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from the now-we-gotta-invent-stuff-to-make-it-happen dept.
195 Nations Approve Historic Climate Accord
195 Nations Approve Historic Climate Accord
Following late-night negotiations and years of anticipation, delegates from 195 countries have agreed to curb the worst effects of climate change by limiting warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius. The agreement, the result of an international climate summit outside Paris and approved December 12, aims to be the world's roadmap to kicking the fossil fuel habit, with a possibility of an even more ambitious 1.5-degree goal in the future.
Even with the agreement in hand, political obstacles and technological challenges remain to reining in global warming. Individual countries will have to swap greenhouse gas‒emitting energy sources like coal, oil and natural gas for low-emission sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power. Along with yet-to-be-realized technologies that pull greenhouse gases from the air, these changes are meant to reduce net carbon emissions to zero in the second half of the century. By 2020, countries will release their long-term plans to cut emissions. Every five years, countries will reassess their progress and tweak their carbon-cutting goals.
COP21 has been signed
After a last-minute weakening of the text, COP21 has been accepted in Paris by almost 200 countries (that's our world, basically) and the French minister of Foreign Affairs, Laurent Fabius, hammered it off before proceeding with the group hug of world leaders.
The draft text [PDF] is currently available, but a crucial change in article 4 point 4 on page 21 is no longer there after the last-minute "oh sorry we were tired and made a typo".
Read about it on The Guardian.
Let me say in conclusion: Thank you Paris! Politics is the art of what is achievable.
Polar bears - Terrorists : 1 - 0 [Caution: to view this link you MUST accept the site cookie popup] (violent cartoon, possibly NSFW)
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Sunday December 13 2015, @09:47AM
Well, maybe the (150 million?) US Republicans are against the agreement, because it goes too far for them, even with the "shall reduce emissions" watered down to "should reduce emissions".
Similarly, the (150 million?) people of Bangladesh might be against the agreement, because it doesn't go far enough, they'll be under water when Greenland melts.
So it's a compromise agreement.
Increased taxes on imports sounds like a good idea but would it work or would it just make smuggling and fraud more lucrative.
I agree this agreement has no teeth; maybe its only value is that it is a piece of paper saying "the world will now begin to reduce fossil fuels", which is a very important piece of paper to wave in the faces of directors of pension funds.
Investment in fossil fuel companies will now be less safe in the long term.
Let's hope that very weak effect will be enough.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @10:19AM
Having lived in that part of the world, I am fairly certain that the leadership of Banglesh would happily drown half their population as long as their own villas were intact and their Singaporean bank accounts stayed fat.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday December 13 2015, @01:24PM
I agree this agreement has no teeth; maybe its only value is that it is a piece of paper saying "the world will now begin to reduce fossil fuels", which is a very important piece of paper to wave in the faces of directors of pension funds.
If those directors take climate change hype as being more important than the future of their pension, then that's a solid indication that your funds should not be in that pension fund. After all, your very important piece of paper is still just a piece of paper (at least, if you bothered to print it out, that is). And to be blunt, I think we're about a century further behind on global warming and its harm than these treaty signatories think we are. The fact that the treaty completely ignores adaptation is a huge problem for me. The fact that the treaty ignores the carbon temperature forcing errors and likely IPCC exaggeration is a problem for me.
I think the most bizarre aspect of this whole affair are the people gleefully practicing economic suicide. For example, no one still has a counter to the problem that mitigation attempts cost a lot. For the evergreen example, Germany and Denmark still have way overpriced residential electricity prices. Germany's program actually is a slick way to subsidize industrial users at the expense of residential users too. The vast majority of carbon markets still have the same basic flaws in their construction (particularly, hard caps - fixed number of CO2 emission credits issued per year). People are proposing hard stops for their country's economy while allowing the developing world to continue unimpeded.