Remember the 1990s when the environmental issue was a concern over the ever-growing hole in the ozone? It seems the issue has become somewhat of a distant memory. Aerosol sprays containing CFCs were banned and taken out of mass production in order to fix a problem identified by scientists. According to the Weather Network, the Montreal Protocol of 1989 was a worldwide agreement to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons, also found in refrigerants.
Now, we have the recent Paris climate agreement in 2015. Not fully legally binding, but based on political will, the 31-page document lays out an international agreement among about 195 countries. According to the CBC, there will be no sanctions on the nearly 200 nations if they do not collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution. It seems like a proposed honour system in which individual countries will implement their own measures through their own government initiatives, this being the political will.
It’s been a long road to this proposed point of change.
In 2011, Canada dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol. This international treaty, most often referred to as the Kyoto Accord, was finalized in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 and put into effect in 2005. It had the goal of cutting global greenhouse gas when a collection of industrialized nations pledged to cut their carbon emissions on a yearly basis. According to the BBC, the United States pulled out of the accord in 2001, stating putting it into action would greatly damage the economy and saying the treaty was flawed because it did not require developing countries to commit to reductions.
The Copenhagen climate summit took place in 2009 and was touted as a failure not to be mentioned at the Paris talks. Before Paris, Copenhagen was the last time world leaders got together to try to tackle the issue of global warming. According to BBC, the largest shift in the six years since Copenhagen has been the United States coming on board, through the Obama administration’s promise to address climate change, and with the recent motivation of China to get on board, with current news stories of business and school closures due to smog in Beijing.
Our new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was cited in the media as calling the agreement “historic, ambitious and balanced.” Yet, some taxpayers saw the around 300 Canadian delegates at the conference as excessive, nearly double the United States and triple the United Kingdom’s team.
The agreement will take effect in 2020. Some key points are as follows:
One of the agreement’s main goals is to hold the global average temperature to well below a rise of 2 C above pre-industrial levels circa 1750. The goal is to limit temperatures to within 1.5 C.
This is the first universal climate agreement with all countries expected to be on board, including developing nations. According to the deal, developed countries will be giving around $100 billion a year to help developing nations through measures such as greater use of renewable energy.
“In November, the Canadian government promised to spend $2.65 billion over five years to help developing countries reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change,” according to CBC.
Countries will be asked to prepare, submit and publish greenhouse gas reduction targets to be reviewed every five years beginning around 2023. Countries will also be required to monitor, verify and report greenhouse gas emissions, according to the New York Times.
Ultimately, the deal has set the goal of creating a carbon-neutral world, sometime after 2050, to limit the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by human activity to levels that can be absorbed naturally by trees, soil and oceans.
Although any agreement like this will always have opposition and it does, climate change can be concerning when we hear stories about hurricanes, rising sea levels, a slower spinning planet, ocean acidification, melting ice caps, global temperature increases, droughts in California, Canadian lakes warming and other extreme events.
Some might say these occurrences are cyclical or natural and not to be worried about, but would it not be better to err on the side of caution. Either way, we can be safe in knowing there are people far smarter than we are working on these issues. That’s an agreement we can all get on board with.
Because sometimes taking action does bring about positive results. According to NASA, the giant hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is shrinking and will effectively be gone by the end of the century.
