Mitt Romney on Global Warming: Troubling on an International Climate Agreement

Mitt Romney on Global Warming: Troubling on an International Climate Agreement

By Victor Morawski
December of 2009 was a tense time for libertarians, conservatives and global warming skeptics worldwide, the month of the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Members of the environmental left across the globe had high hopes going into that conference that this would be where they would finally get it done, would reach a worldwide legally-binding climate agreement on the limitation of greenhouse gases (GHG) to curb global warming — an improved version of the Kyoto Protocol — with nearly all of the world’s nations as signatories. These emissions across the globe would then be regulated by the UN, backed by the force of international law.

That agreement would make national cap and trade laws — like the one liberals had proposed for the US — largely irrelevant and redundant. As a signatory, the U.S. would have been legally bound to pursue the GHG emissions mitigation targets laid out in the international agreement, while also participating in a global cap and trade scheme

Readers may recall that the Copenhagen Conference delegates came up far short of the sought-after agreement. Deep-seated differences prevented them from bringing anything that was legally binding to the table. Failing to reach consensus even on a considerably weakened non-binding resolution, they finally voted to at least “take note” of it as a way of saving face and justifying their air fares and hotel bills.

Fearing the worst at the time, Conservatives were greatly concerned that if such a legally-binding international agreement were reached at the Conference, world citizen Barack Obama would sign it, thus surrendering US sovereignty over the management of GHG emissions to the UN and committing our nation for years to come to a schedule for paying tens of billions of dollars to developing nations as reparations for the harm that we have supposedly done them by having such a large carbon footprint over the years.
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