Mother Jones

After last week’s midterm elections, the Senate is set to be packed with a brand new crop of Republican climate change deniers. They’ll supplement the GOP’s old guard of science skeptics, including Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and James Inhofe (Okla.), who will likely become chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

One of the major repercussions of the GOP’s Senate takeover could actually play out overseas, at next winter’s United Nations climate summit in Paris. The Paris meeting is meant to be a forum for countries—especially big polluters such as the United States, the European Union, China, and India—to hammer out an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help poorer countries adapt to global warming.

President Obama has already signaled that his team in Paris will push for an agreement that is not legally binding—unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the last major climate treaty, which the US never ratified—so as to bypass the need for congressional approval. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be other opportunities for the Senate’s new climate denial caucus to shake up the negotiating process—specifically, by attempting to block Obama’s plan to use the Environmental Protection Agency to slash carbon emissions.

The highest hurdle in negotiations like this is something David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council calls “a vicious cycle of finger-pointing,” wherein no country wants to commit to something that the other big polluters can’t, or won’t, commit to. After all, because climate change is a global problem, a climate treaty makes sense only if all the biggest carbon polluters are on board. That means that unless the international community is confident the US will follow through on aggressive climate policies, other countries will be unlikely take meaningful actions to fight global warming.

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How the GOP’s Senate Takeover Could Derail Global Climate Action