US may sidestep Congress in climate talks: report

OREANDA-NEWS. July 09, 2015. The US could become part of a new UN climate agreement that sets non-binding greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets without requiring Senate approval, according to a new report.

The UN deal to be worked out at talks in Paris in December could qualify as an executive agreement, instead of a treaty that would require ratification by Senate, the Center for American Progress said yesterday.

"US participation would be sanctioned by the president's foreign affairs power," said senior policy advisor Gwynne Taraska, who co-authored the report.

An executive agreement with nonbinding targets appears ever more likely as the Obama administration attempts to make progress at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks while deal with resistance from the Republican-controlled Congress. The UNFCCC, which did not establish GHG targets, was created by a treaty the Senate quickly ratified after it was signed in 1992. But a new agreement that sets binding targets is unlikely to garner the two-thirds majority needed for Senate approval of treaties.

Executive agreements have been used frequently by US presidents, accounting for the "overwhelming" majority of international agreements the country entered into from 1939-2013. Over that time, there were 17,300 executive agreements compared with 1,100 treaties, the report said. Such agreements can be sanctioned by the executive branch without formal Senate consent if they are implemented under existing statutes such as the Clean Air Act and do not require changes to existing laws, the report said.

"This report establishes that, depending on the outcome of the negotiations, there could be both clear authority and well-established precedent for the president to pursue it as an executive agreement," US representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) said. The report was based in part on a January Congressional Research Service report requested by Blumenauer.