Inhofe and Vitter Aim to Undermine US Foreign Policy
The United States must freeze climate-change aid payments to developing countries to help them implement a global plan agreed in Denmark’s capital last year, four US lawmakers said Thursday.
Republican Senators John Barrasso, James Inhofe, David Vitter, and George Voinovich told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Washington cannot to spend the money at a time of swelling deficits and a bloated national debt.
“We remain opposed to the US commitment to full implementation of the Copenhagen Accord, which will transfer billions of US taxpayer dollars to developing nations in the name of climate change,” they said in a letter.
“We do not believe that billions of US taxpayer dollars should be transferred to developing countries through unaccountable multilateral or bilateral channels for adaptation, deforestation and other international climate finance programs,” they told the top US diplomat.
The lawmakers said total US climate-related government spending in 2010 reached 1.3 billion dollars, and President Barack Obama has requested 1.9 billion for 2011 — out of 3.6 trillion dollars in annual government spending.
“We request that the administration freeze further spending requests to implement international climate change finance programs. This would include making no additional international commitments to fund such programs,” they said.
Republicans routed Obama’s Democratic allies in November 2 elections, retaking the House of Representatives and slicing deep into the Democratic majority in the Senate, giving them a firmer grip on the reins in Washington.
House Republicans announced late Wednesday that they were dismantling the committee, created by Democrats, focused on battling climate change, calling it a waste of money.
Inhofe, Vitter, et. al. have several things going on here.
Yes, they are re-upping their credentials with the Tea Partiers wrt AGW, etc.
But they are doing their best to undermine President Obama’s foreign policy negotiations.
They want President Obama to fail just as much as they want to undermine any science-awareness in this country.
On the particular efforts the US is doing in Cancun, since we are not part of the Kyoto treaty and thus don’t participate in the that track of negotiations, one of the US’s main objectives is to see a “balanced” package be completed. This includes the first world-wide agreement on the importance of forests by assigning them value.
Inhofe, Vitter and their friends simply don’t care about forests, or life in general, on this planet - they would just as well see this place burn.
The US has spent the past couple of years pushing “MRV” (Monitoring, reporting and verification ) at the negotiations. That is, we’ve been the leading voice for verifiability in whatever nations do wrt emissions, mitigation, and adaptation. We’ve been pushing for international transparency. It’s been one of the tough things to argue at the UNFCCC meetings, and some progress has been made.
Yet Inhofe and Vitter want to undo all that too.
Finally, the claim of spending $1.9 billion on “climate” is a statement intended to misled. The US sends overseas very little money specifically wrt climate change mitigation or adaptation.