The health of Earth's climate is about the future as well as the present. The USA has to throw it's weight behind the Paris Climate Accords and hold all countries accountable.
By Somini Sengupta
China (click here) must do better now. It cannot wait until mid-century. China must improve its air quality. China states it wants to be a global leader. Then prove it.
The world as a whole (click here) is dangerously behind schedule in slowing catastrophic climate change, and its richest people will have to make big changes in their everyday lives in order to shift course, a major United Nations report warned Wednesday.
But nearly five years after a landmark international climate agreement in Paris, there are signs of a sea change, including from some of the biggest polluters in the world.
The “undercurrent” of the global economy has shifted, said Christiana Figueres, a former United Nations diplomat who led the negotiations that yielded the Paris Agreement in 2015. “We are moving faster than we ever were,” she said in a call with reporters Wednesday.
Most of the world’s biggest emitters of planet-warming gases, including China, have promised to draw down their emissions to net-zero by midcentury, meaning that they would eliminate as much of the greenhouse gases as they emit. If those promises are kept (a big if) the world would come very close to the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise to the levels required to avert the worst climate disasters....
