Obama: Climate change deal ‘best chance’ to save planet

She referred to the intense and complicated bargaining in a Paris suburb on climate change in late November, expressing hope that the agreement has included demands and expectations of developing countries to a great extent and would save the planet from reaching over two degrees C which could otherwise leave irreversible adverse impacts on the biosphere.

In a statement from the White House Saturday evening, President Barack Obama called the agreement “the best chance we’ve had to save the one planet that we’ve got”.

To meet the goal that was set in the Paris climate agreement, different and more efficient methods of producing energy will likely need to be adopted around the globe. More importantly, by adopting the agreement, countries across the globe have committed to end fossil-fuel domination and they have to ensure that net greenhouse gas emissions are zero in the second half of the century.

The deal calls on the world to collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution but imposes no sanctions on countries that don’t. Given that major parties like India and the USA have been at loggerheads over issued of common but differentiated responsibility and climate finance, it is a big win for everyone that the Conference of Parties has passed and agreement without any delegation walking out of the process.

The G77 bloc of 134 developing nations, including China, have given the nod for a hard-fought UN climate rescue pact due to be presented for adoption in Paris.

“There are significant legal limits on [President Obama’s] ability either to carry out the promises he has made in advance of Paris 2015 or to enforce any agreement arising out of the summit”, Paxton wrote in a letter to Obama with West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who also is suing over the Clean Power Plan.

Here is a run down of what’s good for the developing world that’s being ht hardest by climate change, and what’s not.

World leaders say the Paris agreement is the most ambitious since the climate initiaitve began in 1992.

A French official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the close-door talks, said the new text was being “finalized and legally reviewed and translated” into other languages.

Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo said the targets are too weak.

“The greenhouse gases are really central to our energy economy and we want to make changes that maintain our economies, but still allow us to deal with a very hard problem”, said Dr. Sandy MacDonald, with NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Having signed the deal, Washington never ratified it. Our carbon emission is now 0.04 per cent of total global emissions.

Governments around the world had caught up, and were now unequivocal, but there was more momentum from outside governments than within and, importantly, the private sector was completely on message. They argued industrialized nations should shoulder more of the burden.

The final agreement was essentially unchanged from a draft unveiled earlier in the day, including a more ambitious objective of restraining the rise in temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a mark scientists fear could be a tipping point for the climate.