The Paris agreement needs ratification from 55 countries that account for at least 55 per cent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.
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Those that have ratified include China and the United States, the world’s two biggest carbon dioxide emitters.
“The Paris Agreement was an extraordinary milestone”.
Meaning, if we finish ratifying it soon, President Trump can blow hot air all day, and he still won’t be able to doom future generations to catastrophic sea level rise.
The Paris accords, approved by the United Nations previous year, commit nearly every country to lowering their greenhouse gas emissions.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he is confident of reaching the magic number before the next United Nations climate conference, which starts November 7 in Marrakech, Morocco.
Calls from The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group for the European Union to ratify the Paris Agreement on Climate Change as soon as possible to trigger its entry into force.
So far, 185 nations have signed the agreement which takes effect 30 days after 55 countries, representing 55 percent of global emissions, deposit their ratifications with the secretary-general. Kerry said he’s optimistic the accord would take force by the end of the year. “There many issues need to be progressed, ranging from the development of a rule book to operationalize the agreement up to building confidence among developing countries that the $100 billion pledged to them by developed nations is truly building”, said Espinosa. Given this progress, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and secretary of state John Kerry are both confident that the deal will be fully implemented in the coming months, according to The Guardian.
The US Senate refused to join the earlier Kyoto Protocol, leading the Democratic Obama administration to insist that the Paris agreement not be a formal treaty that would require Senate ratification. At Paris, the threshold was narrowed to “well below” 2 degrees, and the agreement also explicitly mentioned 1.5 degrees as an aspiration.
The conference opens one day before the U.S. election, in which Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who rejects mainstream science on climate change, has vowed to tear up the Paris accord. What would be the reaction in the US, where today most USA citizens believe climate change is real and something has to be done about it?
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The likes of renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and prolific astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson have supported the pact written by 375 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, which basically says that a vote for Trump is a vote against the environment. But Mrs Theresa May, the new British Prime Minister, pledged before the General Assembly on Tuesday that her government, too, would legally join the Paris Agreement this year. “The consequences of opting out of the global community would be severe and long-lasting – for our planet’s climate and for the worldwide credibility of the United States”. This increase in greenhouse gases is changing Earth’s climate…
