Paris Climate Deal Adopted

jones_supa writes: 195 countries have adopted the first global pact to fight climate change by reducing emissions. Countries will have to publish greenhouse gas reduction targets and revise them upward every 5 years, while striving to drive down their carbon output as soon as possible, under the ambitious climate-change pact announced Saturday morning at UN talks in Paris. The agreement commits countries to keeping global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and hopes to limit it to 1.5 C, with the goal of a carbon-neutral world sometime after 2050. The 31-page text called the Paris Agreement (PDF) was distributed to countries for them to assess, then agreed to at a plenary session.

Comments

Re:Conspicuously missing from TFA...

[Kjella]

Conspicuously missing from TFA... a list of the countries that have signed it.

Oh, it'll probably be most but it is roughly as harmless as signing the UN declaration on human rights. There's no mandatory national goals, no incentives or penalties. It "notes" on point 17 that they're not going to actually reach the global goal of the agreement. It's a pot luck lunch agreement, each country sets their own goals and how they want to reach them and the only harm if they don't set very ambitious goals or fail to reach them is a bit of political egg on their face. The environmentalists of course tout this as a massive victory, but it's really just taking existing national initiatives and calling it a global effort.

This was not very surprising, after Kyoto I and II it was clear they wouldn't get anything with binding targets from the US, China, India or any of the other big polluting nations - only Europe and Australia have binding goals now. So instead of aiming for an agreement that would fail, create a toothless agreement and call it a victory. It's certainly working in the local press here in Norway, now they're talking like we've committed to saving the world. Truth is, nobody got committed to anything and that's why it's going to pass.