US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that certain parts of any agreement emerging from the Paris climate talks should be legally binding.
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“Obama accepted it was hard to create political momentum for action, particularly in the United States, where many opposition Republicans reject the scientific consensus on the risks from carbon emissions”.
“This is an economic and security imperative that we have to tackle now”.
Just before the Paris meeting began, major carbon-emitting countries committed themselves to specific emission limits.
It is the latest chapter in a 25-year-old diplomatic saga marked by spats over burden-sharing and hobbled by a negotiation system of huge complexity. Developing nations feel that if they are being asked to not burn fossil fuels to power their growing economies, then developed nations that have already benefitted from burning fossil fuels should help pay for the transition to a low-carbon economy.
A statement issued by China on behalf of BASIC countries in the plenary extended support for an transparent and party driven process at the CoP21 and said that BASIC will work pragmatically with all other parties for an equitable and balanced climate agreement. The main driver behind our changing climate is greenhouse gas emissions from human economic activity, and many businesses are in a position to make meaningful, lasting changes.
“I don’t think that’s the best use of our money”, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, told reporters Monday. In Paris, nations have a chance to prove this view wrong once and for all. Writing this year in the Telegraph of London, Christopher Booker detailed how, for 30 years “the official temperature records… were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified”.
“We are really up against the clock and up against the wall”, Daniel Reifsnyder, one of the talks’ co-chairs, told negotiators on Tuesday morning. Expectations at the 2009 Copenhagen conference were so unrealistic they proved counterproductive. Current pledges will bring global warming down only to 2.7 deg C above pre-industrial levels, still way ahead of the 2 deg C needed to head off unsafe climate change.
Infhofe claims Obama’s pledge of reducing green house gasses by 26 to 28 percent “doesn’t even add up to what it claims” and will have no “measurable impact on curbing global temperatures or curtailing global warming”, the Free Beacon reports. That treaty required only rich countries to cut their emissions, while this time the goal is for everyone to pitch in.
They said they hope to utilize a package of financing arrangements between China and Latin America to promote China-Brazil trade and investment.
The legal status of the accord, which must get unanimous backing, is another bone of contention.
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The agreement being hammered out should require countries to complete periodic reviews that are legally binding, President Obama said in a speech from Paris. Other analyses make similar conclusions: IHS Energy, hardly a bastion of loopy environmentalism, released a study last week finding that countries’ emissions-cutting plans would get the world almost half the way to the emissions reductions it needs to keep warming below 2 degrees. “They are pushing back against this and not wanting to have that language in the agreement”, said Alden Meyer, strategy and policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
