PRESS TRUST OF INDIA | 
Washington Nov 29| 15: At a joint news conference here Tuesday with President Francois Hollande of France, President Barack Obama veered from his focus on the terrorist attacks in Paris to bring up the huge international gathering beginning in the French capital Monday to hammer out a global response to climate change. “What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children,” Obama said of the climate conference. The segue brought mockery, even castigation, from the political right, but it was a reminder of the importance Obama places on climate change in shaping his legacy. During his 2012 reelection campaign, he barely mentioned global warming, but the issue has become a hallmark of his second term. And on Sunday night he arrives in Paris, hoping to make climate policy the signature environmental achievement of his, and perhaps any, presidency.fr”He comes to Paris with a moral authority that no other president has had on the issue of climate change,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University who noted that Obama’s domestic climate efforts already stand alone in American history. “No other president has had a climate change policy. It makes him unique.” In Paris, Obama will join more than 120 world leaders to kick off two weeks of negotiations aimed at forging a new climate change accord that would, for the first time, commit almost every country on Earth to lowering its greenhouse gas pollution. All year, Obama’s negotiators have worked behind the scenes to fashion a Paris deal. Crucial to Obama’s leverage has been the release of his domestic climate change regulations, which he then pushed other countries to emulate. So far, at least 170 countries have put forth emission reduction plans.But even as Obama presses for a deal in Paris, it faces steep obstacles, not least the legal and legislative assault on his own regulations at home. During the course of the Paris talks, Republicans in Congress are planning a series of votes to fight Obama’s climate agenda. More than half the states are suing the administration on the legality of his climate plan. And all the Republican presidential candidates have said that they would undo the regulations if elected. On Nov. 19, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the environment committee and the Senate’s most vocal skeptic on climate change science, and Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., sent a letter to Obama, signed by 35 other senators, promising to block the funding for any climate deal unless the Paris pact is sent to Congress for ratification. A vote on the deal would fail in the Republican-controlled Congress.”Our constituents are worried that the pledges you are committing the United States to will strengthen foreign economies at the expense of American workers,” the senators wrote. “They are also skeptical about sending billions of their hardearned dollars to government officials from developing nations.” Nonetheless, Obama is pushing forward. He unveiled the rules on curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions with a tight timeline, ensuring that they would be finalized before he leaves office. He has raised the issue of climate change in dozens of speeches and with every recent visiting foreign leader. In Washington, a team of environmental lawyers is preparing to defend the rules in court, while at the State Department, climate envoys are in constant contact with their counterparts around the world. If his domestic regulations and a Paris accord withstand efforts to gut them, “climate change will become the heart and soul.
