Congress disinterested in CoP 17

I’ll be looking at an article today that relates to my academic project (and be blogging more about the live issue reporting shortly).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/climate-change-battle-framed-in-moral-terms-by-environmental-coalition/2011/11/30/gIQA4NhADO_blog.html?tid=sm_twitter_washingtonpost

Climate change conference lures no congressmen

Juliet Eliperin

This article claims that CoP 17 is the first CoP talks in many years not to draw the attendance of a single US congressman and only a handful of congressional aides.  This contrasts to Copenhagen where Nancy Pelosi led a delegation of over 20 congressional delegates and some republicans, John Kerry for example, attended separately, as did over 50 congressional aides.  It is telling that John Kerry (who has attended 6 CoP talks to date including Kyoto) could not attend because of his work on the Deficit Reduction supercommittee, as this shows that the domestic economic concerns are overriding the international issue of climate change.

The question here is: to what extent does the same apply to the EU?  I hope to find out more about that shortly.