well, we absolutely would create millions of new jobs,” he said. “We would boost our economies, and for some countries where they’ve slowed down, they need that boost. They need the capital that would flow into energy investment. We would see a healthier population, healthier children.” He added, almost as a side note, there would be “a huge contribution to global security.” Gov. Jerry Brown, who succeeded Mr. Schwarzenegger in California, said that “if we can get an authoritative announcement that carbon pollution is real, that it is an existential problem and the countries of the world are committed,” it will erode what he called “Republican denial,” which he said had been effective at “sowing doubt and engaging in very sophisticated obfuscation.” Surveys have shown that in no other country is climate-change denial as prevalent as it is in the United States. If that changes, it may be because of the business community as much as anything else. Several progressive companies, like Ben & Jerry’s, Michelin, Nissan-Renault and Unilever, have taken part in the Paris climate meetings or related events, and Mr. Kerry has praised Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs for their climate-related financing commitments. |