Showing posts with label Paris Agreement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paris Agreement. Show all posts
Monday, 5 June 2017
Saturday, 3 June 2017
Climate rogue (The Indian Express - 03 June 2017)
In reneging on the Paris Agreement, Donald Trump’s America has ceded the bully pulpit on climate change
Less than five months after assuming office, US President Donald J. Trump has fulfilled his ludicrous “election promise” to withdraw his country from the Paris Climate Change Agreement. The decision puts the US, which claims leadership in global environmental negotiations, in telling company: War-ravaged Syria, and Nicaragua, which has argued that the Paris pact is not radical enough.
Trump’s decision was not unexpected. Nevertheless, the announcement was appalling in its rejection of the science and history of climate change, and smacked of the US president’s contempt for India and China. “I cannot support a deal that punishes the United States, the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters…. India can double its coal production.
But we are supposed to get rid of our coal plants,” Trump said. That is somewhat rich coming from the president of a nation whose annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are second only to that of far more populous China.
Historically, the US has pumped in more GHG into the atmosphere than any other country. But like the then-US president George W. Bush, who refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, Trump has always denied America’s historical culpability in climate change. Much has, however, changed between 2001 and today, and Trump is unlikely to get away with his braggadocio, like Bush did. The US president’s climate denial has got him bad press from not just global political leaders but also the Pope and corporates such as Exxon-Mobil. The US decision is unlikely to have a domino effect and other countries are unlikely to ease their efforts to decarbonise.
India and China, whose per capita GHG footprint is far lower than the US, have affirmed their commitment to the Paris agreement. In fact, India’s target of producing 40 per cent of its installed electricity capacity by 2030 from non-fossil fuels outstrips that of the US by 10 per cent. With Trump reiterating his “commitment” to reopen some coal mines, the US might now find it difficult to attain this comparatively conservative target.
The absence of the US from the Paris agreement will hurt the pact in other ways. A core condition in the Paris pact commitments of most developing nations is the promise of financial and technology support from developed countries. On Thursday, Trump announced that his government will go back on the Barack Obama administration’s promise of a $3 billion contribution to help poor nations develop sustainable energy sources. Meanwhile, the EU commissioner for climate action and energy, Miguel Arias Canete, has pledged continued “global leadership” on climate change.
But will the EU also put its money where its mouth is?
We need Paris: on U.S pulling out of climate deal (The Hindu - 03 June 2017)
The U.S. strikes a blow to the climate pact, but the rest of the world must step up the efforts
In abandoning the Paris Agreement on climate change, U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to adopt a backward-looking course on one of the most important issues facing humanity. Ignoring scientific evidence on carbon emissions, Mr. Trump has carried his contempt for environmental regulations to an extreme with the decision to pull out of a hard-won compact that seeks to make the world safer for future generations. His move is incongruent with economic reality, because the most valuable American companies in manufacturing, computing, banking services and retailing, ranging from General Electric to Apple and Tesla, all see a future for growth and employment in green innovation, and not in fossil fuels. Some of them have begun reaping the benefits. For poorer residents of various countries, though, weakening of the climate agreement and failure to progressively reduce carbon emissions by 2020 and beyond threaten to impose misery and deepen poverty. Every successive year is becoming hotter than the previous one, and the ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland, which hold the key to sea levels, have recorded a steady loss in mass. As a major legacy polluter, the U.S. has a responsibility to mitigate the damage. This is something that Barack Obama recognised, but Mr. Trump has abdicated.
It is heartening, however, that there is strong support for the Paris Agreement among many individual States and cities in the U.S., while the European Union and China, which together represent about 39% of man-made emissions, now effectively lead the effort to cut greenhouse gases. Energy efficiency is having an impact, and has levelled off coal use in America; it has in fact fallen over the past four years, including in 2016, in spite of an overall rise in energy consumption. Mr. Trump’s assertion that he represents Pittsburgh, not Paris, is clearly misplaced. India, which he has unfairly blamed for seeking climate funds and building coal plants, should strengthen its pledge to cut the emissions intensity of GDP by 35% by 2030, based on 2005 levels, and expand its ambitious renewable energy programme. The wider challenge now is to maintain the momentum on climate finance for mitigation and adaptation, since the U.S. pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund made earlier is unlikely to be fulfilled. Funding is crucial for poorer countries in order to cope with extreme weather events and sharp variations in food production caused by climate change. The U.S. exit should not affect the overall goal, which is to keep the increase in global average temperature over pre-industrial levels to less than 2°C. Equally, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities that underpins the UN climate framework, and casts a duty on industrial powers responsible for the world’s accumulated carbon emissions, needs to be strengthened.
