U.S. climate commitment ‘irreversible’, Hollande warns Trump

The Marrakech climate conference (COP22), dubbed the Action and Implementation COP, set out to demonstrate that commitments made in Paris previous year are being put into practice, and to act as a catalyst for further action. After decades of failure, the climate accord negotiated previous year and ratified earlier this month, was seen as an historic achievement.

Environmentalists worry Trump’s pulling out of the Paris deal will convince other countries to pull out of the agreement. Our commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement is our best hope to limit rising temperatures that would otherwise have devastating consequences for future generations.

Thus, the Marrakech COP truly heralds a move towards actions that are in fact taking place at an accelerated speed and that has superseded the realm of endless negotiations about how to take actions that has now been resolved by the Paris Agreement coming into force, thereby becoming worldwide law in record speed.

Other evidence of the company’s commitment to a low-carbon economy can be seen in the Lights by L’Oréal project that has the company replacing park lighting along the Hudson River with LED fixtures and bulbs.

“Trump is coming from the private sector”, he said.

Moroccan foreign minister and conference president Salaheddine Mezouar made a similar plea on the final day of the high-level United Nations talks tasked with implementing the landmark Paris Agreement. But it was undermined by an absence of adequate funding pledges and a lack of progress on issues of substance at the summit.

Trump’s election has recalled the shock of 2001, when George W Bush refused to ratify the Paris Agreement’s predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol. Delegates wrapped up the conference in Marrakech amid another warning about the “climate emergency” upon us, as record-breaking temperatures continued for the third year in a row. Amid the onslaught of public relations exercises, it can be hard to distinguish show from substance.

A priority, he says, is to push for “climate ambition in the development plans” of every country.

“The Paris Agreement has clearly recognised the principle of differentiation between developed and developing countries and the current round was focused on operationalising it in rules pertaining to adaptation, mitigation, finance, technology transfer, capacity building and transparency frameworks”, it said.

“We knew before the election that it was going to take additional actions by the next administration to meet the target”, said Meyer.

No doubt, United States federal action will slow and, in some cases, reverse. In the meantime, many utilities have already started to shut down their older and less efficient coal-fired plants, and they might be reluctant to change course now.

“The thing that people seem to be most concerned about is: will the United States fulfil the remaining $2.5 billion of the $3 billion pledge President Obama made to the Green Climate Fund (GCF)?” Jarand Rystad of the analytical firm Rystad Energy thinks Norway can continue to develop its oil and gas industry as planned, in part because production is likely to decline elsewhere and Norwegian crude is lighter and in greater demand than heavier oil fround, for example, in the Middle East and Canada, Russia and Kazakhstan. He pointed out that it was his predecessors’, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., who first supported the global warming negotiations at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the 1980s, which reportedly happened before China’s global warming awareness.