Purvis told The Associated Press at the Paris climate summit on Tuesday “there’s no worldwide climate police that’s going to come and tell a country to do something more”.
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“One of the things you find is when you’re in this job”, he said, is that “you think about it differently than when you’re just running for the job”.
“It is the poor that suffer the most when you take away the ability of fossil fuels and you restrict them so that cheap or accessible energy sources aren’t available”, said Perkins. Obama added: “These nations are not the most populous nations, they don’t have big armies (…) but they have a right to dignity and sense of place”.
Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., said GOP lawmakers were forcing a vote on the climate rule to “send a message to the climate conference in Paris that in America, there’s serious disagreement with the policies of this president”.
“There’s a good understanding internationally of the path that the U.S.is now taking, that the actions are credible”, said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at World Resources Institute.
Throughout the floor debate Democrats mocked Republicans who they said were “in denial” about the science and impact of climate change.
Now, deprived of the “U.S. can’t act alone” argument, the opponents have taken a new tack: It’s insane to focus on the long-term threat from climate change when we should be concentrating on the more immediate threat from radical Islamic terrorism. He didn’t name names.
France’s environment minister is welcoming U.S. President Barack Obama’s pledge to push for a climate accord that includes legally binding promises.
Shortly after visiting the site of the recent terrorist attacks at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris with French President François Hollande and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, Obama gave the opening address at the 21st annual Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris to address the issues of global climate change.
President Barack Obama’s remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in the Syria conflict were remarkably ironic: “The Russians now have been there for several weeks, over a month, and I think fair-minded reporters who have looked at the situation would say that the situation hasn’t changed significantly”.
“If we have these periodic reviews built in, what I believe will happen is that by sending that signal to researchers and scientists and investors and entrepreneurs and venture funds, we’ll actually start hitting the targets faster than we expected”, he said.
“We have broken the old arguments for inaction”, Obama said at the plenary session Monday.
It was just a year ago that Obama and Xi vowed to set definite limits on greenhouse gas emissions, laying the foundation for other countries to follow suit.
On the eve of the summit, an estimated 785,000 people around the world joined the biggest day of climate change activism in history, telling world leaders there was “No Planet B” in the fight against global warming.
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French President Francois Hollande is holding talks with African leaders about what their countries need to cope with and reduce global warming. Those emissions produce heat-trapping gases and scientists say are causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise and leading to more and more droughts and other extreme weather. But on Monday, more than 100 world leaders began to arrive in Paris for talks aimed at staving off the most destructive effects of global warming.
