The Glasgow agreement is a step in the right direction
The climate negotiations are at least on a better track now.
This is a leader. The editorial expresses Bergens Tidende’s journalistic idea: A party-politically independent, independent, liberal and bourgeois (non-socialist) newspaper.
There is every reason to be moderately satisfied with the result of the 26th UN Climate Summit.
But despite the downturns towards the end of the negotiations, it is important that the world’s polluters now talk sensibly together, and are the only ones about the definitions – and not least about the 1.5-degree target.
Treat means a lot, especially during international negotiations. In Glasgow, the 195 participating countries agreed on climate policy at all and all initiatives should be based on “best available science”.
In recent decades, many countries have chosen to ignore research during UN summits. Incredibly, the terms “fossil fuels” and “coal” are not mentioned in the final documents of the 25 previous summits.
That denial of science and conspiracy theories should no longer be allowed to derail the negotiations alone is an important step forward.
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Many were disappointed as China and India over the last 24 hours received the wording that coal should be «phased out» to be phased down ».
The situation shows that climate negotiations are still facing major challenges: How the world’s most populous and strongest adult economy should contribute to preventing global average temperatures from exceeding catastrophic levels.
But there is one good news in the US and China on its own keel has become the only one to create strategies to achieve zero emissions of greenhouse gases.
The participating countries has promised to update its plans to cut 45 percent of emissions by 2030 as early as next year.
Closing the loopholes in the Paris Agreement’s chapter on global emissions trading is also a step in the right direction.
A plus in the book is also for the intention to phase out the huge, state subsidy of coal oil and gas.
During the summit in Copenhagen in 2009 obliged the richest states to transfer $ 100 billion a year to climate roofs in developing countries. It is a pity that this promise has not yet been fulfilled, twelve years later.
In Glasgow, the rich countries have strengthened their commitments, by “considering doubling” climate support by 2025. If they are to have credibility in future climate negotiations, the promise should be kept.
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The organization Global Climate Tracker has calculated at effect of the Glasgow agreement is not enough to keep global warming below two degrees by the turn of the next century.
A limited global warming to 1.5 degrees is still a hair’s goal. It is all the more important that UN member states begin to agree on how to achieve the goal.