Obama’s opponents looking for ways to undermine bold climate change strategy that could bring about drastic reduction in carbon emissions

Republicans promised on Wednesday to use their expanded power in Congress to undermine Barack Obama’s historic deal over carbon emissions with China on Wednesday, claiming Beijing could not be trusted to see through its side of an agreement that would ultimately damage the US economy.

The hard-hitting response from top Republicans to the historic deal between the US and China – the world’s two largest emitters – foreshadowed an expected collision with the White House over climate change that looks set to define Obama’s last two years in office and could shape the 2016 presidential elections.

Emboldened by their victory in last week’s midterm elections, which gave Republicans control over the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, the president’s opponents are searching for ways to hobble a bold climate change strategy that Obama’s aides believe could be the legacy of his second term in office.

That fight will encompass top-line carbon emissions targets set by White House, rules implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that will reduce pollution from power stations and a looming and totemic decision over the Keystone XL pipeline.

The pipeline is a politically contentious project that the Obama administration has repeatedly delayed. The Keystone pipeline, which would transport crude oil from Canada to refineries on the US Gulf Coast, has become a hugely symbolic proxy for the battle between environmentalists and the corporate energy sector.

In a sign of the strength of opposition faced by Obama even within the ranks of his own party, the Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu - who is in the midst of a re-election campaign in Louisiana that has gone to a runoff - took to the Senate floor on Wednesday call for an immediate vote to approve Keystone XL.



“You don’t become a super energy power by just wishing it,” Landrieu said, calling on Senate Republicans to help her pass legislation to endorse the pipeline.

She was supported on the floor by other pro-energy Democrats: Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Jon Tester of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. It was later confirmed that both the House and Senate would hold votes on the pipeline.



Other Democrats applauded the US-China deal as an ambitious step that, if implemented, could help to bring about the drastic reduction in carbon emissions required to prevent catastrophic environmental consequences.



Republican Mitch McConnell, who is certain to take over as majority leader of the Senate in January, fresh from a decisive electoral triumph in the coal-rich state of Kentucky, said he would make it a priority in the next Congress to ease the burden placed on the energy sector by EPA limits on carbon emissions.

McConnell, whose campaign for re-election focused on what he said was Obama’s “war on coal”, is considering withholding funding from the EPA to prevent it from enforcing rules set by the administration. He did not specifically address any such measures on Wednesday but said that “easing the burden already created by EPA regulations” would be a priority for the Republican-controlled Congress.

Those EPA rules, unveiled by the Obama administration in June last year, will require carbon pollution from power plants to be cut by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030. The limits led the groundwork for Wednesday’s deal in which China agreed to cap emissions for the first time and the US committed to deep reductions by 2025.

The deal was welcomed by climate change campaigners across the world as an important step ahead of efforts to reach a global deal on reducing emissions beyond 2020 at a United Nations meeting in Paris next year.

The deal challenges Republicans in Washington because it undercuts one of their principal arguments against restriction on greenhouse gas emissions: that unilateral action by the US handicaps economic competition China, which is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and refuses to play by the same rules.

Building on the momentum from the China deal, Obama hopes to reach a global deal on reducing emissions beyond 2020 at a United Nations meeting in Paris next year that his Republican opponents will almost certainly oppose.

McConnell has already signalled he will use Republican control of the Senate to put pressure on Obama to approve Keystone, but after Landrieu’s brinkmanship on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Democratic leaders in the Senate agreed to schedule a vote.

The move would deprive McConnell from claiming responsibility for the much-anticipated vote on the pipeline and, more significantly for Democrats, would be a boost to Landrieu, facing an uphill battle to hold on to her seat in a December runoff election.



A Keystone vote would be an acknowledgement that Republicans will almost certainly pass a vote to approve the pipeline in January, and throw a raft to Landrieu, who has used her position as chair of the energy committee to lobby for the pipeline to be approved.



Beyond Keystone, Obama’s plans to act on climate change are particularly objectionable to Republicans because it relies solely upon the powers invested in the executive. After becoming president, Obama sought to deal with climate change through Congress, but Republican opposition made that highly unlikely. Ever since he has focused on the considerable range of actions his administration can take independently of Congress. A flurry of other EPA announcements are expected in the weeks and months ahead.

Yet without a two-thirds majority of both chambers of Congress, Republicans are unable to force Obama’s hand on Keystone or override the EPA rules that they argue would be particularly harmful in states like Kentucky.

The fight against the deal is likely to be led in the Senate by Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who is in line to become chairman of the Senate environment and public works in January. Inhofe, a longstanding climate change denier who recently said global warming was a hoax, described the US-China deal as “non-binding charade”. He added: “As we enter a new Congress, I will do everything in my power to rein in and shed light on the EPA’s unchecked regulations.”

Under the secretly negotiated deal unveiled by Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing, China, which previously had only ever pledged to reduce the rapid rate of growth in its emission, will cap its output by 2030. Additionally, it has also promised to increase its use of energy from zero-emission sources to 20% by 2030.

John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, said the deal was “job crushing” and added: “It is the latest example of the president’s crusade against affordable, reliable energy.”

The deal also involves the US going further than it had previously pledged. It doubles the pace of US carbon pollution reduction – from 1.2% per year from 2005 to 2020, to 2.3% to 2.8% from 2020 to 2025.

Inhofe said the deal held the US to a different standard. “It’s hollow and not believable for China to claim it will shift 20% of its energy to non-fossil fuels by 2030, and a promise to peak its carbon emissions only allows the world’s largest economy to buy time,” he said.

Appearing on the Senate floor later, Inhofe added: “Even if they agreed to reducing emissions, we wouldn’t believe them.”

Dismissing the global push to cut emissions, he said “people are trying to resurrect” the notion that there’s “actually some truth to the global warming thing”.

Obama’s top advisers said the deal was significant. “To put it plainly, this is a big deal,” said John Podesta, counselor to the president, who oversees climate change and energy policy.



“This target keeps us on track to reduce our carbon pollution on the order of 80% by 2050, and means the US is doing our part to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.”

Podesta is widely tipped to play a key role in Hillary Clinton’s expected bid for the White House in 2016. A future Democratic president is unlikely to object to the targets inherited from the Obama administration, but a Republican president would not feel so tightly bound to them.

With the exception of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose apparent position on climate change has veered over time, the views of potential Republican candidates range from scepticism about the scientific evidence of man-made climate change to outright denial of its existence.