CLIMATE COUNTDOWN: When’s a warming treaty not a treaty?

It’s the elephant in the negotiating room that few officials want to acknowledge: Whatever international deal comes out of Paris climate talks, it likely won’t be a treaty that needs ratification by a reluctant Republican U.S. Congress.

That’s not the only complication in Paris. China, the U.S. and India don’t want the international community dictating their carbon dioxide emissions, but they do want to do something about ever escalating greenhouse gas levels and the rising temperatures they cause. So they have to come up with an agreement that doesn’t dictate binding, internationally set targets or require U.S. Senate approval — and yet gets the job done. At least partly.

Nigel Purvis, an international lawyer who was a top environmental diplomat and international negotiator for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It’s an issue of definitions and the way an agreement is framed, said Purvis, who is president of the non-governmental organization Climate Advisers.

The U.S. Constitution and the rest of the world have different definitions of the word “treaty,” Purvis said. Elsewhere, a treaty is a binding agreement. But in the U.S., there are several types of international agreements and only 6 percent of them end up being formal treaties that require Senate approval, he said. The last international, Senate-approved treaty was in 2010.

The climate treaty, Purvis said, is likely to end up as an “executive agreement” like the 1945 Yalta Accord at the end of World War II. This requires only presidential approval.

“If you can end World War II, I think you can do a climate agreement where the only obligation is to inform the international community what you are doing and demonstrate to them that you are doing it,” Purvis said.…

Kerry threatens climate skeptics: They ‘put us all at risk’ – Warns ‘we cannot sit idly by and allow them to do that’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kerry-says-climate-change-impacts-armies-as-much-as-polar-bears/2015/11/10/00a8c678-87db-11e5-9a07-453018f9a0ec_story.html

“We have to prepare ourselves for the potential social and political consequences that stem from crop failures, water shortages, famine and outbreaks of epidemic disease,” he said. “And we have to heighten our national security readiness to deal with the possible destruction of vital infrastructure and the mass movement of refugees — particularly in parts of the world that already provide fertile ground for violent extremism and terror.

“Long story short, climate change isn’t just about Bambi. It’s about us.”

Kerry said he would convene a task force of senior government officials and outside experts to determine how to make climate change predictions a part of foreign policy planning.

“If we can better identify the red flags of risk around the world, we can better target our diplomacy and development assistance to enable those nations to become more resilient and more secure — and less likely to devolve into a full-fledged war and humanitarian crisis,” he said.

Embassies could use climate change analysis to help host countries find ways to deter disaster, Kerry said,“before it evolves into deep grievances that help fuel conflicts.”

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Related Links:

NYT: John Kerry ‘hopes to use his position as secretary of state to achieve a legacy on global warming that has long eluded him’

John Kerry is ‘Coming For Your Refrigerator’

http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/260649/john-kerry-coming-your-refrigerator-daniel-greenfield

We’re losing the war on ISIS, but it’s okay, because according to the increasingly insane Democratic Party, the real national security threat is your refrigerator or maybe your air conditioner. After we banned CFCs and replaced them with HCFs to “save the planet”, we now have to ban HCFs to “save the planet” from the Flying Global Warming Monster.…

Proselytized: Sec. of State Kerry tells climate faithful: ‘None of you need to be converted’

 

Speaking at the State Department’s ‘Climate and Clean Energy Investment Forum’, Secretary John Kerry tells green investors, ‘None of you need to be converted.’

Kerry: ‘Achieving a global agreement on climate change at the Paris conference this December is an absolutely critical step and a major priority of President myself and the rest of the administration.

Climate and Clean Energy Investment Forum
October 20, 2015

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Related Links: 

Outgoing UN IPCC Chief reveals global warming ‘is my religion and my dharma’

Kerry Blames Debunked Global Warming Claim For Syrian Conflict

Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday he believes global warming played a role in exacerbating the Syrian conflict.

“It is not a coincidence that immediately prior to the civil war in Syria, the country experienced the worst drought on record,” Kerry said during a speech in Milan Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“Now, I’m not telling you that the crisis in Syria was caused by climate change,” Kerry said, adding that global warming “clearly made a bad situation a lot worse,”…

John Kerry: Bar Global Warming Skeptics From Elected Office – ‘They disqualify themselves fundamentally from high public office’

http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/102115-776750-john-kerry-climate-change-deniers-should-be-barred-from-office.htm

John Kerry:

“But when I hear a United States senator say, ‘I’m not a scientist so I can’t make a judgment,’ or a candidate for president for that matter, I’m absolutely astounded. I mean, it’s incomprehensible that a grownup who has been to high school and college in the United States of America disqualifies themselves because they’re not a scientist when they’ve learned that the Earth rotates on its axis, but they’re not a scientist; where they’ve learned that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and it does so 24 hours a day; and you can run the list of things that we know science tells us happens, and we accept it every single day.

“And to suggest that when more than 6,000-plus peer-reviewed studies of the world’s best scientists all lay out that this is happening and mankind is contributing to it, it seems to me that they disqualify themselves fundamentally from high public office with those kinds of statements.”

 

 

Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/102115-776750-john-kerry-climate-change-deniers-should-be-barred-from-office.htm#ixzz3pJ6NiimD

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Climate Depot’s Morano on Kerry’s claims of ‘climate refugees’: ‘It is the lowest common denominator of politics’

http://onenewsnow.com/politics-govt/2015/10/07/kerry-chasing-an-elusive-legacy

Marc Morano, spokesman for Climate Depot, tells OneNewsNow that Kerry is after a climate legacy.

“A global warming legacy has eluded him for decades – and this is his year, this is his moment,” says Morano. “He’s coming up to the Paris (climate) talks. So he’s going to say any kind of nonsense to make that happen.”

The global-warming skeptic says while there are no climate refugees, “There are weather refugees. There are extreme disaster refugees …. Now they’re trying to say that ISIS was in part created by global warming because it created the drought in Syria which created the conditions that made ISIS.”

Morano adds there is no standard for this. “It is just the lowest common denominator of politics, and I don’t even think fellow Democrats follow this stuff,” he says. “This is preaching to the ten-percent environmental activists who like these kinds of linkages.”…