REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMEN opposed to an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen have seized on the “climategate” scandal over e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia to undermine President Barack Obama’s summit visit.
The same Republicans are expected to use the e-mails, which they claim are proof that scientists falsified evidence of global warming, to fight climate change legislation in the US Senate.
More than two dozen Republican senators sent a letter to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon on Thursday demanding an investigation into the e-mails. Several Republican climate change deniers intend to travel to Copenhagen to raise the issue.
Chief among them is Sen James Inhofe from Oklahoma. “We now have thousands of e-mails showing several of the UN’s top scientists apparently evading laws requiring transparency, defaming scientists with opposing viewpoints, and manipulating data to fit preconceived opinions,” Mr Inhofe said.
At the end of November, Mr Inhofe told the New York Timeshe intended to travel to the climate summit because "I don't want a group of people to tell the people of Copenhagen that the US is going to pass some kind of a cap-and-trade Bill. I want to be there . . . to say: 'No, that isn't true. They don't have the votes.'"
The House passed the Waxman-Markey Bill on climate change last June, but legislation will not be debated in the Senate until after a healthcare Bill is completed.
The Bill would cut US greenhouse emissions “in the range of” 17 per cent, measured against 2005 levels, by 2020. The same goal has been cited by Mr Obama, and by senators John Kerry, a Democrat; Joe Lieberman, a Democrat-leaning independent; and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, in an agreed “framework”.
The Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, but could not get it ratified by the Senate. Todd Stern, the chief US climate change negotiator, has tried to explain this dilemma to negotiators. “They look at what Congress has already done and say, ‘Can’t you do 10 per cent more?’,” Mr Stern told the New York Times. “The answer is no, not really.”
In a Washington Postopinion piece former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin urged Mr Obama to "boycott Copenhagen" to "send a message that the US will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices".