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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Low Expectations Mean Low Turnout From U.S. Congress

by Dean Scott

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 DURBAN, South Africa—A decidedly smaller number of U.S. congressional and Obama administration representatives have made the trip to this year’s U.N. climate change talks compared to previouse years, reflecting the relatively modest expectations for progress here.

Notably absent from this year’s negotiations is Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), who typically travels to the annual negotiations, including far-flung talks held in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both spoke at the 2009 Copenhagen talks. Neither attended the 2010 summit in Cancun, Mexico, but the administration sent Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Nancy Sutley, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Neither the president nor any Cabinet-level official is at the Durban talks.

Harlan Watson, a former State Department special envoy and climate negotiator for the Bush administration, said the drop-off in attendance by congressional representatives and administration officials is not surprising.

“There were a lot of expectations and the spotlight going into Copenhagen and that’s clearly not the case here,” Watson, now a majority staff member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, told BNA Dec. 7.

Obama administration officials at the Durban talks include the top U.S. negotiator, Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, as well as Amanda Dory, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, and others who have made presentations at the U.S. Center, a forum within the conference.

The U.S. House and Senate are essentially represented by staff from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Kerry, as well as from several House panels including the Energy and Commerce Committee.

That contrasts with the delegation led by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and several House committee chairmen who traveled to Copenhagen in December 2009 to support Obama’s pledge for a return to U.S. engagement on the climate issue.

“The perception this year was this is not going to be a big meeting like Copenhagen or that we would see a major decision on many of the key issues like finance or a wholly new [climate] treaty,” Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told BNA.

The Durban talks “may launch a process that leads to a new treaty down the road in three or four years but it’s just not seen as the high-intensity meeting Copenhagen was," Meyer said.
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