[The task may prove most
challenging for India India
By Sewell Chan and
Melissa Eddy
 |
Coal vendors in
to lift more than half of its
population of 1.25 billion out of poverty and to
provide basic electricity to 300
million of them.
Credit
Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press
|
“Today, we celebrate,” said
Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Union’s energy commissioner and top climate
negotiator. “Tomorrow, we have to act.”
With nearly every nation on earth
having now pledged to gradually reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases
that are warming the planet — a universal commitment that had eluded
negotiators and activists since the first Earth Day summit meeting, in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992 — much of the burden for maintaining the momentum now shifts
back to the countries to figure out, and put in place, the concrete steps
needed to deliver on their pledges.
The task may prove most
challenging for India ,
which is struggling to lift more than half of its population of 1.25 billion
out of poverty and to provide basic electricity to 300 million of them. Rich
countries are intent that India
not get stuck on a coal-dependent development path.
“It is essential that the
developing countries are able to transform their energy system before they
develop a level of dependence on coal that we have in the industrialized
countries,” said Jan Burck of the activist group German watch.
During negotiations, India
insisted that it would not be able to make the transition without assistance.
“There will have to be new
mechanisms,” Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told reporters after the
agreement was adopted.
Its top climate negotiator, Xie
Zhenhua, said on Saturday that “China
will actively implement its nationally determined contributions so as to reach
a peak as soon as possible,” but privately its officials have expressed pride
that it no longer has the coal-stained reputation it had during theCopenhagen
climate talks of 2009.
Giza Gaspar Martins, an Angolan
diplomat who represents the Least Developed Countries, which negotiated in Paris
as a bloc, said of the accord: “This is but one stop on a long journey. This
puts a system in place to do climate action, but we will have a lot of work to
do.”
He said the pledges were designed
to emphasize participation rather than ambition, but now “we have to make sure
our national contributions are aligned with what the scientists tell us we need
to be doing.”
Leaders here agreed that while
legislation and regulation are essential to set the ground rules for the
marketplace, the ultimate goal of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy
will require accelerated research and investment, and technological
breakthroughs.
By calling — albeit indirectly, and
in delicately crafted phrases — for net carbon emissions to be effectively
brought down to zero “in the second half of this century,” the Paris Agreement
could mark “the beginning of the end of the fossil-fuel era,” as Marcelo Mena
Carrasco, a Chilean biochemical engineer and climate negotiator, put it.
That is certainly the hope of the
Obama administration. Secretary of State John Kerry said the American
government had helped catalyze the agreement by toughening fuel-efficiency
standards for cars and light trucks, cracking down on emissions from coal-fired
power plants, and reaching a deal with China ,
the only country that emits even more greenhouse gases.
President Obama has endorsed the
idea of a price on carbon — in the form of a tax, or a cap-and-trade system
like California’s — and leaders of Canada, Chile, Ethiopia, France, Germany and
Mexico endorsed the idea at the start of the Paris conference, but there was
not nearly enough support to incorporate it into the Paris Agreement.
While attention is shifting to
the marketplace, the United Nations process will move ahead. The Paris
Agreement’s provisions will not kick in until 2020. Indeed, though adopted “by
consensus,” no nation has signed it. Countries will be invited to do so in a
ceremony at the United Nations headquarters in New York
on April 22; the agreement officially will take effect after at least 55
countries, representing at least 55 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, have
signed on.
The United
States will be one of them; through careful
legal craftsmanship, the Paris Agreement will not be considered as its own
treaty under American law but rather as an extension of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the Senate ratified in 1992.
The United Nations has several
short-term priorities. One is to get the remaining countries that have not
submitted emissions-reduction pledges to do so. Venezuela
and St. Kitts and Nevis
submitted their plans on Saturday, bringing the total to 188.
By May, the United Nations
climate staff will update its estimate for the combined impact of the national
pledges (now known as nationally determined contributions, the qualifying word
“intended” having been dropped). Estimates of the first round of pledges
suggested that, if carried out, they would still result in a rise of 2.7 to 3.5
degrees Celsius (4.9 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels —
far above the newly adopted aspiration of an increase of just 1.5 degrees
Celsius.
Those national plans must be
revised every five years. Also every five years, starting in 2018, the United
Nations will “take stock” of the pledges to see how much progress has been made
in the aim of reaching peak carbon emissions “as soon as possible” and limiting
the rise in temperature.
The Paris Agreement also
“strongly urges” rich countries, which in 2009 pledged to spend $100 billion a
year by 2020 to help poorer countries mitigate and adapt to the effects of
climate change, to “scale up” their commitment. The agreement calls for a new
financial goal — with $100 billion a year as the minimum — to be agreed upon by
2025.
A Green Climate Fund, established
by 194 countries in 2013 to invest in technology, said on Saturday that it had
raised $6.5 billion out of a total of $10 billion pledged last year. The Global
Environment Facility, a fund established in 1992 for the first Earth Day summit
meeting, announced $250 million in new financing for the least developed
countries. The Paris Agreement urges additional support for both funds.
But as the Paris Agreement gets
implemented, the front lines of the battle to stabilize the planet’s atmosphere
will shift elsewhere. At the start of the talks, 20 governments — including
those of Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Mexico and the
United States — pledged to double spending on clean-energy research and
development over the next five years, while a coalition of business leaders led
by Bill Gates vowed to invest billions on developing renewable energy.
Many governors, mayors and other
leaders of “subnational” governments have announced their own commitments to
reducing greenhouse gas emissions — including one effort led by Michael R. Bloomberg,
the United Nations special envoy for cities and climate change, and another
spearheaded by California and the
German state of Baden-Württemberg.
Gov. Jerry Brown of California
and Winfried Kretschmann, president of Baden-Württemberg, convened in Paris
during the talks to attract more supporters. “You don’t pull a switch and solve
climate change,” said Mr. Brown, a Democrat. “You have to do many different
things and each place it’s different. It is a process of shifting and balancing
and it takes a lot of people.”
Climate activists have long used
a “power of the people” approach to promote sustainability and organize
globally, and the world leaders who met here credited “civil society” for
keeping up the pressure.
“Now the work to hold them to
their promises begins,” the American environmentalist and activist Bill
McKibben wrote on Twitter, moments after the gavel fell on the Paris Agreement.
“1.5? Game on.”
