A special leaf-shaped gavel was thumped on the table in Paris Saturday evening to signal a major leap for mankind: to get nearly 200 nations to end the era of fossil fuels and move towards clean and green energy, after just two weeks of negotiations, was a landmark accomplishment. After 20 years of failing to determine how to save the planet, all nations united in the knowledge that the Earth must be rescued from global warming and climate change that has proved catastrophic for mankind. The historic deal sets a new goal to reach net zero emissions in the second half of the new millennium’s first century.
As America’s President Barack Obama noted, the problem aren’t all solved by this accord. A lot must be done to ensure the planet doesn’t heat up over 2ºC, or better still 1.5ºC, by 2100. Mr Obama did his bit, calling up China’s Xi Jinping, as Francois Hollande spoke to Narendra Modi and French foreign minister Laurent Fabius pressed for its universal acceptance as UN chief Ban ki-Moon helped close the communications gap between the leaders of the richest and poorest nations. The Paris Agreement brings the rich, developing and poor to work together towards curbing emissions before 2030 and eliminating emissions altogether by 2050 through reforestation and technologies like carbon capture and sinks.
The rich nations have agreed to pay for cleaning up the planet, raising a minimum $100 billion a year from 2020 onwards to help the poor transform their economies and adapt clean and renewable energy sources. The money pledges aren’t legally binding while the overall agreement is, but everyone knows by now that climate justice is vital for the world to survive while avoiding climate extremes that are threatening to wreak havoc, as they most recently did in Chennai on India’s Coromandel coast. India’s view on sustainable lifestyle was accepted too, that means the deal is closest to representing “everyone’s a winner” sentiments.
To sell the idea of rich nations having to pay for polluting the Earth ever since the birth of the industrial revolution was the hardest part. India was even projected as the agent provocateur in this before wisdom dawned on the rich that they had to pay the bills for the cleanup as their polluting ways had brought things to such a pass. The deal does not need the approval of the US Senate, which means it has the best chance of survival as does the Earth from this promise to look for cleaner ways to light up the planet.
