“As world leaders gather in Paris to begin climate negotiations, I hope President Obama and Secretary Kerry remember the rightful role of Congress and the American people in the agreement-making process”, Lee said.
Advertisement
“My expectation is that we will absolutely be able to meet our commitments”, Obama said Tuesday at a news conference in Paris.
But it’s also important for the climate talks where the president made his comments.
Mr. Obama also says that without ambitious action on climate change, people may be forced to flee island nations and will become refugees.
Obama is meeting on the sidelines of global climate talks in Paris with leaders from island nations hit hard by rising seas and increasingly violent storms.
French President Francois Hollande said he was encouraged by the start of talks that are planned to run until December 11.
Their main goal: Agree on legally binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions meant to hold global average temperatures short of a 2 degrees Celsius increase over preindustrial global temperatures.
Peruvian activist Maria Alejandra Rodriquez Acha said her country is facing climate threats on many fronts – from coastal erosion by the Pacific Ocean to shrinking forests in the Amazon.
“Nowhere has our coordination been more necessary or more fruitful than the topic that we’re here to discuss during the Paris conference, and that is how the world can come together to arrest the pace of climate change”, Obama said as quoted by Xinhua Net.
So the administration is looking to keep the targets out while including binding procedures on when and how countries should periodically review and raise their targets.
At a meeting with Hollande, African leaders described the Sahara Desert encroaching on farmland, forests disappearing from Congo to Madagascar and rising sea levels swallowing homes in West African river deltas.
“When a young student is forced to go study under a street lamp at night, it clearly demonstrates the electricity issue”, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said.
“In his address to COP21 Leaders Summit, the United Nations chief urged world leaders “to instruct your negotiators to choose the path of compromise and consensus”.
More than 40,000 delegates are in the French capital tussling over the details of a draft agreement that will include all countries in the fight against climate change.
“The world, and in particular the developed world, owes the African continent an environmental debt”, he said.
Disagreement over how to share responsibility for curbing emissions is one of the thorniest issues, and developing nations have accused richer countries of hypocrisy for demanding they cut their use of fossil fuels after carbon-burning their way to prosperity.
Advertisement
“It is still a text with many options”, Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar Vidal told Reuters, adding with a shrug “but everybody has shown their commitment to have an agreement”.
