“Congress and more than half of the states have already made clear that he won’t be speaking for us,” according to a McConnell opinion column posted on The Washington Post’s website. He said it would be “irresponsible for an outgoing president to purport to sign the American people up” for a new climate agreement.
About 150 heads of state are set to join Obama for talks on Monday and Tuesday as the deal nears the finish line. The goal is to secure worldwide cuts to emissions of heat-trapping gases to limit the rise of global temperatures to about another 2 degrees from now.
With little room for error, leaders have tried to avoid the pitfalls that undercut global climate negotiations in the past — specifically, those in Kyoto, Japan, in the early 1990s and in Denmark during Obama’s first term.
