Obama: GOP is the 'only major party in advanced world' to deny climate change

Barack Obama chided Republicans on Friday for standing apart from every other rightwing party in the developed world by denying the science of climate change.

In a confident defence of the Paris climate deal agreed by nearly 200 nations last weekend, Obama predicted that Republican opposition to the accord and the denial of climate change itself will not be sustainable.

“The American Republican party is the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” the president said. “It’s an outlier.

“Many of the key signatories of this deal, the architects of this deal, come from centre-right governments. Even the far-right parties in many of these countries, they may not like immigrants for example, but they admit, ‘Yeah the science tells us we’ve got to do something about climate change.’”

Tuesday’s debate between Republican presidential contenders barely touched on climate change, other than criticism of the Paris summit for focusing on dangerous global warming rather than terrorism.

Frontrunner Donald Trump has called climate science “bullshit” and a “hoax”, while contenders including Florida senator Marco Rubio and Texas senator Ted Cruz have questioned the science of climate change and downplayed the need to confront the issue.

Obama predicted that while Republicans will oppose the Paris deal during the 2016 presidential election campaign, the party’s hostility will fade away within three years, mirroring the fate of opposition to action on previous environmental problems such as air pollution and acid rain.

“My sense is that this is something that may be an advantage in terms of short-term politics in a Republican primary; it’s not something that will be a winner for the Republicans in the long term,” the president said.

Obama said the Paris deal, although not entirely legally binding, sets all countries down the path towards clean energy and expresses a shared ambition to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In a nod to what the president hopes will be a defining legacy, Obama said the US was a “key leader” in getting a breakthrough following 20 years of often fraught climate negotiations.

“This is something I’ve been working on for five, six years,” he said. “When I went to Copenhagen [in 2009] I engaged in 24 hours of diplomacy to salvage from a pretty chaotic process the basic principle that every country had to participate, that we couldn’t have a rigid division between developed countries and developing countries when it came to solving this problem.”

Obama has set the US a target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% by 2025, based on 2005 levels. This will primarily be achieved by empowering the Environmental Protection Agency to curb carbon pollution from power plants, although 24 states have banded together to sue the regulator in an attempt to overturn the plan.

Republicans claim the regulations will hurt American jobs and raise power bills.