Ric Lander
The Agreement
We won't spend too much time discussing the agreement itself as plenty of others have done that already (see this excellent summary from ROAR magazine and this from climate scientist, Kevin Anderson). But suffice to say: the agreement is, to a large extent, a pile of crap.
Firstly, the only binding parts of the agreement are for countries to make vague commitments for their emissions reductions and revisit them every five years. Bizarrely the commitments themselves are non-binding, so there is no legal requirement to stick to them. Even if countries do stick to their so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) we will be headed for a disastrous 2.7 – 3.7 degrees of warming. As things stand it seems extremely unlikely that they will fulfil their INDCs, considering the now defunct Kyoto protocol, which was legally binding, was ditched or ignored by those who ratified it as soon it became inconvenient. All this shows the emptiness of the stated aim in the agreement to keep temperatures “well below two degrees”, and assurances “to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” seem ludicrous.
