PARIS, Dec 14 – President Barack Obama praised a landmark climate change agreement approved Saturday in Paris, saying it could be “a turning point for the world.” He said the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis.
Obama said it creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way. He praised American leadership but noted that all participating nations will have to cooperate. He said he believe this moment can be a turning point for the world. He calling the agreement “the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got” while speaking this from the White House.
Though the plan was hailed as a milestone in the battle to keep Earth hospitable to human life, critics say it is short on specifics, such as how the plan will be enforced or how improvements will be measured. The accord achieved one major goal. It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures and strives for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) if possible.
The agreement, put together at the 21st Conference of Parties, or COP21, doesn’t mandate exactly how much each country must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, it sets up a bottom-up system in which each country sets its own goal which the agreement calls a “nationally determined contribution” and then must explain how it plans to reach that objective.
Those pledges must be increased over time, and starting in 2018 each country will have to submit new plans every five years. Many countries actually submitted their new plans before climate change conference, known as COP21, started last month but those pledges aren’t enough to keep warming below the 2-degree target. But the participants’ hope is that over time, countries will aim for more ambitious goals and ratchet up their commitments.
Another sticking point has been coming up with a way to punish nations that don’t do their part, but observers say that was never really on the table. Instead, the agreement calls for the creation of a committee of experts to “facilitate implementation” and “promote compliance” with the agreement, but it won’t have the power to punish violators.
Another issue, according to observers, was whether there would be compensation is paid to countries that will see irreparable damage from climate change but have done almost nothing to cause it. The agreement calls for developed countries to raise at least $100 billion annually in order to assist developing countries. Members of the scientific and environmental activist communities responded with varying degrees of optimism.
“This didn’t save the planet,” Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said of the agreement. “But it may have saved the chance of saving the planet.” Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute anticipated a “historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis.”
