The historic Paris agreement on climate change was finally adopted with no objection on Saturday by the 196 Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) during the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) hosted by France.
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Speaking at the White House hours after the deal was completed, Obama said that “no agreement is ideal, including this one”, and that negotiations that involve almost 200 nations are always challenging.
“We are already making strong progress towards meeting the existing goal to mobilise United States dollars 100 billion from a wide variety of sources, including both public and private, by 2020”, the White House said.
Obama, who had traveled to Paris earlier this month to mark the beginning of the talks, dismissed critics of efforts to promote clean energy, arguing their warnings of job losses haven’t panned out. But he cast the success as a helpful precedent for future efforts.
In the “Paris agreement”, countries commit to keeping average global temperatures from rising another degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) between now and 2100, a key demand of poor countries ravaged by rising sea levels and other effects of climate change.
Obama added that Saturday’s agreement is still only the first of many.
The president added that the agreement “represents the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got”.
“This agreement, we had been waiting for a long time, for 40 years”, Hollande said.
“This evening, leaders from 195 nations reached agreement on a historic deal to curb carbon emissions and begin to reverse the course of climate change”. The Kyoto agreement was legally binding, but applied only to developed nations, not developing nations where emissions have been rising rapidly in recent decades.
Top Republicans in Congress dismissed the pact as nothing more than a long-term planning document and said that Obama was making promises he won’t be able to keep in the months and years ahead.
Last weekend, Merkley traveled to Paris as part of a delegation of ten U.S. Senators to take part in the talks.
Diplomats celebrate the signing of the Paris climate agreement.
Previously, Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump has cast doubt on science that attributes the warming of the climate to carbon emissions, saying the world’s temperature “goes up and it goes down”.
Burning coal, oil and gas are some of the most widely practiced methods for producing energy around the world, but they emit an abundance of greenhouse gases in the process.
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“The time to act is now”, Nevada’s Reid said.
