Pete Souza/White House ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT Obama's green gambit The president is pushing for a global climate change accord that could seal his environmental legacy.

President Barack Obama is quietly but steadily working behind the scenes on what could become one of his signature achievements: a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What he’s seeking out of the December U.N. climate talks in Paris would create the broadest, farthest-reaching deal in history, reworking environmental regulations for governments and corporations around the world and creating a framework for global green policy for decades.


Republicans in Congress, sensing what he’s up to, are already saying no. And Obama’s already preparing to sign on without them.

Which is why, even though reaching a climate change pact has become a top priority for the West Wing and part of nearly every conversation Obama has recently had with a foreign leader, the president and his aides aren’t advertising it.

All the same, a global climate accord is what last November’s greenhouse gas agreement with China was leading up to. That’s what a big focus of his talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in New Delhi in January. And that’s why aides have been traveling to Lima, Bonn and Geneva, setting the terms for a deal that’s far bigger than the one to which Obama unenthusiastically committed in 2009 in Copenhagen.

Since the Paris agreement would be voluntary and not a formal treaty, it’s seen as much more likely to get support around the world. And it can happen without the Senate taking any kind of vote on it.

“When we think about the things that we want to get done that have significance and consequence, this is a big thing,” said Brian Deese, Obama’s new senior adviser, who’s taken over the Paris preparations overseen until last month by John Podesta.

For a president in his seventh year, with the domestic political discussion moving past him, the Paris talks provide Obama with an important opportunity to direct his energies internationally. And if it works, he can leave office claiming to have helped save the world.

“Paris is the big focus internationally for this year, and it’s clear that this is a very high-level priority for the president,” said a senior administration official familiar with the negotiations.

Obama prioritized climate late. In his first term, he was ambivalent about international accords; in 2009, at the most recent big climate talks in Copenhagen, he called on the world to “act boldly, and decisively, in the face of a common threat” but offered no American commitments. Those talks collapsed shortly thereafter.

Now, in part because he has realized that climate change is one of the most fruitful areas in which he can pursue his agenda by executive authority alone, the ambivalence is gone.

“If I can encourage and gain commitments from the Chinese to put forward a serious plan to start curbing their greenhouse gases, and that then allows us to leverage the entire world for the conference that will be taking place later this year in Paris. … [W]hen I’m done, we’re still going to have a heck of a problem, but we will have made enough progress that the next president and the next generation can start building on it,” Obama said in an interview with Vice News released Monday.

The next nine months will be marked by a series of meetings and interim deadlines. By the end of March, the State Department will put out its proposal for meeting the emission-cut target as part of the China deal. By May, the U.N. will release the basic areas of negotiation for the Paris talks. And then in December, Obama is expected to travel to Paris to seal the deal.

Obama believes Paris offers a historic opportunity to finally take global action. It’s been nearly 20 years since Kyoto fell apart. If Paris doesn’t produce a deal, people familiar with the talks say, another 20 could go by before another agreement is reached, with the effects of global warming mounting.

“If Paris fails, that’ll be a catastrophic blow to efforts to control what could become runaway climate change, which will stimulate mass migrations, extreme weather, rising sea levels, disease transmissions that we can hardly even imagine,” California Gov. Jerry Brown said last week after a meeting with White House officials about environmental policy.

Brown’s been working on lower-level agreements with neighboring governors and local leaders in Germany and China, in addition to having his own conversations with CEOs to encourage them to support a Paris deal.

“It’s big, but it’s more remote than immediate catastrophes. And that’s why it takes imagination and steady, sequential steps to get carbon emissions under control,” said Brown.

Already, Congress has been trying to get in Obama’s way.

GOP Sens. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Roy Blunt of Missouri filed an amendment to a Keystone XL pipeline approval bill that would have blocked any international agreement that would have permitted different levels of emissions cuts for countries at different stages of industrialization — a central tenet of the Paris talks.

Inhofe’s amendment failed. But the congressional pushback continues.

“The president should not bypass Congress and try to negotiate a climate deal on his own that could cost American jobs. He has to have Senate approval for any new climate agreement and cannot bind the federal government by himself,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Then there’s the Green Climate Fund, which helps cover developing countries’ costs to transition from polluting infrastructure. The United States is expected to kick in $3 billion. Some administration officials say they’re not worried about getting this money approved, because it’s on par with amounts Congress has approved in the past. But opposing that funding might be one way Republicans can protest an agreement that Obama finalizes without them.

“Although the president has pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, I will do everything in my power to prevent taxpayer dollars from being spent by unelected United Nations bureaucrats to dictate U.S. energy policy, especially when it puts American competitiveness, jobs and livelihoods at risk,” said Inhofe, chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee.

The White House isn’t paying much attention to those concerns.

“When the United States leads, we can inspire other countries to work with us and lead with us. The argument that we should hold our fire, or we should rein in our ambition on climate because only a global solution is going to solve it is backwards,” Deese said. “It’s the opposite: The U.S. leadership will have changed the international conversation.”

Andrew Restuccia contributed to this report.