Obama: Climate agreement 'best chance we have' to save
the planet
Updated 0602
GMT (1402 HKT) December 14, 2015 | Video Source: CNN
Paris (CNN)President
Barack Obama praised a landmark climate change agreement approved
Saturday in Paris, saying it could be "a turning point for the
world."
"The Paris agreement establishes the
enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the
President said, speaking from the White House. "It creates the mechanism,
the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective
way."
He praised American leadership but noted
that all participating nations will have to cooperate.
"I believe this moment can be a
turning point for the world," Obama said, calling the agreement "the
best chance we have to save the one planet that we've got."
Though the plan was hailed as a
milestone in the battle to keep Earth hospitable to
human life, critics say it is short on specifics, such as how the plan will be
enforced or how improvements will be measured.
The accord
achieved one major goal. It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius
(3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures and strives for a
limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) if possible.
Some major
points not addressed
The agreement, put together at the 21st
Conference of Parties, or COP21, doesn't mandate exactly
how much each country must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Rather,
it sets up a bottom-up system in which each country sets its own goal -- which
the agreement calls a "nationally determined contribution" -- and
then must explain how it plans to reach that objective.
Those pledges
must be increased over time, and starting in 2018 each country will have to
submit
new plans every five years.
Many countries actually submitted their new
plans before climate change conference, known as COP21, started last month --
but those pledges aren't enough to keep warming below the 2-degree target. But
the participants' hope is that over time, countries will aim for
more ambitious goals and ratchet up
their commitments.
Another sticking point
has been coming up with a way to punish nations that don't do their part, but
observers say that was never really on the table.
Instead, the agreement calls for the
creation of a committee of experts to "facilitate
implementation"
and "promote compliance"
with the agreement, but it won't have the power to punish violators.
'This didn't
save the planet'
Another issue, according to observers,
was whether there would be compensation
is paid to countries that will see irreparable
damage from climate change but have done almost nothing to cause it.
The agreement calls for developed countries
to raise at least $100 billion annually in order to assist developing
countries. Members of the scientific and environmental activist communities
responded with varying degrees of optimism.
"This didn't save the planet,"
Bill McKibben, the co-founder
of 350.org, said of the
agreement. "But it may have saved the chance of saving the planet."
Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources
Institute anticipated a "historic agreement that marks a turning point in
the climate crisis."
What happens
next?
Even though the text has been agreed upon,
there's still much more that needs to be done before the agreement goes into
effect.
The agreement was adopted
by "consensus"
during the meeting of government ministers. That doesn't necessarily mean all
196 parties approved it; French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who served as
the president of the conference, had the authority to decide if a consensus had
been reached.
Individual countries now must individually
ratify
or approve the agreement in their respective
countries.
And the agreement won't enter into force
until 55 countries have ratified it. Those nations must account for 55% of
total global greenhouse gas emissions.
That means if the world's biggest polluters don't authorize
the agreement, enacting
it could prove challenging.
China and the United
States, respectively, account for about 24% and 14% of total greenhouse gas
emissions, according
to the World Resources Institute.
A senior
administration official told CNN that Congress doesn't have to vote on the
plan.
"This agreement
does not require submission
to the Senate because of the way it is structured," he said. "The
targets aren't binding."
The pieces that are
binding are already part of existing agreements, the official said.
One leading Republican
criticized the agreement, saying it will place emissions restrictions on
American industry while requiring the United States to give money to
undeveloped nations.
"Once again,
this administration is all too eager for the international community to review
its commitments before even revealing those commitments to the American
people," said Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, chairman of the Senate
Environment and Public Works Committee.
The United States
has backed off full support of climate change measures in the past.
The Kyoto Protocol
on reducing greenhouse gas emissions was adopted in 1997. The Clinton
administration signed the agreement but, fearing defeat,
never submitted
it to the Senate for ratification.
In China, the
Standing Committee of the National People's Congress is in charge of
approving treaties.
From Xie Zhenhua,
China's chief COP21 negotiator, said, "Although this deal is not entirely
perfect and contains some content that needs to be improved, this doesn't
prevent us from taking a historic step ahead."
The agreement calls
for a signature ceremony in April 2016, and requests that the U.N.
Secretary-General keep the agreement open for signing until April 2017.
Fabius released the
draft
worked out by negotiators Saturday morning. Later in the day, world leaders or
their representatives approved it. A crowd erupted in applause once the
agreement's adoption
was announced.
'We need all
hands on deck'
Leaders around the world praised passage of
the agreement.
"A month ago tomorrow, Paris was the victim
of the deadliest terror attack in Europe for more than a decade," British
Prime Minister David Cameron wrote in a Facebook post. "Today, it has
played host to one of the most positive global steps in history."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed
the draft.
"We must protect the planet that
sustains
us," Ban said. "For that we need all hands on deck."
In the streets of Paris, outside the conference,
protesters demanded action. #ParisAgreement was trending on Twitter.
"Nous sommes la nature qui se
défend!" read one tweet,
with a photo of one person dressed as a polar bear and another dressed as a
penguin. "We are nature that defends itself."
Some demonstrators
felt differently -- they called the agreement insufficient and chanted
"it's a crime against humanity."
"We have a 1.5-degree wall to climb,
but the ladder isn't tall enough," Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace said at a
press conference. He did call the agreement a "new imperative"
and positive step.
2 degrees
Celsius threshold
Capping the increase in global average
temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius was
organizers' key goal going into the COP21. That level of warming is measured as
the average temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.
Failure to set a cap could result in
superdroughts, deadlier heat waves, mass extinctions of plants and animals,
megafloods and rising seas that could wipe some island countries off the map.
Scientists and policy experts say hitting
the 2 degrees Celsius threshold would require the world to move off fossil
fuels between about 2050 and the end of the century.
To reach the more ambitious 1.5 degrees
Celsius goal, some researchers say the world will need to reach zero
net carbon emissions sometime between about 2030 and 2050.
CNN's Don Melvin, Ralph Ellis
and Greg Botelho contributed to this report.
Structure of the Lead：
WHO- President Barack Obama
WHAT- praised a landmark climate change
agreement, saying it could be "a turning point for the world."
WHEN- Saturday
WHERE- Paris
WHY- not given
HOW- not given
