House Dem to offer measure backing Paris climate deal

A House Democrat is working with his colleagues to introduce a nonbinding measure to support the Paris climate agreement.

Rep. Jared Huffman’s (D-Calif.) resolution, if it gets a vote in the full House, would be a rebuke to President Trump’s 2017 decision to pull out of the climate pact.

Depending on the timing, it could be the first major action House Democrats take to push back against Trump’s environmental policies since they took over the chamber’s majority earlier this month.

Huffman hasn’t gotten any assurances from Democratic leadership on whether the chamber would vote on his resolution, but said he’s hopeful the vote can happen by Earth Day.

{mosads}“It feels like this is a sweet spot on something we can do early in this Congress that sends an important message, that will be strongly passed out of the House,” Huffman told reporters Thursday.

He said he hasn’t finalized wording yet for the resolution.

“We’re just getting started, but I’m getting an enormous amount of positive feedback from colleagues.”

Huffman said a number of Democrats have agreed to support the resolution — along with at least one Republican — but he declined to name them.

He said the resolution would be a good start to Democrats’ efforts to push back on Trump, but that it should be followed by other legislative actions, too.

“Now, let’s be clear, we’ve got to do a lot more than just a concurrent resolution to stay in the Paris agreement. That’s an important message, but it’s not all we need to do,” he said.

But given that Republicans control the Senate and the White House, House Democrats can’t do much more than a nonbinding resolution.

The Paris agreement was written in 2015, with nearly 200 nations signing on. The efforts to come to the agreement were largely driven by then-President Obama.

Under the pact, individual nations came up with their own targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and agreed to revise those targets in coming years. The United States’s pledge was to cut emissions 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, when compared with 2005 levels. The emissions reduction goals are nonbinding.

Trump promised during the 2016 presidential campaign to pull out of the accord.

He fulfilled the pledge in June 2017, and announced that he would withdraw the United States. But he cannot formally do that until 2020 at the earliest.

Politico first reported Huffman’s plans.