On Tuesday Morning, the White House unveiled President Obama’s new blueprint for cutting the United State’s greenhouse gas pollution to the United Nations. The Obama administration hopes to achieve cutting greenhouse emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025. This is before negotiators from 200 countries will meet in Paris in December in attempts to forge an international climate change agreement.
Mr. Obamas new plan is part of a formal submission entailing a mutual pledge between the President’s administration and President Xi Jinping of China. China and the U.S. are the two largest greenhouse gas polluters so they hope to set standards for other nations in the Paris conference. Mr. Xi said China would expect to drop its greenhouse emissions by 2030.
Environmental groups praised the plans, especially due to the fact that no action is required by Congress for the plans to come into effect, will be achieved by the hopeful Obama administration by using existing statutes that will in effect bypass them.
But environmental groups say that the change will not be enough and that deeper cuts will be necessary past 2025 in order to allay the worsening global warming problem.
In the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, Mr. Obama said he set plans to reduce the greenhouse emission of the U.S. by 80 percent by 2050.
Other countries joined in, with Mexico saying it would peak it greenhouse emissions by 2026, and then reduce them after. In total, the U.S., Mexico, and the E.U. account for nearly 60 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite good intentions, the U.S. is not on pace to meet its 2009 goals of energy conservation, which was proposed to reduce greenhouse emissions by 17 percent below 2005 by 2020.
Numerous scientific assessments show that far more aggressive greenhouse emission cuts will be needed to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) goals of prior U.N. meetings.
The agreement that may take place in Paris is not likely to be compare a formal treaty, on account of the U.S. administrations hybrid approach that would have each country commit its own reductions with their own proposed method of enforcement, but environmentalist are all in accordance that the conference is a step in the right direction.
