The U.S. and China weren’t always Earth’s biggest polluters.
The Paris Agreement is an essentially forward-looking document. In it, global leaders aspire to 1.5°C of warming, beefed-up financing strategies, and regular check-ins to assure nations are on track to phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
The headlines from the Paris climate talks tell an inspiring story. Agence France-Pressereported an outbreak of “euphoria” as the international climate accord was sealed. Reutershailed a global “turn from fossil fuels.” The Guardian headlined “a major leap for mankind.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marked the Paris climate agreement by committing to take on the “tough work that still needs to be accomplished both at home and around the world to implement the agreement.” Part of that tough work will be re-orienting federal funding to stop making the climate crisis worse.
Given Trudeau’s statements on the seriousness of the climate crisis, you might expect that the multi-billion dollar infrastructure program he ran on in the election would already be targeted to reduce carbon pollution. You would be wrong.
The COP21 Paris Climate Conference has, as expected, led to an agreement. It will come into effect from 2020 if it is ratified by 55 of the countries which are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and these 55 countries account for at least 55% of global emissions of greenhouse gases. In the light of the positions taken in Paris, this dual condition should not raise any difficulty (although the non-ratification of Kyoto by the United States shows that surprises are always possible).
Globally influential climate activist Yeb Saño has just returned home to the Philippines disappointed, having recently trekked 1,500km from Rome to Paris only to see the COP21 climate change summit reach a spectacularly bad result last weekend, he says.
Saño and those in his multi-faith and environmental entourage —called the “People’s Pilgrimage" — had marched for two months across Europe, praying for a miracle.
Lake Poopó becomes a desert while in Paris, governments conclude an agreement they call “historic” to address climate change. Will the Paris Agreement save over 125,000 lakes that are in danger of disappearing in the world due to climate change?
The recent Paris talks on climate change failed utterly to slow the planetary slide towards extinction. The human-induced heat wave will continue to build. President Obama and other world leaders “say they want to reverse fossil fuel emissions and yet they agreed to what amounts to a 3 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase.”
“The talks in Paris ended with an agreement to keep heating up the planet.”
We knew it was going to be a record breaker. We knew that atmospheric greenhouse gasses in the range of 400 parts per million CO2 and 485 parts per million CO2e, when combined with one of the top three strongest El Ninos in the Pacific, would result in new all-time global record high temperatures. But what we didn’t know was how substantial the jump would ultimately be.
