![]() That China and the United States – two of the world’s biggest economies and biggest polluters – have both made real pledges to move away from fossil fuels is hugely significant. Despite still being the world’s biggest carbon polluter, “last year (China) added more solar than the entire U.S. “China has become the biggest market for renewable energy technology in the world,” he told me. A common refrain there: It doesn’t matter what the United States is doing because China has the dirtiest air in the world and it doesn’t care at all about climate change.Ĭonclusion: Why should we bother if they don’t?īut that logic is it is based on “a very dated perspective of the world,” said Schmidt, from the Natural Resources Defense Council. I recently spent a week in Woodward, Oklahoma, which is one of the most climate-skeptical places in the United States. China and the United States are playing ballĪir pollution in Beijing, 2013. This time, everyone knows where to start the process.Ģ. “In Copenhagen (in 2009), frankly, most of the big emitters announced the targets days before the conference, (and there was) not time to digest them and figure out what it meant for the agreement.” ![]() That’s part of what makes an agreement of some sort “inevitable” in Paris, said Jake Schmidt, international program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Maybe that all looks like numbers soup, but the point is this: The countries are showing their cards, and they’re doing that now. The European Union is pledging even deeper cuts: at least 40% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by 2030. China will peak its carbon dioxide pollution by 2030. The United States, for example, has announced that it will cut heat-trapping pollution 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. This leaves other issues on the table in Paris but gives negotiators more of a starting point than has been common in the past. That means that rather than hashing everything out at the actual meeting in December, the big countries are deciding, now, how much climate pollution they will agree to cut. This U.N.F.C.C.C.’s COP21 meeting in Paris is, in part, taking a bottom-up approach to negotiation. Wind power is taking off in surprising places, including the U.S. Countries already are pledging major pollution cuts Here are five reasons for optimism ahead of the talks.ġ. “And it’s open – it’s opening – right now.” “The window for significant progress on climate is only open every once in a while,” said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute. But these talks, which aptly, if ominously, have been called “our last hope” for climate action, must be met with bold optimism. (“That’s not going to happen,” said Nathaniel Keohane, vice president for international climate at the Environmental Defense Fund, for example). People following the talks closely tell me that meeting the 2 degrees goal in Paris would be unrealistic. It’s true that a Paris agreement probably will fall short, on its own, of the international community’s stated goal of halting warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). I’m hopeful that the 21st time’s the charm. ![]() That means this is the 21st time we’ve done this – gathered the entire world and tried to address the global climate crisis on something resembling the scale science says is required. The Paris talks are called COP21 in U.N.-speak, for the 21st meeting of the Conference of Parties. And, this time, against all odds, there’s ample evidence things finally will be different. World leaders are set to meet again 100 days from Saturday. We can’t throw out that frustrating history, of course.īut we can and should do our best to shake it off, Taylor Swift-style. More recently, in 2009, talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, amounted to “ a sort of climate wish list,” Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, for instance, was signed but never ratified by the United States, and even global sweetheart Canada pulled out and failed to meet its pollution targets. Yet all, so far, largely have failed to really put the brakes on climate change – to stop us from careening toward 2 degrees Celsius of warming, which is regarded as the benchmark for dangerous, unmanageable climate change. They’re attended by pretty much every country in the world. The meetings have been organized around a wonkish treaty called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or, you know, U.N.F.C.C.C. We know the stakes are huge – nothing short of the fate of this planet – but it’s become difficult to expect much out of diplomacy. We’ve learned to be pessimists about climate change.Įvery so often, we hear news about world leaders meeting in some exotic-sounding location – Copenhagen, Lima, Durban, Kyoto – to try to hammer out an agreement to curb heat-trapping gases. ![]()
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