"At the U.N. climate summit in Paris, the U.S. has a big footprint. Cabinet officials scurry from meeting to meeting, trying to get a binding deal that would help some 200 countries slow the planet's warming. Yet in some ways, the United States is an outlier."

"'Everybody else is taking climate change really seriously,' President Obama said during his visit to Paris at the start of the summit. 'They think it's a really big problem.'"

"As the president acknowledged, he leads one of the few advanced democracies in the world where climate change is still the subject of political debate."

"'You travel around Europe, and you talk to leaders of governments and the opposition, and they're arguing about a whole bunch of things. One thing they're not arguing about is whether the science of climate change is real and whether we have to do something about it,' he said."

"As the summit began, House Republicans in Washington were debating a bill to gut the Obama administration's clean energy plan."