Climate change campaigners say the Paris Agreement does not go far enough to reduce carbon emission.
UK-based campaigner, Joana Blackman, told Westminster News “we need to leave fossil fuel in the ground and stop extracting it”. According to her, the world will become a safer place if we “wean ourselves of using oil” and move to a future of renewable energy.
On Saturday, climate change campaigners protested in London. They said governments across the world had once again failed “to agree a deal that will protect our future”.
This comes at the same time as former Nasa scientist, James Hansen, who is also considered the father of global climate change awareness called the Paris talks “fraud”. He told The Guardian website that: “It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years’.
The Guardian website credits the scientist for analysing changes in the Earth’s climate sine the 1970s and warned about the “greenhouse effect” where heat-trapped gases are released into the atmosphere was causing global warming.
Mr Hansen added: “It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.” According to him, fossil fuel will continue to be used as long as it remains the cheapest.
Nearly 200 countries met in Paris over two weeks to negotiate a climate deal. The agreement reached aimed at reducing global warming to less than 2C by the end of the century.
Key points of the agreement include:
- To peak greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and achieve a balance between sources and sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century
- To keep global temperature increase “well below” 2C (3.6F) and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C
- To review progress every five years
- $100bn a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020, with a commitment to further finance in the future.
The deal is however, only partly legally binding.
Hope for the future
Lujain Ismail Shafeeq, a journalist in Maldives told Westminster News the Paris deal was promising compared to the failed attempt at Copenhagen in 2009. But he conceded it will take a while for governments to take action and for small islands like his country, the Maldives to realise the effects of that commitment.
Mr Shafeeq said the commitment to reduce global warming by 2C was not low enough.
US President, Barack Obama, earlier called the climate deal “the best chance we have to save the one planet we have”.