by Nick Pope
The Daily Caller
President Joe Biden is unlikely to attempt to ratify the pledge his administration made at the recently-concluded United Nations (U.N.) climate summit to transition away from fossil fuels, Republican lawmakers and legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The U.S. joined nearly 200 other countries in committing to a pledge to transition away from fossil fuels and embrace green energy on Wednesday, the last day of the conference. Republican lawmakers and legal experts told the DCNF that Biden will not bring the pledge to the Senate for a ratification vote, criticizing its underlying rationale and the administration for unilaterally agreeing to the commitment without attaining the consent of Congress.
The pledge stands as one of two major accomplishments achieved by delegates attending the summit, known as COP28. In addition to the energy transition commitment, the conference also produced pledges from the U.S. and other Western countries to pour a combined hundreds of millions of dollars into a de facto international “climate reparations” fund…
“Nothing the Biden administration may have agreed to at COP28 is at all legally binding on the U.S. At most, whatever agreements Biden made would be mere executive agreements similar to the Paris climate accord, which is basically just non-enforceable executive branch policy,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute and a member of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team, told the DCNF. “Biden’s anti-coal announcements at COP-28 are already in the works at EPA. But they will most likely never be implemented. They will likely be determined to be unconstitutional under the 2022 Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA.”
