Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) has found a new forum to contest the United States’ involvement in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. The senator, who takes issue with monetary contributions the U.S. has pledged under the UNFCCC, grabbed on to the organization’s inclusion of the “State of Palestine,” which the U.S. does not acknowledge, in hopes of putting a stop to such funding. On Wednesday, Barrasso offered an amendment to the NDAA stating that it is the sense of Congress that the U.S. cannot make financial contributions to the UNFCCC.
“The law is absolutely clear – U.S. funding for U.N. organizations that recognize a ‘State of Palestine’ is expressly prohibited. Our amendment is a clear reminder for the Obama administration that if it sends a single penny of taxpayer funds to any of these groups, it will be breaking the law,” Barrasso said Wednesday in a prepared statement.
Palestine became a member of the UNFCCC in March, and thus began Barrasso’s campaign to halt any U.S. funding to the organization. In an April 18 letter to the State Department co-signed with several other senators, Barrasso demanded that the agency withhold all future funding for the UNFCCC.
According to the Barrasso amendment, State Department spokesman John Kirby has stated that “[t]he UNFCCC is a treaty, and the Palestinians’ purported accession does not involve their becoming members of any U.N. specialized agency or, indeed, any international organization.”
The new amendment, which has not yet been voted on, “reaffirms that, under United States law, the United States is prohibited from making any disbursements of United States funds to the UNFCCC secretariat, the Green Climate Fund, the Conference of the Parties, and the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol after the “State of Palestine” was allowed to become a full member of the UNFCCC.”
The State Department contributed $500 million to the UNFCCC’s Green Climate Fund in early March, days before Palestine officially joined the UNFCCC. The payment was the U.S.’s first toward the $3 billion it has committed. Even though the Palestine issue had yet to surface, Barrasso took issue with this deposit as well, stating during a March 8 hearing of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that he “firmly oppose[d] what the president [was] doing here in this misuse, I believe, of taxpayer dollars.”
