President Barack Obama spent almost $3 million to attend the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, pushing his total taxpayer-paid travel costs over $80 million.
Flight expenses for the Paris meeting were $1,652,124.60, while related Secret Service costs came to $1,324,171.60, including hotel rooms, rental vehicles, air and rail travel, and overtime, according to records obtained by
Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group in Washington.
"Obama's Paris junket is another example of wasteful and unnecessary presidential travel that abuses the taxpayers, the military, and the U.S. Secret Service," said Tom Fitton, the group's president, in a statement about the expenses.
Wired calculated that the 50,000 people who attended the talks would produce 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide just getting there and back. The goal of the talks, originally, was to prevent average global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius, which
ThinkProgress reported wasn't feasible for the countries involved under their previous commitments.
"Paris is focused on stanching the bleeding with a tourniquet," Joe Romm of ThinkProgress wrote. "The goal has always been to get firm global commitments from the big emitters to meet serious targets in the 2025-2030 time frame so we can get off our current emissions pathway — a pathway that would blow past 4°C (7°F) warming, ruin a livable climate for centuries and make feeding 9 billion people post-2050 an unimaginably difficult task."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump vowed to reject the Paris agreement during his first 100 days in office, a move an Obama official says will not happen.
"To me, there's more likely to be continuity no matter who's in office," Jonathan Pershing, the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change, said in an interview, according to the
Washington Examiner. "I believe that this is a huge problem, though, and no matter who is president, it's going to be part of what they have to deal with."
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