Washington – The Obama administration is working hard to get its message on the Paris climate change meeting, hoping that a “durable, credible, and universal” agreement will be reached, a senior administration official of the White House said on Wednesday.
All parties will meet in Bonn, Germany, this week to ultimate the details before going to Paris on November 30, where 190 countries are going to meet to approve the final deal.
“Science keeps on telling us we’re just not acting fast enough. My attitude, though, is that if we get the structure right, then we can turn the dials as there’s additional public education, not just in the United States but across the world, and people feel a greater urgency about it and there’s more political will to act,” President Obama said to Rolling Stone Magazine in an interview last month.
In 2009, leaders from the U.S. and the rest of the world got together in Copenhagen to set the global temperature limit to 2 degree Celsius, a goal that they all confirmed this year. Nevertheless, many of these commitments haven’t been sufficient to get to the target, as the current global temperature is set between 2.7 and 3 degrees.
Besides its own pledge, the U.S. has tried to encourage other countries to achieve their own targets. The Obama administration is relying on the U.S. ability to ensure global warming, by putting pressure on global leaders to commit to even bigger targets on the near future.
In order to get to the mark, the White House believes that the targets set by the countries should be a collective commitment, with the ability to be reviewed and updated over time, according to the administration official.
On the other hand, Todd Stern from the State Department said, “We have pushed for the idea of successive rounds of targets, coupled with longer-term goals for greater ambition,” in a recent testimony in the Senate.
Stern believes that it is responsibility of each country to make a “political vow” that strengthens these policies to “decarbonize” the global economy in order to decrease the global temperature.
President Obama has been treating the subject along with business leaders in a climate change roundtable, proposing new corporate commitments looking towards a Paris deal. Also, during his visit to China, President Obama discussed the subject with President Xi Jinping to work together to get the global agreement done.
As the Paris meeting is one month away, 152 countries that represent more than 85 percent of global emissions have submitted their commitments to the UN.
Source: The Huffington Post