Last month, President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. had reached an historic deal with China on climate change, according to which the U.S. would decrease carbon emissions more rapidly and China would stop growing its emissions 15 years from now. The president’s media fans cheered, though critics noted that the one-sided deal kept the status quo and was unenforceable. Now, China has rejected U.S.-led efforts to monitor its carbon emissions levels.
The rejection came Sunday at an international conference on climate change in Lima, Peru, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
China’s refusal to allow foreign governments and non-governmental organizations to ask questions about its emissions levels has effectively blocked the Obama administration’s diplomatic momentum.
One analyst quoted by the Morning Post observed: “The spirit of constructive cooperation of the US-China agreement seems to have come to a full stop.”
Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.
Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak
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