Obama uncertain on attending summit
By Lisa Lerer
When President Barack Obama arrives in Oslo on Dec. 10 to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize, he’ll be just an hour’s flight from Copenhagen, where approximately 40 world leaders will be gathered for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Don’t count on him to join them.
Trapped between international pressure to curb greenhouse gas emissions and a Senate unready to act, the White House is playing coy about the president’s plans. And while environmentalists and operatives would love to see him in Copenhagen, they also see the political peril in his making the trip.
“I’m not sure there’s anything you get out of it,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. “With nothing to report, inaction and gridlock in the Senate, it seems like a wiser move to stay home.”
Expectations for the Copenhagen conference have dropped dramatically over the past few weeks, with nearly universal acknowledgment that the talks are very likely to result in a limited political agreement, rather than in a legally binding treaty on global warming.
Some world leaders have been eager to blame the United States, but an international wave of finger-pointing would only decrease the likelihood that Obama will attend, said climate experts.
“It’s very hard to send the president to an event where there’s going to be intense focus on the lack of a U.S. policy and intense blame leveled on the United States for not having a policy to offer,” said David Victor, an energy policy expert at Stanford Law School.
And the diminished expectations could also set up Obama for the appearance of failure back home.
Republicans are eager to paint a do-nothing climate conference as another loss for the president in Copenhagen. Obama has come home empty-handed from Copenhagen before, when he flew to the Danish capital to help his hometown of Chicago lobby for the 2016 Olympic Games.
“He weighs the leadership on the issue versus the lack of any concrete result,” said Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain. “We know there’s going to be no real result.”
But even if U.S. climate negotiators were to push for a deal in Copenhagen, that could backfire in the Senate, where moderates of both parties have vocally opposed any cap-and-trade legislation. The House passed its climate change bill in late June, and Republicans have tried to use that vote to bludgeon Democrats from conservative districts.
“As a country, I know we’re not there yet, so I would hope the president wouldn’t be out in front of where the country has been,” said Tennessee GOP Sen. Bob Corker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And even if the politics of climate change were better, Obama might be preoccupied with a bigger priority in Washington in mid-December: a final Senate debate on the health care bill, which might keep many senators away from Copenhagen.
“His decision to go there will be very much tied to the progress we are making on the health care bill,” said Rep. Ed Markey, the author of the House climate bill. “His highest goal is to finish that bill.”
World leaders planning to attend the conference include French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The White House insists it remains undecided about whether the president will make the trip to Copenhagen. Obama may go just to keep up the pressure on world leaders to make a political commitment to reduce greenhouse gases, even if a real deal is punted to the future.
“If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over the edge, then certainly that’s something that I will do,” Obama told Reuters in an interview earlier this month.
Administration aides working on climate issues also say that they want to see whether China and India are ready to make any serious concessions on climate change. So far, those nations have been resistant to mandating their own firm commitments in advance of the talks, and U.S. negotiators don’t want to be out in front of those countries. Democrats also point out that presidents and prime ministers rarely attend the climate negotiations. Vice President Al Gore went to Japan in 1997 for the talks that ended in the Kyoto Protocol. But only Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd attended the talks in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007, and both Obama and McCain declined to speak at talks last year in Poznan, Poland.
Environmental activists still hold out hope, believing Obama’s presence is needed to show a serious commitment by the United States to taking action on climate change.
“I think he should go simply because the stakes are so high,” Gore told POLITICO. “The U.S. has so much at risk because all around the world, the topic of conversation with regard to climate is: When is the U.S. going to act?”
