Fresh Off Iranian Nuclear Deal “Victory,” President Obama Vows to Hit Climate Change Agenda Hard

President Obama has big foreign policy and climate change aspirations as 2015 begins to wind down and his administration prepares for the final year of his presidency.

According to Politico, President Obama’s National Security team has been “quietly building an agenda of action items” that the administration will focus on as it heads into its “lame duck” year. Top of the list? “Climate change.”

Buoyed by the success of his nuclear deal with Iran, President Barack Obama is preparing to move aggressively on other long-delayed priorities, including a major climate change summit this winter and his elusive quest to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Despite being seven years into the Obama administration, and the president being in what most consider to be “lame duck” status, President Obama plans to have a laser-like focus on foreign policy issues like fighting ISIS, reigning in Russia, and inking the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

A list of other foreign policy interests includes:

• A better relationship with Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal
• Increasing counter-terrorism operations in Africa and Asia
• Improve ailing relations with China
• Iranian nuclear monitoring
• Defeating the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh)
• Russia’s involvement in the Ukrainian separatist movement
• The continuing withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan

That’s quite a laundry list that has accumulated.

But President Obama and his administration have “no intentions of resting on our laurels,” one senior official told Politico:

“We have an ambitious foreign policy agenda that we’ll continue to pursue aggressively throughout the remainder of [the] fourth quarter of the administration.”

Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told Politico that President Obama will increase his focus on the issues that will affect his successor:

“The last 16 months actually can be very important not only for this president’s legacy, but for setting up the next president’s administration. No matter what people say in campaigns, you’re most likely to see incremental change from administration to administration.”

The President’s latest major foreign policy “accomplishment,” the nuclear deal with Iran, was fought tooth-and-nail by Republicans and many Democrats.

In fact, the House rejected the deal on Friday, which included “nay” votes from all but one Republican (that Republican, Libertarian Thomas Massie, voted “present”) and 25 Democrats.

On the climate change front, the President is preparing for the United Nations Climate Change Summit, which is set to kick off on November 30th in Paris, and is expected to last 11 days.

In recent weeks, President Obama has already tried to bring climate change issues into the spotlight. Two weeks ago, the President traveled to Alaska where he attempted to raise awareness about man-made climate change, which included a speech at the GLACIER conference.