United Nations conference is opportunity to renew climate change partnership with Canada

To commemorate the start of the talks Transition Lopez Island is planning a Paris Party on Monday, November 30 at 6:30 p.m.at Lopez Center for Community and the Arts, featuring a French dessert potluck, the launch of the Green Ribbon Campaign here in the islands, and the debut of the movie version of Naomi Klein’s blockbuster book, “This Changes Everything”.

Forty-thousand delegates and heads of state are expected in Paris later this month, for the UN Climate Change Conference. The Global Climate March will take place on the eve of a major summit of world leaders in Paris to discuss a unified global response to the crisis of climate change.

Unless the developed countries see reason, there will be no “Climate Justice” and when there is no justice the stalemate will continue and the global temperature will keep rising and affect one and all. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked that the U.S.-Canada relationship “is much bigger than any one project”, and new Liberal Government House Leader Dominic LeBlanc noted that the decision provided an opportunity to “reset the relationship” so that the two nations could work more constructively against the global threat of climate change.

The European Union has pledged to cut greenhouse gas pollution by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 which means, including this new agreement, the countries responsible for more than half of the world’s emissions now have plans to cut them. “But they can’t look back and say, “we didn’t know it was coming”.

A third sticking point is the agreement’s legal status.

“I wish for two most important things to happen at COP 21 – (i) Africa must represent an effort to ensure that climate finance reaches the poor and most vulnerable, and (ii) Africa must push for a governance framework that ensures that despite climate change, developing countries will be guaranteed of sustained economic growth that is inclusive”, she said.

Despite a lingering – and potentially volatile – debate about whether those commitments will be legally binding under global law, they are expected to remain voluntary.

The hope is that we will achieve a deal on the “how” part, ie a global agreement on who does what in order for the limit in global warming to be achieved.

US President Barak Obama has urged leaders not to allow the Paris attacks to sabotage the climate change summit. This time, the idea is to provide a “political impetus at the beginning” of the conference.

Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela was the latest to confirm his attendance at the opening by world leaders including US President Barack Obama, China’s Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi of India and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a French presidency official said on Friday. “We know we are not going to get everything we want in Paris, but it’s symbolic”.